Hacker News: pschw

New comment by pschw in "'It's quite soul-destroying': how we fell out of love with dating apps"

pschw — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 22:21:16 +0000

> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?

Friday Night Lights

New comment by pschw in "Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories"

pschw — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 14:26:01 +0000

There's a massive scholarly debate about when exactly the Final Solution took shape, with one school of thought being that it wasn't until after the invasion of the USSR that extermination became the goal. Christopher Browning's _The Origins of the Final Solution_ [0] provides a good overview of this position.

[0] https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259799/

New comment by pschw in "Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office"

pschw — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 15:23:00 +0000

In the case of the LIRR:

https://gothamist.com/news/lirr-riders-still-miffed-over-jam...

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/hell-on-wheels-bklyn-shuttles-...

New comment by pschw in "Emacs is not just an editor (2015)"

pschw — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:11:49 +0000

lsp-java mode should handle most of that: https://emacs-lsp.github.io/lsp-java/

New comment by pschw in "Beej's Guide to C Programming"

pschw — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 18:11:01 +0000

From his bio:

> I'd started off with Beej's Guide to Network Programming back in 1995 or so

New comment by pschw in "Less gym time, same results: Why ‘lowering’ weights is all you need to do"

pschw — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 02:35:16 +0000

IIRC they were the basis of the routines in Arnold's _Education of a Body Builder_... doesn't get any more classic than that.

New comment by pschw in "The Real War 1939-1945 (1989)"

pschw — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:27:29 +0000

> The author seems to have little understanding of how much this was true of World War 1...

Fussell wrote _The Great War and Modern Memory_, so I'd say he was pretty well-versed on how WW1 was portrayed.

New comment by pschw in "The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks"

pschw — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 16:48:42 +0000

From what I remember (I did a masters in history about a decade ago), Eran Shalev's _Rome Reborn on Western Shores_ was the main book on the subject (edit: the subject being Rome / the classics and early American political culture generally, not specifically the US Constitution).

That said, there was some debate over the influence of Rome on early American political debates, with others citing either "classical republicanism" or the pre-English Civil War debates on the English constitution as more important influences (for example, JGA Pocock or Gordon Wood).

New comment by pschw in "Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (2019)"

pschw — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 12:02:26 +0000

Anecdote: When I was in a history graduate program, part of our training was a "written exam" based on a list of 200+ required books (and several hundred more recommended ones). There literally was not time to read every book, so we all got a crash course in how academics read -- get the author's argument from the intro/conclusion, then get the structure/evidence/case studies by skimming the chapter list. By the end, I was able to "read" a book in about 30 minutes, but there was no way I could actually _read_ the book. The goal was to spend as much time as possible reading primary sources, not books, because that was the "value-add" for an academic historian.

New comment by pschw in "Cisco Webex launches real-time translation"

pschw — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 15:34:06 +0000

> If you like Zoom you should be ok with Webex.

Webex lacks a native Linux client, and the browser-based version has limited features and in my experience has had some recurring issues with audio and screensharing. So, purely from a user experience point of view, the shift from Zoom to Webex hasn't been painless.

New comment by pschw in "How can you not be romantic about programming? (2020)"

pschw — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 22:16:21 +0000

> Read a book about Lisp games programming

Any recommendations?

New comment by pschw in "U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests"

pschw — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 02:02:52 +0000

Nit: the first issue of Marat's "L'Ami du peuple" wasn't published until several months after the fall of the Bastille and thus played no role in radicalizing the populace prior to the Revolution.

But the broader point that the French Revolution was proceeded by a radicalized literature [0] is accurate (Sieyes' "What is the Third Estate?" is the most famous work [1]). Though it's contribution to the origins of the Revolution is the matter of some debate [2].

[0] For a good overview, see the work of Robert Darnton, esp. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674536579 [1] https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_que_le_tiers_état... (I don't recall if there's a full English translation of this... there are excerpts in Keith Baker's French Revolution reader (U Chicago Press) [2] One of the better treatments of this is https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Cultural-Origins-of-the-Frenc...

New comment by pschw in "Magician-turned-mathematician uncovers bias in coin flipping (2004)"

pschw — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 17:24:52 +0000

It is definitely doable. _Scarne on Dice_ (1945) details a number of methods for controlling dice throws. And Steve Forte's "Gambling Protection Series" videos show what the moves look like in action.

Mind you, none of these moves will fly in a modern casino.