vadman

Side note: what's with the over-the-top political correctness epidemic on HN? Every time somebody talks about a random programmer it's "her" or "herself". I am all for gender equality and more women in tech, but this sort of stuff just seems strange.

Human beings are not perfectly rational automatons. Sometimes they want brand new stuff.

I have a friend who is 15 years older than me and very financially savvy. He grew up in India in a poor family and his father spent all his free time repairing their ancient clunker that kept breaking down. That memory is enough that he only buys new cars.

Unfortunately yes. But there is lots of good stuff outside the Diageo umbrella :)

Scotland has 100 distilleries in 5 major whiskey-producing regions with their own traditions. There is really no such thing as "scotch", they are all different, so this generalization is wrong.

But the good thing about it, unlike its superior rival George Dickel, is that JD is not owned by Diageo. It's a pity that I have to boycott Dickel because of that, but I'm not giving my money to those assholes.

EDIT: and yeah, rayiner's wife is awesome :)

+1

Felten's book ( http://www.amazon.com/Hows-Your-Drink-Cocktails-Drinking/dp/... ) has a good overview of all the classic cocktails, and in general is an interesting read. I have yet to try the Sazerac, having 3 bottles of rye at home... Shame :(

Also, the "original" pre-rye Sazerac was done with Cognac, gotta try that at some point as well.

Must be the same in every profession. How many of e.g. your school teachers were good? About 10%.

I am wondering if the ratio holds for crap to good parents. The scarier aspect of this is that people are actually being trained for their professions, as opposed to parenting, so the ratio may be even worse.

Not really. Take the Staten Island express bus for example. Between SI and Manhattan, there is about 35 min on the Verrazano Bridge and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, without any opportunity to get off (BQE does not even have shoulders for the most part). That's on a good day with decent traffic. In bad traffic and bad weather, that could be an hour or even more without any opportunity to get off.

EDIT: a clarification for non-New Yorkers -- people take these daily to get to work, if they work in Manhattan. The alternative is SI railroad-ferry-subway, which allows more bathroom safety but takes quite a bit longer.

T-Mobile prepaid plans are great in that regard. I only pay the New York sales tax on top of the quoted price (8.875% or something). My parents were on AT&T and they were paying close to $15 in mysterious fees + taxes per line, for dumbphone lines without data plans. I convinced them to move to T-Mobile prepaid, seems to work well so far.

Simple != easy, as per this great talk by Rich Hickey:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Sources? I'm really interested to learn who has been killed for speaking Ukrainian.

I think you are oversimplifying things.

People comprising the government are not "just" people.

They may have personality traits that compel them to seek out high-power positions.

They may suppress their natural good intentions because where they work, "things are done that way and everybody does that". After several years of such cognitive dissonance, they may just completely change personality-wise.

&c., &c.

Off-topic, but it's the first time I see somebody use "tannoy" in place of "PA" - really identifies you as a Brit :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannoy

The rest of the world is the other 2 countries that matter (and shit like that doesn't happen to them), a multitude of countries that don't matter (the USA doesn't give a fuck what their impression is) and a handful of "allies" who are in it with the US.

It will take really coordinated efforts of multiple governments for the US to even start caring about "impressions" and so on. Highly unlikely to happen.

Not sure why everybody is downvoting you, especially sicne you don't claim to be happy about the facts, just stating them.

Bolivia is, well, unimportant, and their complaints to the US will amount to nothing. There are exactly 2 countries in the world that the US cannot mess with. If it was a Russian or a Chinese plane, do you all think it would be denied airspace entry? (And EVEN IF it was denied entry and still decided to go through, do you think anything would happen to it?)

What should be downvoted is the state of affairs when a US whistleblower has to be escorted around the world by Putin himself to guarantee his safety.

The quote is nice but it's a great justification for illegal/unconstitutional actions. Those in power can do a lot of harm while abusing this idea.

60 fps, but the current drivers for both AMD and Nvidia (still in development) make you connect 2 cables and essentially treat it like 2 1920x2160 displays from what I read.

They are using Sharp's 4K IGZO panel. The MSRP for Sharp's own monitor is $5500, the street price is closer to $4800. ASUS will be in the same ballpark most likely. If you can just order 3 of them to put side by side in portrait mode, I envy you :)

BTW - one nasty thing about the Sharp display is that it's LED edge-lit, and the ASUS is most likely the same (the press release says "backlit" but they don't mention local dimming so I'm guessing edge-lit as well). Perhaps I am being an unreasonable purist, but I don't like such corner-cutting on premium displays.

A scary percentage of "naturally polite americans" feel entitled to to whatever they want with complete disregard for others' convenience, as long as they politely say "Excuse me".

Surely you mean (++ A)?

Actually I didn't justify anything, just asked a question. Your explanation makes sense, thanks.

I don't know much about Bayesian statistics, but wouldn't it be "terrorist, given Arabic descent AND participation in the targeted event AND proximity to the explosion AND high probability of a follow up explosion (judging from past events) AND ..."?

I remember reading some article about Japanese gamedev years ago that said the same thing. No OO, no standards, lots of repetition, &c.

So it's a bug after all :/ hope the author fixes it, such a neat idea otherwise.

No, that's circumference - 3.14 * 12742 is approx. 40K. You are looking at the Earth side-on, so you only see the 2D projection of the half-equator. (EDIT: I think it should be "1D projection")

Another nitpick - presumably our view axis is perpendicular to the solar system plane. The Earth would not look like in the picture, we would see one of the poles but slightly off-centered.

Not sure if it's a bug or a typo, but the "width" (diameter) of the Earth is 12,742 km, not 6,371 (which is the radius).

I use a soft-ish guideline of 100 columns per line, but I mostly code in C# at work, so normally namespace/class/try-catch is already 3 indentations, and 80 chars is simply not enough for everything.

I do my best to keep it between 80 and 100 chars. With a horizontal screen resolution of 1920 pixels, 2 pages of such code fit nicely side by side.

Well women spend their time and health bearing and nursing our (hopefully :) children. That's resources they could have dedicated to pumping their social status. So in the end it's fair I guess...

The main thing I took away was in this passage: "you prove to me I'm worth it. ...make me know how valuable I am. Because I don't have any idea..."

But then, I don't see how she'll be satisfied with any ring. Surely if a guy could sacrifice this much he could sacrifice just a bit more - so she may not be that valuable to him. I don't even want to start thinking about a guy who can afford a bigger rock suddenly showing up :D

Basically, the moral of the story, for me, was: 1) Avoid women who don't know their worth and require external confirmations; 2) Develop your own sense of self-worth by doing something worthwhile, then finding a like-minded woman would be easier.

I think.

Not sure why you got downvoted.

There is an interesting couple of articles on the subject here:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/01/what_would_you_do_if_...

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/02/what_would_you_do_if_...