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chaosfactor

12 karma · joined September 13, 2014

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chaosfactor··on World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience “worse than death”
You do not understand medical ethics.

And I do, because I've actually run human subjects experiments as approved by an IRB. QED.

chaosfactor··on World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience “worse than death”
You do not understand medical ethics.

The surgery requires a staff of 150 doctors and nurses and exclusive use of a state-of-the-art operating theatre. The doctor clearly can't afford to go testing on animals.

chaosfactor··on World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience “worse than death”
You do not understand medical ethics.

The worst-case cost to the patient is miniscule relative to the benefits to society.

chaosfactor··on Reasons not to buy from Amazon
Stallman just LOVES puns https://stallman.org/puns.html
chaosfactor··on Reasons not to buy from Amazon
The slavery analogy holds because in both cases we are talking about freedom. A word you aren't using.
chaosfactor··on World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience “worse than death”
The patient is of sound mind and agrees to the transplant. That makes it ethical.
chaosfactor··on Why do we have allergies?
Costs vs benefits.
chaosfactor··on Why do we have allergies?
Did you just say that allergies are never genetic?
chaosfactor··on I'll Accept Anything – Accepting every pull request submitted
Wikipedia articles have topics, this does not.
chaosfactor··on What I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years
It's not gratiutously negative - or even negative at all. It's a matter of fact. The advice in that column will not lead you to create a successful company, so take it with a healthy dose of humility and with a grain of salt.

Indeed, while your post can be considered harmful, mine cannot.

chaosfactor··on What I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years
P(you create a successful company|you read this guys post) ~= 0
chaosfactor··on Why do we have allergies?
I have theorized that allergies, such as cat allergies, may, in some cases, be your body's way of warning you that there are Big Cats in the vicinity and you should GTFO.
chaosfactor··on NSA Spy Cam Blocker
Hahaha is rsync's comment for real? Also, how meta can we get here?
chaosfactor··on Current Status of IA.BAK – A backup of the Internet Archive
What would be really awesome is to have the ability to fire up a cloud instance and do computations on the Internet Archive.
chaosfactor··on Monica Lewinsky: The price of shame
This talk is fantastic.
chaosfactor··on The truth about the Bitcoin Foundation
Vote with your feet. Using Bitcoin is a vote for that kind of system.
chaosfactor··on New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
Wow, this post has some hard core moralizing in it. The whole concept that a mean comment is going to prevent the next AirBnB. That may be the case, but it's unfalsifiable and straight up passing more judgement. I can do without that, personally. I mean, you seriously won't let Linus Torvalds post on HN?
chaosfactor··on Space.js – HTML-driven narrative 3D-scrolling
It's funny because I actually kind of like it.
chaosfactor··on Deep Learning, the Curse of Dimensionality, and Autoencoders
You've created a nice little chicken and egg problem for yourself.
chaosfactor··on Porting Emacs to Chromebooks and the Web [pdf]
My laptop died and I am broke and jobless, and needed to do some programming for InstaSource. My only choice was to use my Chromebook. Now I do all my coding on it. It's surprisingly awesome!
chaosfactor··on Porting Emacs to Chromebooks and the Web [pdf]
I'm using emacs on my Chromebook by using crouton.
chaosfactor··on My next project: AutoSEO
It's funny because it's plausible.
chaosfactor··on Vectorious – A generalized n-dimensional matrix and vector library in JavaScript
I agree with this guy! Computers will never be fast enough to justify the use of a forward thinking library like this! Nevermind future integrations with the GPU or SIMD or technological enhancements we can't even imagine! Why, Javascript is so slow I don't even know why I stopped browsing with wget piped to e-mail like Stallman!
chaosfactor··on Amazon Dash Button
The button can automatically order batteries for you when it's running low.
chaosfactor··on GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
This does not generalize to arbitrary purposes. If you just want to detect that the user has run more jobs than your build system can possibly benefit from and print a warning, there is no reason to start messing with the jobserver. This is not the Ockham solution :)
chaosfactor··on GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
It makes some sense to want to know this. You might know that your build process doesn't benefit from more than 4 jobs, and want to alert this to the developer who tries to use more.
chaosfactor··on GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
Write a target that greps the Makefile itself and extracts the targets.
chaosfactor··on GNU make insanity: finding the value of the -j parameter
This probably won't work if you just pass -j. If I needed to solve this problem, I would have just grepped the output of `ps' to get the make invocation. If I wasn't sure which invocation was correct, I would have used heuristics like the output of `pstree' to figure it out.
chaosfactor··on Physics in 100 Years
This is an exercise in paradigm paralysis. How about: I predict that if I were teleported 100 years into the future, I would have no fucking clue what was going on, you wouldn't be able to explain it to me and I would probably die from the culture shock. You have evolve and develop and turn into the future. You can't just go there willy-nilly, nor, at this point, can you confidently make predictions about it. That too is a prediction, though. For all I know Rudy Rucker is right and we will be a black hole in 100 years. But even if that prediction is right, our guesstimate of the phenomenology is all wrong.
chaosfactor··on SSH Proxy Commands that use `sed`
Calling into sed when you use ssh increases your attack surface to include sed's attack surface. And likely more.
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