ubernostrum

5 ms·

1.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish their goals while publicly conducting themselves with p
2.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Generally an "undisputed champion" title would require a level of effort that the AlphaZero team apparently isn't interested in. They like to run matches between AlphaZero and Stockfish in private under their own controlled c
3.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Let me be clear: I do not see it as an inherently bad thing if Nazis have to put in more effort than other people to find or build a platform on which they can spew their thoughts. I do not see it as the first step on a slippery slope to a
4.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
So to prevent an angry mob from taking away someone's platform, you insist we need the ability for an angry mob to take away someone's platform. I think you need to think this through a bit more.
5.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Their "punishment" is that they have to build their own platform because the owners of other platforms are exercising their freedom of (dis)association. Nobody's made it illegal for them to build their own platform, and in fa
6.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
I don't know for certain, but what I would guess is that strptime() without a day-of-week indicator is ambiguous. strptime() produces a datetime object, which consists of year, month, day, hour, minute, second, microsecond, time zone,
7.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tolerance of everything except intolerance. There are
8.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Inventing your own pseudo-normalization of Unicode is a worse idea than using the actual normalization forms Unicode defines. Also, if you think you can decompose without allocating memory... well, try a code point like U+FDFA. For referenc
9.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
I have a soapbox. I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too. Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agr
10.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
As the kids say these days: you accidentally said the quiet part out loud :) When it was Margaret Sanger being prosecuted for distributing information about contraception, well, there's a perfectly reasonable justification for that law
11.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters
12.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
And just to clarify a bit: the specific restriction Python imposes is that if a strptime() format string contains one of %G (ISO year) or %V (ISO week number), it must also contain the other one, and must contain a day-of-week format code (
13.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
From the perspective of Unicode, no. What you're looking for here is what Unicode calls "equivalence", and it comes in two variations: canonical equivalence and compatibility equivalence. For example, "é" can be wri
14.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
A lot of languages take their date/time formatting from C strftime (and quite a few simply use light wrappers around actual strftime), where the format code for ISO year is %G. And FWIW, Python's (strftime-based) datetime library
15.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Only if you churn -- signing up for a card, redeeming the signup bonus, then signing up for another, and so on. And card issuers know about churning. The highest-value cards also have limits to how often you can churn. Chase's "5&
16.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
As others have noted, this is not the same thing. What the parent was talking about is usually called "same-day change" (abbreviated "SDC"), and is in fact only available free of charge to passengers who have a minimum s
17.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
The value of loyalty programs, for the customer, tends to inversely correlate to the state of the economy. In very broad terms: tourism is a larger part of the travel market than business travel. When the economy is bad, fewer people travel
18.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to brutally tear apart the ideas of "Atlas Shrugg
19.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
If people who have issue with military are given someone else to do, you can't simultaneously claim they have to be willing to die. Without committing to any position on the book itself (it's certainly an interesting Rorschach t
20.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
On the other hand, there is no substantive content in metaphysics (at least as far as ontology goes) if the statements do not pick out real entities. You've just committed the fallacy of begging the question -- you assumed the truth
21.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
The general idea you're missing here is that it's very hard -- perhaps impossible -- to develop a clear, bright-line method for distinguishing between fields that deal with concepts we can't empirically test, in such a way th
22.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
So, write the program correctly. Show me. You just want to fight someone because you're angry, and I don't do that. No matter what someone writes you'll find a way to argue into it being wrong and then prance around declari
23.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
I referenced people who've tried this before and were made to shut down or change tactics before it escalated to a court ruling. You also keep citing copyright cases. You cited a case where the multi-factor test of fair use was met, wi
24.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
The way I usually put it is that Python 3 shifted its priorities. Previously, if you were a UNIX-y scripter writing UNIX-y scripts on your UNIX-y OS, the fact that Python just kind of pretended encoding issues would never exist was a help t
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by ubernostrum 8y ago
The courts have ruled many times using content that is in the public domain is fair use, you have no claim to trademark protection If you take all your legal advice from people who repost whole movies onto youtube and put "no copyrig
26.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Like I said elsewhere: these kinds of schemes don't really "work". The best that happens is you get away with it for a while until you accidentally do it to someone with resources. Are you carefully vetting every single entit
27.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
Google doesn't pop up a thing asking me to donate to Tom Scott's fundraising campaign. Brave apparently does (based on screenshots shared by others; in order to preserve my right to legal action in the future I'm very careful
28.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
It's not like the browser is setting up a crowd funding page for you. That is precisely what the browser is doing. This can have harmful consequences for the people they do it to. If someone's on a means-tested disability benefi
29.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
There is a non-zero chance that a company in legal trouble will suddenly decide an employee wasn't authorized to speak on their behalf and so clearly misrepresent their perfectly legal and honest intentions, and throw that employee und
30.
by ubernostrum 8y ago
How about instead you shut this off and rebuild it to be explicitly opt-in only? Or, better for you personally: how about you hand in your resignation and retain an attorney? Here's the thing: people who get away with this type of thin

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