sabbatic13

5 ms·

1.
by sabbatic13 12y ago
Socrates' ideas, or rather Plato's representations thereof, belong to a cultural context radically different from our own and have absolutely no relevance. Greece was undergoing a transition from orality to literacy at the time. I
2.
by sabbatic13 12y ago
"Sturdy roads, aqueducts, buildings, and military equipment are basically the things you want to have in order to consolidate and maintain power over a large area for a long period of time." The first three are also the things you
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
Nice. When lawsuits are directed _against_ the content giants, she's all for the letter of the law and due process: http://www.wired.com/2008/03/riaa-racketeeri/ I feel so much better knowing that such in
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
That was covered in the article. Disrupting the default order allows you to put emphasis on certain words, in your case, you'd want the color adjective to stand out. The other option, which I don't think the article covered, would
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
Keep mind that Google was initially installed as the default search engine years ago, because FF users voted for it to be so. Only after Google saw how many search referrals they then got from FF, did they, that is Google, suggest an actual
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
Perpetuating the illusion that there are innumerable grave threats that require resource-intensive responses is a useful tool for ensuring that more anti-terrorism money from the federal government gets poured into the city. It's not a
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
Please let it be car dealerships and mattress salespersons. (crosses fingers)
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
It seems to me that if someone is just honestly interested in meeting people and hearing whatever about them, then they are by nature rather social and extroverted and scarcely need advice on how to start conversations. For most people who
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
And what exactly do you think you mean by "I think we're reaching the limits of the English language with that one."? The semantic "limit" of the 3rd person plural pronoun is that there is an explicit or implicit, a
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
I'm sorry, but you generalized about the same billion people and even offered a completely imaginary 90% statistic to boot. And I'm not an outsider, not to the industry, not to web services, not to social networks, not to FB itsel
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by sabbatic13 12y ago
"indispensably useful tool" is way too strong. They find it a service that is hard, or at least usually undesirable, to do without.
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Rules like these aren't really good guide to style though. They are the sort of guidelines suited to curing teenagers of bad habits. That's the problem I have with articles like these. They aren't adult discussions of languag
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
How do you handle "fairly"? It is similarly polyvalent.
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
There's a difference in meaning between "he ran home" and "he was running home." Most people aren't aware enough of the language they use to avoid overusing certain things, but mechanical transformations aren&#
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
I found this article rather superficial. It touched on a few (very few) points of comparison and ignored a huge number of factors affecting entrepreneurship in Europe. Rather than waste time expanding on that though, I have a question. In t
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
And? He was paraphrasing what he'd like to see, not drafting legislation verbatim.
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Excellent links.
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere. Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to economic theories, but having societies and cultures, only a
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Well, in his defense, your Bundy and Armstrong examples are just awful, and the bit about whether X is moral or Y is moral is even worse. You've begged the question of what defines morality entirely and replaced a rational basis for ev
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
The problem with most libertarian beliefs is that they are very high-level and most attempts to apply and create a coherent system fail miserably. At their most useful, they can influence the current system to prevent certain undesirable ex
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
I wouldn't write off mockery as unproductive. It's been an element of perfectly productive political discourse since the beginning of recorded political discourse. If done well and in an informed fashion, it ends up dispelling the
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
I'm afraid your knowledge of history is almost completely inaccurate. The "Goths" were just a few dozens Germanic tribes who moved West and conquered territory which was already occupied by Germanic tribes. Now, before the la
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
And your dad's alternative would be what? To balkanize science and engineering? To create dozens of separate islands of knowledge? To slow the spread of knowledge, because everything deemed significant has to be translated to and from
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
But the Queen's Guard is dependent on the Canadians for the bear skins they need to make those giant grenadier hats. If we invade Canada and put that vital commodity in jeopardy, the regiment may attack the White House in the name of o
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Ah yes, I jumped into a PhD program after the college experience. That's a great butt-kicking too, because suddenly you are responsible for justifying anything and everything you might say or write about something. At least I learned h
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
It is, but there's also some historical friction between the people who hack on gecko (like smedberg) and the people who hack on the services that tie into the browser, so sometimes it's diversity of opinion, and sometimes it&#x27
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
This is quite true. The best thing I ever did to preserve and improve my brain was find things, really hard things, about which I was passionate. It's not so much about studying as it is about finding subjects and venues of learning th
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
It's also the first time all the work that went into my doctoral exam in Proto-Indo-European Verbal Morphology has been relevant to, well, anything on HN. O.K., it's pronouns, but I had to study those too.
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
The last class I got to help teach in Grad School was The Nature and History of the English language. Leading undergrads to this epiphany is also very gratifying (that and being able to explain the weirdness that is English orthography).
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by sabbatic13 13y ago
Oh, and no, the plural wasn't used as a formal singular. It was idiomatic to occasionally use the first person plural to refer to oneself (you can see this in Cicero's letters), but it had nothing to do with formality or some sort

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