Hacker News: adavies42

New comment by adavies42 in "NSA Careers for DEF CON Attendees"

adavies42 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:28:18 +0000

> If it's serious, like assault, you're out.

i've seen some examples that suggest it might not be as cut-and-dry as that. i don't have the url handy, but some time ago someone in one of this discussions linked to a publicly-accessible record of clearance decisions. the one that jumped out at me had a guy who'd been a drug addict and involved in dealing in the past--he was clean now and fully informed them about it during the screening, and was approved.

New comment by adavies42 in "The new Digg"

adavies42 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:56:46 +0000

i guess the new digg is the old reddit....

New comment by adavies42 in "Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?"

adavies42 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:50:12 +0000

i went to academic summer camps basically from sixth grade on (Duke TIP-affiliated stuff), and one year i took chemistry class. one of the three weeks was "uncontrolled oxidation" week. lots of fun. :) the biggest takeaway was that potassium perchlorate plus almost anything equals cool. i think my favorite was equal parts potassium perchlorate and sugar in a half-coke can. take outside and add a couple drops of sulfuric acid--ten-foot cone of flame.

for reference this would be, hmm, i think 1995? somewhere between 94 and 97, anyway.

New comment by adavies42 in "Whatever happened to kids' chemistry sets?"

adavies42 — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:43:06 +0000

ethanol burns relatively cool (as do (some of?) the other alcohols). the problem is that it often burns above the ignition point of its carrier substance, which itself burns much hotter. e.g. calcium acetate/isopropyl alcohol gel (lab sterno) is perfectly safe to burn in your hand, but only until the alcohol runs out--it will light the calcium acetate, which is not remotely safe to burn in your hand.

hand sanitizer is usually an alcohol in water and a thickener (glycerin, etc.). i'd worry a bit about the same effect. (not that i actually know what the ignition and flame temps of glycerin are....)

New comment by adavies42 in "Issues"

adavies42 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:30:44 +0000

"Users may be experiencing issues" is not the passive voice (not that you explicitly said it was, but IMAO you implied it), it's the continuous aspect, modified by whatever an auxiliary like "may" does. (this is where my grammar vocabulary starts to run out. conditional continuous maybe?)

passive would be "Issues may be being experienced by users".

New comment by adavies42 in "Gunsmith Uses 3D Printer To Make A Rifle"

adavies42 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:13:17 +0000

istr a ds9 novel (yes, i read some) where they had to replicate some machine guns to deal with invaders who had perfect shielding, but only against energy weapons. there were security overrides involved, but it had a large collection of projectile weapons to choose from once it was unlocked.

New comment by adavies42 in "Google Fiber Plans & Pricing"

adavies42 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:06:52 +0000

you ever see American Graffiti? one thing that really stuck with me was the bit at the end where they're boarding a plane--it was just walk out onto the runway, present your ticket and walk up the stairs.

to do that nowadays you have to be flying private....

New comment by adavies42 in "Google Fiber Plans & Pricing"

adavies42 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:04:22 +0000

i've flown international business class on luxury airlines twice (once on singapore on the company dime, and once on qatar through a random complimentary upgrade). the service is just staggering--never mind the full-flat bed-seats, the unlimited free liquor, the gourmet food, or the entertainment center with a full array of power outlets and usb and video ports so i could run any device and content i wanted, what really impressed me was the rose in a vase on my table when i boarded, and the pajamas in the care package (with the slippers and eyemask and so on).

i'm splurging and flying "premium coach" (or w/e the hell they call it on Virgin) on my next vacation; we'll see how it compares....

New comment by adavies42 in "GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, breaks existing scripts"

adavies42 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:34:49 +0000

ever work on a non-gnu box? (old solaris, *bsd, stock os x, etc.) there's a decent chance they don't have -r at all.

New comment by adavies42 in "Apple Reports Third Quarter Results"

adavies42 — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:40:00 +0000

this is traditional: they almost always undershoot the over-expectations

New comment by adavies42 in "The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?"

adavies42 — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:35:09 +0000

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...]

I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Hank Rearden in TFA.

New comment by adavies42 in "Destined To Fail"

adavies42 — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 21:41:52 +0000

a few years ago i moved into an apartment in NYC that somehow didn't have a phone line. at all. like there wasn't a wall jack in the entire apartment. (it was a hundred-year-old building, i have no idea how this was possible.)

i discovered this when i finally gave up on cable internet (insanely unreliable there) and needed about five calls and three visits to get verizon to understand that someone would have to drill a hole in my floor and run wire into the basement before my DSL could be hooked up, because yes, i really didn't have a phone line.

New comment by adavies42 in "Destined To Fail"

adavies42 — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 21:33:25 +0000

> What exactly is the "violence" that Austin would do to competitors?

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke: If you run your own cable, you'll need a permit. If you do it by negotiating with the landowners without a permit, you'll be blocked. If you do it anyway, you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot.

New comment by adavies42 in "How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 21:32:37 +0000

Rand also liked Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane.

If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).

New comment by adavies42 in "How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:43:46 +0000

> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)

Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)

Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical http://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)

New comment by adavies42 in "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:23:33 +0000

it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....

New comment by adavies42 in "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:21:57 +0000

no, just illiterate. the original author and the commenters here all made allowances for non-native speakers of english, which apparently you couldn't be bothered to read....

New comment by adavies42 in "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:15:09 +0000

> For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test.

that's a question of knowing something about history. i wouldn't hire anyone with perfect grammar and style who was too dim to know that both are subject to change over time.

New comment by adavies42 in "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:13:11 +0000

they have their place. i saw a lovely translation recently of a french request to "tutoyer" (address in the familiar) as "i must be thee to thou".

New comment by adavies42 in "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar"

adavies42 — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 16:11:12 +0000

There's also Lenin's famous line "Who? Whom?", which is a lot harder to translate without a "whom" available....