jlgreco

Is that a thing? I don't seem to be able to do that with 18k+, so if it exists there are only a couple dozen people that can.

Hmm, good catch, I didn't notice when that was published.

That rationale may be a bit revisionist, here is Olin Shivers' take on RMS's justification for elisp's dynamic scoping:

"Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this, to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical scope is interesting, theoretically, but it's inefficient to implement; dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer & implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually), Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And outside the Lisp/AI community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to perl, to say in 2001 that billions of dollars of services have been rolled out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

(emphasis not my own)

That whole page is a good read, particularly if you are a fan of Shivers' writing style.

Ideally anything that you reject for should also be conveniently baked into the build system so that you can do things like `make validate` before pushing to save yourself the embarrassment.

pre-commit would be a bad idea. You would have to ask all of your developers to install the hook, instead of just installing it on your 'official' repos and it would quickly become a nuisance to developers who liked to create temporary commits with no intention of ever giving them out to the rest of the world. These developers would quickly become annoyed at the pre-commit hook, turn it off, then you would be back where you started (except now you would have a false sense of security).

I do agree that pre-commit isn't the best choice though. I prefer update hooks; I find they are simpler to write and easier to read.

A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

My understanding is that they do use such magnets for microgravity experiments. Here is a cool video on diamagnetic levitation from the University of Nottingham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nod54HFkH0o

The presentation is pretty good (fairly minimal, which I like), but I think that some autocompletion in those search forms would go a long way. Things like showing autocompletes for town names or strains.

Hmm, it looks like you are right, but I think they can't start actually selling until January 1st. I'm not quite sure there.

In Washington it will still be a few more months, since anything sold recreationaly needs to be grown explicitly for recreational use, and that process cannot start until the permits are issued (I believe they have until the end of this year before they are required by law to start issuing permits to grow (or sell)).

Barring the possibility that you are in a jurisdiction with unusually draconian drug laws, sure it's legal. This site is just telling you how much different strains cost at different businesses where you can legally buy them (currently, if you have a prescription). The site itself isn't selling weed.

Nowhere in Washington or Colorado is selling recreational weed legally yet (although many businesses are partially through the licensing/application process).

fwiw, Leafly seems a bit easier to use than this site.

Fun graphene fact: As the article mentions, graphene was first isolated at the University of Manchester using sticky tape. For this discovery, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics... making Andre Geim the first person to be awarded both the Nobel Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize. He was previously awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for magnetically levitating a live frog.

You have just rediscovered the reason that some people talk about "free software", and some people talk about "open source".

The sort of access to source code that is being expected here is really no more than the sort of access that you can get to Windows code. It really is not an unreasonable expectation.

@dba7dba You are hellbanned. This means that most users cannot read your comments.

[Disconnection the discussion from something that we are personally connected to...]

Is it preferable for a newspaper to report on a new medical study and publish Yet Another(tm) "Researchers at [University] find cure to cancer" story, or, is it better for the newspaper to refrain from talking about the medical paper entirely?

Personally, I have to go with the later. Given the choice between botched reporting and no reporting, I'll go with no reporting. It is better to be uninformed than misinformed. It is easier to correct 'uninformed' and the state of 'uninformed' is easier for self-aware people to recognize in themselves.

Consider the fallout caused by the media botching the reporting of the FTL neutrino anomaly. People lost their jobs because reporters could not be arsed to do theirs.

That isn't the complaint about this particular article. The complaint about this article is the botched reporting on what happened, and what MITM attacks are. This criticism was defended by pointing out that misinformation from the media has the potential to have a negative effect. An example given of this was the careless use of the word "hacker" by the media "in general".

When the pot calls the kettle black, the pot is not incorrect.

"Yes but to make sweeping complaints about the French as an American is absurd."

I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere in this dicussion:

"Insane laws in one place do not make laws in another place any less insane. If we universalized your attitude towards criticism, then only those blessed to live in utopias would have the privilege of leveling complaints at other systems."

Americans do get to criticize the French government. Americans get to criticize the American government. French get to criticize the French government. French get to criticize the American government. Zimbabweans get to criticize the Portuguese government. The Portuguese get to criticize the the Swiss government.

Everybody gets to criticize any government they please, no matter what government happens to lay stake to the place that they live. It is absurd to think otherwise.

I want to get a decal for my pickup truck's back window with an image of the White House burning and a crying bald eagle, backdropped by an American flag, and the words "1812, Never Forget".

Also I'll need to get a pickup truck.

Both are bad (although obviously there is a discrepancy in seriousness here). We should not fail to criticize one because the other also happens.

And then he has the sheer cheek to talk about insane French law. Hello USA? The go to place for mad law?

Insane laws in one place do not make laws in another place any less insane. If we universalized your attitude towards criticism, then only those blessed to live in utopias would have the privilege of leveling complaints at other systems.

Camus2 seems to be French. You would not be at risk of making embarrassing mistakes like this if you made an effort to find actual arguments, instead of attempting to criticize the person you are imagining the commenter to be.

The line between criticize and insult is so fine, I can scarcely see it. It's like the line between the ocean and the beach.

Can a French person say "The president is illiterate.", as Americans have often said about their president? Could they say "The idiotic president keeps on making up words."? Harsh criticism is naturally insulting.

Probably easier to fit a passenger on the back of a motorcycle.

"yelling fire in a movie" is the famous example of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, right?

It is an example of nothing of the sort, since that scenario never happened. That hypothetical scenario was dreamed up to justify the arrest of a war/draft protester for what was plainly political speech.

I use to love Amarok back in the 1.4.x days, but after Amarok messed everything up with 2.0, I swore it off and wrote my own XMMS2 client. Clementine wasn't out yet and I decided that the only way to get something that I wouldn't hate would be to write it myself.

These days I just use zsh and mplayer though. Apparently all of my use-cases sum up to "play one or more albums, perhaps shuffling them first". I've given Clementine a shot, and it is quite like Amarok use to be, but now it all seems like clutter.

I suppose what I am suggesting is something along the lines of littering the DNA with lots more "stuff that does nothing" that has a very small edit distance from "encodes the creation of a protein that kills the cell."

So while you might normally have:

  ... ACGATTACGATACG ....
  ---|--------------|---
       |
       useful protein

  ... ACGATTACGATACG TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC TACC ...
  ---|--------------|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|---
       |                |
       useful protein   pointless proteins

So each time you get whacked by a gamma ray, you spin a die and see what it hits. Maybe it hits a naturally occurring sequence like 'ACGATTACGATACG' and maybe you get cancer. Or maybe it hits one of those artificially inserted TACC segments that is designed to usually break in such a way that the cell is killed. Add more and more TACC segments and you become less and less efficient, but the odds get stacked more in your favor the more you add.

It would kind of be the "electric fence" approach to arresting unintended behavior (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Fence).

I suspect actually pulling this off isn't something that is doable in the foreseeable future, since it would require being able to make strong statements of the nature "This segment of DNA should have no effect", and similar, but it makes sense in my head at least ;)

I don't see any adds for that search result, though the results are now tainted by news articles about that ad and that particular search.

Just to derail the conspiracy train, when I try other searches of the same type, such as "oldest bar in philadephia", I get no ads as well. I would not expect ads for a search that unique.

You'd be amazed at the variety of compounds you can pay to have synthesized.

That's a good point. Gamma rays are pretty penetrating though, so unlike visible light there might be some benefit to having a rather thick piece of flesh to absorb as much gamma rays as possible, instead of letting most of them pass through the skin then get uselessly absorbed by muscle and organs.

I think you are dead on with the power consumption point though. The human body uses something around 100 watts or so right? (That might just be how much they put off in waste heat, I'm not really sure... but in the neighborhood of a few hundred watts I guess) You would need to put out way more than that in gamma rays to power the person, taking into account waste at various stages. I suspect you'd cook a human before you managed to power one.