donall

11 ms·

1.
by donall 2mo ago
You're absolutely right that they aren't in a parallel institution. As I understand it, the SF perspective is that there is no legitimate government representing the people of West Tyrone (other than Stormont, which is complicated
2.
by donall 2mo ago
Agree that SF is not a protest vote but they do vote and debate. Since their first major electoral victory over 100 years ago they have been clear that they represent their constituents to the best of their abilities (I won't opine on
3.
by donall 2y ago
Like I said, it's a guess. I don't have firm numbers and I'm speculating. Aside from incidents like the one you described, I'm taking into account Wellington's military campaigns, which involved large-scale battles
4.
by donall 2y ago
The original post was arguing that there were too many Irish people in Ireland because of the predominant religion. The implication, as I surmise, is that Catholics believe that only those who are constantly reproducing can be real BFFs wit
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by donall 2y ago
> Irish one is seen as something special because it happened in the West, and because overpopulation there built up for a considerable time being allowed by potatoes farming There was no overpopulation problem in Ireland! It was _less_ d
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by donall 2y ago
I'm aware that he has his detractors. I'm not a Coogan apologist! I'm just saying that the book covers the Malthusian angle well enough and it cites sources. The genocide angle is controversial to some but 90% of the book is
7.
by donall 2y ago
It isn't difficult to find examples of people misbehaving in the history of any country. That doesn't mean they are irredeemable and they need a British Army battalion to come and save them from themselves. I would guess that the
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by donall 2y ago
Complicated doesn't begin to describe him! I think that, by our modern standards, I would be very unhappy to be a citizen of Napoleon's empire. However, considering the available governments in Europe at the tail end of the 18th c
9.
by donall 2y ago
I don't think the British empire was "uniquely nefarious", but I think most of the indigenous people of the places that they colonised experienced it as being _fairly_ nefarious! I'm not aware of many former colonies cel
10.
by donall 2y ago
"Up the RA" is a great slogan. The IRA made an important and undeniable contribution to Irish statehood. I don't think we'd be "a privileged and filthy rich country" were it not for their activities in the 20th
11.
by donall 2y ago
> Catholic church that pushed people to reproduce without limits [Citation needed] It's hard not to interpret this as just garden variety bigotry, of the same sort that caused the famine in the first place. Let's assume it&#x27
12.
by donall 2y ago
Very much so. Tim Pat Coogan covers this in his book "The Famine Plot" (which is one of the major proponents that the great hunger was a genocide and has received a lot of criticism, but which covers the basic facts in good detail
13.
by donall 2y ago
Strongly agree. I have been doing data engineering for 14 years and, in my experience, new grads need a lot of on-the-job training. There are a lot of real-world problems (e.g. consistency problems, scale problems, distribution problems) th
14.
by donall 2y ago
Fair comment. And I'm usually suspicious of young engineers wanting to implement the new hotness and I'm also a fan of "if it ain't broken don't fix it". In this case, though, the system was in very rough shape
15.
by donall 2y ago
I had a visceral reaction to this comment! I once joined a company doing ETL with Apache camel and a half dozen underpowered pet machines. Ingesting their entire dataset and running a suite of NLP models took 3-6 months (estimated; it was s
16.
by donall 3y ago
> Then we have the collisions between the Brythonic languages (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Cumbric, Cornish and the rest) and English Small correction: neither Irish nor the two languages people might refer to as Scottish are Brythonic langu
17.
by donall 3y ago
I confess I laughed at this (you're good at the sarcastic takedown), but it's a bit mean-spirited and not really in keeping with the discussion guidelines. Belittling someone like this discourages dialogue and learning.
18.
by donall 3y ago
One aspect of the problem here is the difficulty in running a clinical trial, particularly at the recruitment stage. The covid-19 trials all had a surfeit of participants because of a pandemic, but with modern cancer treatment trials the qu
19.
by donall 5y ago
IANAL, but habitually screaming at and insulting employees sounds like textbook harassment/bullying. I suppose this sort of criminality is less likely to be reported in more precarious employment situations. As a data point, I have wor
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by donall 10y ago
Do you have citations, particularly for housing? I'm not trying to be difficult; I'm genuinely interested in the sources because I have a sense that you're right but have never found great evidence to back it up. The raw numb
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by donall 11y ago
I think the difference is that the actors in movies aren't trying to give the impression that they wrote the script, whereas musicians talk about "their" songs like they conceived them in a process of true artistic expression
22.
by donall 11y ago
You can get free access to the API, capped at 10K requests per day. Hopefully that is enough to be useful at this initial stage! After that, I think pricing depends on your app. I think it is extremely favourable to small/new startups,
23.
by donall 11y ago
FYI, you can use Factual.com to get location data for all kinds of businesses. You'll still need to source reviews from somewhere else, but this might be a useful way of ensuring you have good coverage. (disclaimer: I work at Factual,
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by donall 11y ago
I can see that that would be interesting information to have, but why is it absolutely necessary?
25.
by donall 12y ago
A fair point about half being a little optimistic. But even if it is just Europe we consider, that's still doubling the population of great programmers and that seems like a win, objectively.
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by donall 12y ago
Just my $0.02: I agree with all of your criticisms. Despite that, I am an immigrant programmer living in California. I couldn't find any work in Europe that was as interesting and challenging as what I do here (obviously there are good
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by donall 12y ago
Well, he does say "if"... I think PG's point is that some people are naturally great, regardless of their environment. So, yes, Congo or Nigeria or whatever have a bunch of guys who might have been great programmers if given
28.
by donall 12y ago
This is the second time you've categorised it as choosing "the lesser evil". I don't think that's what the system was designed to be. It sounds to me like it's so far off the rails that the real lesser evil cho
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by donall 12y ago
[Citation needed]
30.
by donall 12y ago
Learning ClojureScript is on my to do list for today, so this is a nice coincidence. It looks fairly complete (but I haven't learned it yet, so I could be very wrong!). One word of advice: have it proof read by a native English speaker

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