Viewing profile — SteveLAnderson

I lead a small group of people twice a week in mindfulness practice. I agree wholeheartedly with what this article is saying. Mindfulness has been sold as the latest snake oil, a c…

If by technical documentation you mean a readme page, or a few internal pages, then either are fine, as are AsciiDoc, org, etc. There's no huge advantage or disadvantage to any of …

TL;DR - the writer dismisses common lisp because he can't be bothered to learn emacs.

The question the article is asking isn't matched by the headline, or the conclusion. The points raised in the article come down to this idea - if we, as a society, want to make sur…

It was insulting to every person that works in the government, and especially to those people you mention that are "good competent folks". If your only experience with government e…

I agree with your assessment of the legislation. It's true that Sen. Lieberman, in coordination with Sen. Snowe, threatened a filibuster. At the time, Sen. Lieberman was an indepen…

Just go straight to the Harvard Museums site - http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/the-bauhaus

"American governments are not capable of running efficient programs" - that's simply false, and your statement about government employees is insulting.

Well ... you're strictly right, but just like the idiotic provision that forced Congress to give up their employer sponsored insurance and use the exchange instead was forced by th…

Answering my own question - the graph is about mass shootings. The data is from http://www.shootingtracker.com .

California's population in 2013 was 38.4 million. According to the map, 2 Californians per million were affected by firearm violence that led to death, so that'd be about 77 people…

DSSSL was amazing. Mr. Clark did some truly outstand work, and I benefited from using it with SGML and FrameMaker back in the day. It was hard to learn, though, and the documentati…

On the one hand a detailed report and the other a bunch of random quotes. I think I'll trust Brookings.

Interesting quotations you included - where did they come from? I didn't find them in the report you cited. The following is from the conclusion of the Brookings report you cited, …

Anybody that thinks $1.1T is a "small piddling decrease" must be a truly wealthy person. Can you spare the government that pittance? We'd all benefit from it.

Ask yourself, honestly, what percentage of the entire budget was that end of year splurge? In my experience it's very small, much smaller then the year to year cost inflation. Ther…

That may happen, but like the "cadillac welfare queen" is an exception, not the rule. For most departments, they run out of money before the end of the fiscal year.

You mean the 2013 budget sequestration never happened? Tell that to the departments that are getting $1.1T less over an 8 year period. Between the sequestration and the lack of bud…

The paper I linked to discussed both of those papers and corrects errors made in them.

Ah, yes, flag it because heavens forbid anyone on HN discusses gun violence!

You may not be sure, but the researchers that study this subject are sure - http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf And for the US - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_…

How do you know it won't work? Seems like speculation to me.

Exactly. When Australia changed their gun laws, the suicide rate went down by 65%.

Fixing the issues that lead a person to consider suicide is really hard. Decreasing the number of available guns is much easier and is effective. When Australia decreased the numbe…

Don't do it. Send them an email telling them why you didn't sign up.