andrewl

Quoting from an earlier comment in this discussion:

There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.

— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>

To me they look oppressive and bleak. They are interesting, to be sure. But I don’t find them beautiful. And aesthetics are subjective, of course. I can well believe others find them beautiful.

The linked article does not say what happened to him, but if you Google his name there are lots of hits. This one says he was fired:

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/monroe-county-deputy-arr...

I think it's that they need humidity or else they dry out. So hot and humid is fine. Hot and arid is what they have a problem with.

Can you give us some more detail on the nematodes, or point us to an article?

It’s impressive. To admit fallibility is to be honest. It represents confidence.

Your link to the security page is broken because of the capital H in your URL. It should be: https://www.sqlite.org/security.html

The January 6, 2022 date at the bottom of the page is not the date the page was last updated. It is the date problem 8.9 (Boundary value error in the secondary journals used by nested transactions) directly above it was fixed. The date at the very bottom of the screen in the middle says the page itself was last updated on 2026-04-13.

“They have phones in booths now? Finally! I don’t have to lug this cell phone around.”

Hermes Conrad, Futurama Season 6, Episode 6: Lethal Inspection

Then there is the tromboon, created by P.D.Q. Bach, which is a real instrument but should not be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach#Tromboon

Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice explains the subtleties, mathematical and otherwise, of both Alice books in engaging detail. It explained things I never understood, and showed me things I missed (and then explained them). Besides the mathematics there are references to politicians and events of the era, and jokes that would be known only to people at Oxford.

The subhead on the article is: Animals that feed on dead matter perform an important service. Without them, we’d live in a world of putridity and pestilence.

That was a bizarre performance.

This is the first I’ve heard of straight-tusked elephants, which are almost twice the mass of modern day elephants. You’d need a lot of cooperation and coordination to kill one of them.

Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.

Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354

The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.

That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.

The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.

Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.

The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.

His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing the living. [1]

I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.

[1] https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/magazines/life/how-the-dece...

Yes. And then after you throw all your tools away you should buy my software.

Replying to slibhb, while the research involving mental illness is not conclusive, fecal transplants are a known and accepted treatment for persistent C. diff (Clostridioides difficile) infection. Just for the record.

Cassepipe, it’s not a great default for sure. What do you have yours mapped to? I mapped jj to return to normal mode and also save my file. So, as I’m typing, I just hit jj, the jj vanishes, and this command is run:

<Esc>:w<CR>

I could just have it escape instead without saving.

If I hadn’t chose jj it would have been ff, which is also always under an index finger. I do wish I’d been clued into the idea when I started with Vim instead of two years later.

Speaking of ranged weapons, I used to throw boomerangs. Not the heavier, non-returning kind made for hunting, but the lighter returning boomerangs. It felt like magic when I finally got good enough to throw one and not have to take a step to catch it. I should get back to it. I think they’re fascinating. And I just read in Wikipedia that tests on the International Space Station found they function the same way in zero gravity as they do on Earth.

I hope you are right, but the administration does not tend to follow court orders. They break the law and then use every legal mechanism at their disposal to slow walk cases through the system. And then, as I say, they do not follow rulings except under the most extreme pressure.

"It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just realised I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?"

Not that my personal experience is actually a statistically significant sample, but I don't know anybody who takes sleeping pills. Or maybe I do, but they haven't told me. I've also never heard heavy sleeping pill use is one of the stereotypes about Americans. There are an estimated 342 million people in the United States, so impressions aren't always meaningful.

It's an important topic and it's worth getting the terms correct. Concentration camps and extermination camps are two different things. Not that Jewish and other peoples were not killed in concentration camps, either by being worked to death or by summary execution, but they were not the almost assembly line killing factories of the extermination camps.

I would say USAID (United States Agency for International Development) has done good work overseas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter...

Like all large organizations and projects they are not absolutely perfect or ethical, as you can see in the Concerns and criticism section towards the bottom of the Wikipedia page. Still, I think they made some contribution to humanity. I have seen articles saying the withdrawal of funding has definitely hurt communities USAID had been helping.

I know the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) do (or did) disease prevention work outside the US. There are other examples like these. I don’t know if the government did more good than bad, but they certainly have done some good that is not just designed to benefit American big capitalists.

Not traveling alone on foot in a country in which you barely speak the language does not mean staying shut in your house and never traveling at all and never meeting people. There is a middle ground.

The WNIP.org (Wednesday Night Interesting People) home page says:

Invitees: Interesting Guys, Hot Girls.

Exceptions Tolerated: Hot Guys, Interesting Girls.

The organizer sounds like an unpleasant person.