grandpa

Claude Clause.

The title is "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?"

https://archive.org/details/gergel_isopropyl_bromide

  git clone --branch start https://github.com/djkoloski/anima_solver
  Cloning into 'anima_solver'...
  fatal: Remote branch start not found in upstream origin

The opening of Borges' essay is absolutely brilliant writing:

AT TRIESTE, IN 1872, in a palace with damp statues and deficient hygienic facilities, a gentleman on whose face an African scar told its tale — Captain Richard Francis Burton, the English consul — embarked on a famous translation of the Quitab aliflaila ua laila, which the roumis know by the title, The Thousand and One Nights. One of the secret aims of his work was the annihilation of another gentleman (also weatherbeaten, and with a dark Moorish beard) who was compiling a vast dictionary in England and who died long before he was annihilated by Burton. That gentleman was Edward Lane, the Orientalist, author of a highly scrupulous version of The Thousand and One Nights that had supplanted a version by Galland. Lane translated against Galland, Burton against Lane; to understand Burton we must understand this hostile dynasty.

Borges also admires Burton's footnotes:

Thus Volume Six (which I have before me) includes some three hundred notes, among which are the following: a condemnation of jails and a defense of corporal punishment and fines; some examples of the Islamic respect for bread; a legend about the hairiness of Queen Belkis’ legs; an enumeration of the four colors that are emblematic of death; a theory and practice of Oriental ingratitude; the information that angels prefer a piebald mount, while Djinns favor horses with a bright-bay coat; a synopsis of the mythology surrounding the secret Night of Power or Night of Nights; a denunciation of the superficiality of Andrew Lang; a diatribe against rule by democracy; a census of the names of Mohammed, on the Earth, in the Fire, and in the Garden; a mention of the Amalekite people, of long years and large stature; a note on the private parts of the Moslem, which for the man extend from the navel to his knees, and for the woman from the top of the head to the tips of her toes; a consideration of the asa’o [roasted beef] of the Argentine gaucho; a warning about the discomforts of “equitation” when the steed is human; an allusion to a grandiose plan for cross-breeding baboons with women and thus deriving a sub-race of good proletarians. At fifty, a man has accumulated affections, ironies, obscenities, and copious anecdotes; Burton unburdened himself of them in his notes.

With `. ranger`, if you change directory and then exit, the shell's working directory changes to where you left off in Ranger.

  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa
  $ ranger
  [ ... change directory ... ]
  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa

  $ . ranger
  [ ... change directory ... ]
  $ pwd
  /home/grandpa/src

This is really good fun! But it would be nice if I could finish up the problem I'm on when the timer runs out. Currently, it just gets taken away abruptly.

You could test this by looking at whether pairs of fraternal twins are as similar on personality traits as pairs of identical twins. If they are more different, then genes are the cause.

Why "infamous"?

I think this is the same technique as Russ Cox used to search Google Code: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html

It parses "fruit flies like a banana" the same way as "Time flies like an arrow".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

Definitely, but I think Oxford University is more interested in teaching the underlying principles than tracking what's popular in industry.

The "cluetrain" in the title refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html

There's a difference, though: QuickCheck randomly tries a large-ish number of possible inputs to try and disprove a postcondition, whereas formal methods prove the postcondition for all inputs. Practically, if the number of possible inputs is huge compared to the number of failure cases, it's unlikely that QuickCheck will find it. I strongly suspect - and this would be an interesting experiment - that QuickCheck wouldn't have found this particular bug, since Timsort has been in use for years without anyone noticing it.

Utilities should be happy about this. One of their biggest problems is uneven load on the grid - low at night, too high during a heatwave - and this has the potential to make that problem a lot easier.

The paper described in the article is available as PDF here: http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Kross-et-a...

Spoiler: the second bit of advice is "Step 2: No, seriously. Don't"

Also, capturing blocks and instance_eval are notoriously slow.

...and, in this case, are evaluated once, at startup. It's so fast that you couldn't possibly notice a difference.

Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Yesterday's discussion of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7109623

This is what happened when I tried typing the first sentence on your web site: http://i.imgur.com/jQGHwQc.png

Using Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html), your first paragraph is DH2 (responding to tone), and the rest is DH1 (ad hominem). Do you have any arguments relating to the points being made?

I don't think you are taking the word "infinity" seriously. If parents believed that, why are they recklessly endangering their children's lives by taking them to a public place where they could be shot and killed, instead of hiring a personal shopper? Why did they put them in a car when auto accidents are the number one cause if child deaths? Why are they living in America when child mortality is lower in several other countries?

The answer, of course, is that while losing a child is unspeakably awful, children are not infinitely valuable to us - at least if you go by what we do rather than what we say. And public policy needs to reflect that.

I don't think negative infinity is a reasonable number for this. If it were, then I would expect you to gladly pay someone all your income for the next 20 years to stand guard over your children night and day to ensure that none of them are kidnapped and killed. Anything less would be negligent parenting.

From the Hacker News guidelines:

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is the compiler's printf(), not the one that gets linked in with compiled code. As long as the compiler itself doesn't have more than 9 substitutions, it's OK. Your code will link with a different one.

Perhaps this will one day be so widely implemented that the great firewall of China will become obsolete, and the censors' dream will be realized.

If it's an interesting fix, please consider doing a post like "What I learned from getting slashdotted by Hacker News".

I couldn't figure out from the article what exactly it is that's illegal. Which of these situations cause me to break the law as an American?

1. I travel to Canada, unlock my cellphone there where it is legal, and bring it back to the U.S.

2. My Canadian nephew unlocks my phone while I am not looking.

3. I unlock my phone, but then never turn it on so it never connects to a carrier.

4. I buy a phone in New York, then move to Canada never to return. On arrival in Canada, I unlock my phone.

If it's really true that "unlocking cellphones is illegal in the U.S.", then only 3 should be illegal.

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a debate over what Godwin's law says approaches 1.

I think the concern is not that people called him out when he was wrong, but that one person phrased it very rudely.