Typhon

Dialing 911 in the EU can redirect you to 112, though I don't know how that redirection works. It's worth knowing the local emergency numbers in any case

Yes, and Dennis Ritchie who died seven days later

That's not true in the sense that the cancer doesn't have objectives per se, therefore it doesn't have anything to lose in the sense that matters.

It reminds me of the extreme advertising meme.

Justin Rye's site is now at http://jbr.me.uk/ (and the espe-ranto at http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )

I am a true prophet. https://twitter.com/TyphonBaalAmmon/status/15911802751865528...

I think Pinboard is more likely to buy Twitter. And honestly this might not be the worst thing that could happen to it. Not sure if Maciej will be keen however.

Organizations (mostly) don't self-perpetuate through sexual reproduction. It's perfectly possible for the VHEMT to expand if they manage to convince enough people.

I thought it would have been obvious to anyone that this is satire, but then again I know that it was explicitly presented as such the first time I read this text so I'm probably biased.

This is one of those things that is both very true, and very much easier to say than do.

It used to be the most common lie was "I have read the EULA". Nowadays the most common lie is "we care about your privacy" or possibly "we get it, you hate ads".

It's never more about money than when "It's not about the money anymore".

I think that with a stock whose worth at this point is the result of pure dutch-tulip-like speculation, the question is where is the tipping point where money just becomes too good to ignore and when people start collectively selling, making the stock inevitably plummet.

The one valid definition of success for a programming language is that it looks pretty and thus the most successful programming language is Piet ( http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html )

I mean, joking aside, it's always fascinating when people can't wrap their minds around the idea that their criteria for success or quality or goodness are subjective and not universal.

This is a rather bad article because it completely misses the real complexity of a spell checker.

A spell checker is not simply a list of words, it's a way to check mistakes according to a standard and to point towards ways to fix these mistakes. This not reducible to a look-up in a hashtable. It requires taking into account some complicated things about the definition of a word and the context in which it is written. You might think that's grammar checking but the boundary is not clear and in any case, any language processing application starts with tokenizing and deciding what counts as words and on what basis.

What is a word even ? Is "CIA" a word ? What about "C.I.A." ? What about C (as in the language) ? What about c (as in the speed of light) ? 2,4-Dinitrophenylhydrazine ? How does the spellchecker handle dashes and apostrophes ? What about proper nouns ?

Really, the example is poorly chosen.

The big difference between the American attitude and the Chinese attitude towards ecology is this :

The Americans loudly refuse to do anything, loudly deny that there's a problem, and loudly proclaim their hatred of ecology.

The Chinese say yes to everything but they have absolutely no intention of actually doing anything, they just lie.

Check this out : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/23/china-factories-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/04/china-underrep...

This article quotes Perlis' famous saying that "a programming language is low-level when it calls attention to the irrelevant", and I am reminded of another Perlis aphorism :

« Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. »

There's plenty of small online stores selling all kinds of stuff. Recently I had ordered smoked paprika from Amazon UK because I can't find any where I live (France). I got regular paprika. So I ordered from a specialized online spice store, got my paprika and vowed never to order anything from Amazon ever again.

No, it's just a simple heuristic to get started.

Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.

No, no it's still there at https://www.duolingo.com/courses

There's a great post at Slate Star Codex : http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-h...

It contains a lot of advice on how to choose a therapist and how to behave with them and what you can otherwise do if you won't go to a therapist.

Han unification was really a pretty stupid idea.

most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds

Oh you remind me of the beautiful paean to those GIFs in Olia Lialina's "A Vernacular Web", which is a pretty cool discussion of early internet aesthetics.

http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/uc/

If you have to do X in the new language in the same way as in Fortran, the new language is not better for doing X than Fortran, is it ?

In any case, some researchers have claimed that Sci-Hub obtained their credentials through phishing. I don't know if it's true but in any case, such claims provide plausible deniability against that kind of watermarking proof, don't they ?

All websites have founders and personality. Since you mention the PirateBay, they were a team with a rather snarky sense of humour. Archive.org is run by a foundation. There are always people and there's always legal responsibility.

In any case, Sci-Hub is really "everything that is good about the internet" because it's a way to make scientific knowledge accessible anywhere to anyone, in a way that was never possible before. The benefit to scholars and students in poor countries is enormous.

And considering just how disgustingly parasitic the scientific publishers have become, Elbakyan is probably the closest to a XXIst century Robin Hood, much more so than the Piratebay founders, actually.

yeah I was just giving an example of quick-and-dirty HTML that I thought was being advocated.

Yeah but users don't read the HTML, the browser does, and it doesn't care that you're using ten <br> tags for vertical spacing instead of an elegant CSS styling property.

Edit : just want to make it clear that I'm trying to paraphrase here, I don't know if I agree (although I do want to point out that HN is built in this philosophy)

You can pay attention to politics, you can do politics without necessarily following obsessively every little happenstance of things. Once you know some politician is a racist crook, you don't need a reminder every day. You especially don't need a remind from people who will give the same amount of space to the president's crooked necktie or and to the healthcare reform. What you mostly need is coordination to fight his politics, which is not what the media give you.

The american media were bad before Trump, and they have remained bad as far as I can tell. They completely fail to disentangle the serious from the merely ridiculous.

Client-side Javascript is executed in the browser, not on the desktop, it is sandboxed, it has no unlimited access to my local data on the disk.