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berntb

2,415 karma · joined February 26, 2009

Generic nerd.
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berntb··on Night’s Nirvana: On Norwegian Black Metal
I have a bit of a trauma, regarding this whole niche thing.

10-15 years ago, I used to tell people about Meshuggah -- something like "My favorite of all time. It is the greatest thing since sliced <Cough>. Think of it as like modern jazz, but played a bit faster and heavier. I'm not that musical, I have to listen to a song dozens and dozens of times to get half of the stuff happening (I think, I probably get less). It is just efficient, you listen one minute and you get at least two or three minutes of other music."

They looked at me as if I was an idiot or was trolling them. (Both true, arguably. :-) )

Today, half of the university kids around where I am now seems to know more about Meshuggah than me. Literally. For an old favorite band.

Sigh, it is hard being a hipster when your stuff gets mainstream.

:-)

berntb··on Night’s Nirvana: On Norwegian Black Metal
How do you guys see the interviews with Fenriz? I think most of them are on Youtube now.

He have a special place in my personal music history. I started to listen to a bit extreme metal in the 90s and was a bit shocked by my own taste. From the early Metallica to death metal, it got steadily more extreme.

The limit was Darkthrone -- I got an album and (at least at the time) I felt physically sick if I used headphones! Years later, I saw that series of youtube interviews with Fenriz, discussing the music. He was so knowledgeable and, more or less, dismissed most genres I love in metal (Meshuggah, Nile, etc) as not really that interesting. :-)

These days, I can enjoy the early Darkthrone stuff, but it was a funny reality check to realize early that I'm not really that metal, I just like the music. :-)

berntb··on Useful Perl one-liners (2013)
I think the obvious counter argument is:

You read them to learn. I learned a couple of perl flags in this discussion I had forgotten. Also, you get ideas about what you can do. And third, after reading through a collection like that, you can find stuff back by looking in an index.

berntb··on Useful Perl one-liners (2013)
It was faster than Googling. :-)

But it would have been better to build off a well tested module as a basis for my set of tools, sigh. I could have used yaml as an intermediary.

A favorite saying is from chemistry -- with a few weeks of hard work in the lab, you can save hours in the library...

berntb··on Useful Perl one-liners (2013)
Here are a few quick and dirty I use for handling output of MySQL. (For serious stuff I include real CSV libraries in the one liner to quote correctly etc.)

  alias sqlcmdtocsv="perl -nE 'chomp; s/\\t/;/g; say \$_;'"
  alias sqlcmdtoperl="perl -MData::Dump=dump -nE 'chomp; @r=split(/\\t/); if (@titles == 0) { @titles=@r; next; } \$row={};   for(\$i=0; \$i < @r; \$i++) { \$row->{\$titles[\$i]} = \$r[\$i];  } push @rows, \$row;  END { say dump \\@rows };'"

  # Quick and dirty for moving from the real DB to the test DB.
  # Use: mysql_generates_a_row | sqlcmdtoperl  | dumptosqlinsert
  alias dumptosqlinsert="perl -E 'my \$txt; { local \$/; \$txt=<>; } my \$rows= eval \$txt; \$q=chr(39); for my \$r (@\$rows) {  @cols=map { \$v=\$r->{\$_}; if (\$v eq \"NULL\") {\"\$_=NULL\"} else {\"\$_=\${q}\$v\$q\"} } keys %\$r; say join(\", \", @cols);}'"
I have a bunch of aliases for conversions, to generate common SQL that dependend on parameters and so on.
berntb··on ‘Diamond-age’ of power generation as nuclear batteries developed
Is that an idiom, or are they really "off the shelf" and not specially built for every space probe?
berntb··on Fidel Castro has died
Strange, all the loops which left wing people jump through, to support murdering dictators... :-(

So, why didn't you compare with working democracies there.. instead of with cleptocracies that had coups and civil wars?

What is the real problem with doing as normal people and condemn all dictators?

Castro had options, he could have gone to Western Europe and asked for help in e.g. the 70s, as part of a democratization program.

(And when Cuba didn't have free money by being a client state, they even had problems feeding the population.)

berntb··on Fidel Castro has died
For Scandinavian history, only in Swedish. :-)

But I think the same pattern is found everywhere. Most cultures were much more violent in the past. I think Pinker wrote a book about the phenomenon, he is good (I haven't read that but others).

(Let me note that reading about the Polish deluge was one of the shocks of my life, the Swedish school system really didn't mention much about the Polish side of it. I guess the Germans are the only ones that ever took any form of responsibility for historical atrocities.)

berntb··on Fidel Castro has died
You really think it became peaceful ca 1100? :-)

Please read some history. It was no better, it was just not internationally infamous clan societies for a while. Then we had violent national states (check e.g. Polish deluge or the 30 year war).

berntb··on Fidel Castro has died
You seriously argue that there is no difference between a democracy and a dictatorship.

A trivial counter example -- if you causally dismissed your government as a Cuban in Cuba online, what happens?

(Since Cuba has a really, really strict control of the Internet last I looked, it is of course a bit of an academic question...)

Edit: This comment is really jumping up and down in votes... :-)

berntb··on Fidel Castro has died
People are "programmed" by culture. It wasn't so many generations ago when people with similar genes as me (a Scandinavian) did organized clan warfare with slavery, murder, plunder and everything else we see as bad in today's Western world. But the people then were "loving fathers and sons" too, of course. Attitudes to things you/we deplore are trivially cultural.

Your argument as a whole was a bit funny...

You use personal arguments about someone else as thinking in black and white -- then define people with different backgrounds as good or bad, according to our local cultural definitions.

berntb··on Neural Net Trained on Mugshots Predicts Criminals
This BBC article also quotes people arguing that this recognition might just be a tendency for a judge/jury to find someone guilty.

Again, that can't explain how you can reach 89.5% hit frequency?! Even in China, there needs to be some evidence... right?

To me, that argument sounds like "double think", because of fears of a 1984 society -- where people are characterized from their faces. (That is stupid, if this can really be refined and made to work, then active criminals would just do cosmetic operations.)

If those results goes against your ideology, just note that it isn't peer reviewed yet. :-)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38092196

berntb··on Neural Net Trained on Mugshots Predicts Criminals
That is testable. Prison populations should look different in areas where a larger fraction of serious crimes are solved. (It is hardly likely that a large enough fraction of people in prison are innocent to influence TFA's gigantic results of 89+%!)

So Occam's razor seems to imply that something changes in the face for people with e.g. (lead) poisoning, brain defects leading to psychopathy/violent tendencies or something else?

It could alternatively be in the life style of criminals. Drug use or attitude to others? Someone that really prey on people might even have changed hormone levels, or something, as it might be an evolutionary strategy?

Or just body language, but not for face pictures of course. In Sweden, when a state security group hired people with police training, they didn't hire police that ever worked on the streets because it changes the body language in some way; they are recognized by criminals -- and vice versa. (This is old, I have no clue how it is today.)

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
>> The content [of John Kerry's speach] was completely different than the NYT tried to make it out to be

I saw this a few days late.

I'd love some references -- since we were talking about propaganda here...

if that is true, a transcript along with quotes from the NY Times article ought to have passed by my Facebook in stream... unless FB is another conspiracy? :-)

(I'm willing to believe that e.g. US politicians pamper to all the conspiracy theories floating round the Middle East. It is sensitive to write that a majority of the population anywhere do something we despise in the West, like believing in stupid conspiracy theories.)

berntb··on Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It
I get dependent already on computer games (not a bad thing for Nethack and the Dark Souls series of course). It might be easy for me to get dependent, so I avoid drugs and other dependency causing things religiously -- like social networks.

But I am now a heavy FB user despite that, as an expatriate it helps a lot with keeping the fluency of my native tongue. The ease with keeping in contact is also really good for me, quite a bit away. I just wish there were fewer cat pictures.

The relevance for work and career is zero, of course. But the personal value is high.

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
I wrote an answer, but removed it. I'm not arguing simplified Swedish politics on HN.

Sweden already is in the absolute top of redistribution of wealth. It is not the rich people's money you can get, since you can't have a too different system than every other country in the EU. (The threshold for moving is sinking quickly.)

Do note that people earn their money by taking them "out of their backs", as an older generation put it. Only populist left wing politicians think tax money are free.

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
As I wrote, I selected two informative data points.

Per capita, there are 4-5 times as many people shot in the cities of Sweden as in Norway, Denmark and Finland. And mainly by criminals from those suburbs. So there are quite a lot of data.

Google this yourself, but I suspect you know all this already.

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
Generally correct, but Finland was a part of Sweden since hundreds of years earlier than the 1600s (ignoring the question if you can use the concept "nation" about Sweden in e.g. the 1200s).

And Norway never really got into our greedy, grasping Swedish hands until much later... they had a bad time enough with being part of Denmark anyway. :-)

Edit: And I finally got that Vendan's point was about the recent US election. :-)

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
It was claimed to be 22 in Norway so far 2016 and 11 in Malmö. (According to media).

(Also, I didn't misspell. Please be careful when quoting.)

>> A lot of different things could lead to fifteen murders in a year, one person who doesn't like refugees could do it.

According to an imam from the Malmö suburbs, it is an internal problem to the suburbs. Do you have other references?

http://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmo-imamens-uppmani...

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
My comment -- despite being quite carefully written and about something few people on HN really care about -- have really jumped up and down in votes. Which is expected. [Edit: A bit weird when it first had multiple plus votes, then ended up on -2 -- and the vote counter is +2? :-) 20 minutes later, up to 0 and vote counter 4. ]

The most extreme parameter when Sweden was compared to the rest of Europe used to be the high amount of trust in the society. People trusted each others and the state.

All that seems to be disappearing. I saw in my FB stream "Sweden is a country where we are right now learning to hate each others".

Sad. Or maybe it is part of growing up, as a country and as a society.

Edit: Vendan seems to think I'm happy about this change in societal climate? :-( I'm closer to mourning.

berntb··on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts
Let me expand on that... Just two simple data points:

1. Malmö, with large immigrant population, have a population of around 300,000 -- and half the number of murders this year as the whole of Norway, with 15 times the population. (Norway is culturally very similar to Sweden. Well, unless you ask Norwegians. :-) )

2. in the last 20 years there have been a negligible building of housing, for political reasons. At the same time, the Swedish population have increased with 10+% -- also for political reasons! This created a really high risk for a housing bubble in the next economic downturn.

In short -- there are scary problems.

Those problems are much larger than Germany's problems with immigration -- and are pushed under the carpet extensively by the Swedish media. Hence, you see two Swedes with totally different views of the Swedish situation.

The internal Swedish discussion is insanely polarized. The largest newspaper have for years stamped people nazi and fascist for arguing to implement a migration policy used in most of the rest of the EU. Norway and Denmark have been attacked for being "brown" (as in SA), despite being a couple of the world's most liberal and tolerant countries. And so on.

Finally, the point:

The Swedish general media have been systematically misrepresenting facts to the public. (For instance, up until a year ago, it was a "fact" that immigration of largely uneducated people was a good business and gave a good economical result for the country, despite an expensive welfare state.) What is really the fake news in Sweden..?

(You might argue that media lie and spin everywhere. Probably true. But in democracies, the news don't generally all use exactly the same spin...)

berntb··on Regex 101
Best sources about regexps?

I thought I knew regexps, then I read "Mastering regular expressions". After that I was embarrassed. :-)

berntb··on Python Versions Used in Commercial Projects, 2016 Edition
There are quite a few backwards incompatible extensions for Perl 5. But you must declare what new features to use.

Then there is Devel::Declare etc with extensible syntax... :-)

http://perldoc.perl.org/feature.html

berntb··on Python Versions Used in Commercial Projects, 2016 Edition
You got a point I agree with but a bad example since Perl 6 is a new language. (That the name don't reflect that is still a heated discussion.)

(And Perl 5 code can declare which of the newer features it will support. Excellent backwards compatibility.)

berntb··on Python Versions Used in Commercial Projects, 2016 Edition
Hmm... you really use the system Python installation for development? Python is not pathologically backwards compatible, what happens when the next OS version use a newer Python 2 version?
berntb··on Address to the American Psychological Association on Men (2007)
You want to stop assigning absolute moral/mental characteristics to people because of their skin color, facial features or other physical specifics?

You modern people with your statistics and correlations, that don't remember the good old days before 1861.

:-)

berntb··on Canada's immigration website crashes on election night
Come on, be realistic. The guy would say anything to get votes. He is just like my Swedish politicians [0]. So what will the US and the rest of the world get? I don't know. You don't know. I'm not even certain that Trump knows.

I hope, as an European, Trump will be pro NATO enough to keep Putin from invading more countries...

Let's hope that Trump will look at who buys US stuff and who doesn't. And Russia is too badly managed to have a good economy and be a good partner for trade.

Nothing positive about Clinton implied, either.

[0] The Swedish ex communists have declared themselves a feminist party -- but stamp it as "racist" when immigrant women have problems with oppression in the immigrant areas... :-) They are courting the intolerant immigrant votes. I would dare anyone to find any more hypocritical political example anywhere, but... sadly, there certainly are.

berntb··on Homebrew 1.1.0
OK, thanks. It was a few years since I touched the Mac package managers.

(I ought to ask or go read up on why it is like this, but I'll let it wait a year to when I research the next machine anyway.)

(Edit: Weird to not allow root? Oh, next year. :-) )

berntb··on Homebrew 1.1.0
Wouldn't this be mostly solved by a paragraph in the Homebrew documentation that recommend creating a specific user which do installations?

Edit: It seems to be fixed anyway? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12892929

(That aside, this praise was good to read. Homebrew didn't work well enough for me a few years back, so I got a Linux computer. I'll reconsider Macs next year when it is ~ time to get a new laptop.)

Edit: Let user "homebrew" have id 0. I tried MacPorts too. Hopefully either works for me next time.

berntb··on Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?
Regarding all discussion about creativity and programming, I heard a usability expert that had been painting for 30 years say this about GUI engineering:

Usability as a subject is the opposite of art, it is kitsch. You actively try to make simple and obvious; to have just one possible meaning.

She also said that art/painting was the best of hobbies, but would have been the worst possible of jobs. Too little money and too many interested people, so it was a rat race.

Personally, I've found hundreds of subjects I love to learn about. But it seems only one thing I really love doing. So they'll have to break my cold fingers off the keyboard. I love to teach about subjects I love, but sadly lack all pedagogical talent. (Maybe I had liked art if I wasn't color blind or so unmusical that I can't clap hand to most of my favorite music. :-) )

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