Viewing profile — penrod

Hear, hear. The freedom to vote with your feet is one of the most important characteristics of the American experiment. Among all voting methods it is uniquely effective and access…

Any discussion of Singletons is incomplete without https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/singleton-consider...

Quite. Who cares whether the NYT revised the article? The more salient criticism is that the article is a deeply lazy and tendentious exercise in using insinuation to push a predet…

I wonder how many people would cite the War on Drugs as the primary reason they identify as Libertarian.

It is no surprise that Treasury made a profit on its investments in troubled companies, since the fact of investing in them effectively rigged the market in their favor: If the gov…

"Unfortunately, as a result of my work, several more Linux storage developers came out publicly in favor of harassment and assault." I really would like links to these public state…

It seems like you are also selling something. And the price, which you do not mention, is the curtailment of free speech, a steep price to pay for the privilege of having my delica…

"Well, you are aware that the roads were built for cars right?" Unless you're referring only to freeways, that's a nice bit of revisionism. Especially in any city older than 100 ye…

The horror - horror! - of rich people having more stuff than poor people is not alleviated by preventing prices from rising in times of scarcity - rich people can just pay others t…

The more positions are elected, the more power the majority have to impose upon minorities. It is well known that pure democracy does not invariably promote liberal society, which …

Speaking without specific knowledge of the junction you mention, but with 20 years' experience of urban cycling, my observation is that this type of accident is usually a function …

This might be of interest to you: https://github.com/gilesjb/copalis.sql

> In the modern American cultural context, monkeys are associated with bananas. Actually, code monkeys are associated with Fritos.

A nitpick about terms, but not all discrimination against women is 'institutional' sexism. Institutional prejudice may be sufficient but is definitely not necessary for acts of sex…

The article is a little unfair to Seattle. Note the alacrity with which the city clamped down on Lyft and Uber - clearly you can get some things done here if you know the right peo…

It should be abundantly clear at this point that the established media is antipathetic to the tech sector. Part of this is economic - journalists (with some justification) blame th…

Quite. I am puzzled by the article. As even the author points out, binary search is tail-recursive, and therefore trivially transformed to an iterative form. So why on earth profil…

Appeal to authority and all that, but.. "the pressure on the legislature to license an occupation rarely comes from the members of the public . . . On the contrary, the pressure in…

It is not just that large companies are more efficient at dealing with regulation; Large companies actively lobby for regulation as a way of protecting themselves from (smaller) po…

The self-regard of journalists never ceases to impress me. What other profession would believe that they have priveliged claim to the most fundamental of the rights enumerated in t…

The difference between disability and a stipend is that you lose disability benefits the minute you engage in any productive activity, whereas the stipend dispersed by the Cherokee…

I hate hipster hackers as much as anyone, but what we have here is a case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures The arts and culture establishment, with their refined hu…

The Dymaxion car had three wheels, two at the front, with rear-wheel steering and the engine mounted at the back. Imagine a car with the dynamic qualities of a Reliant Robin. Drive…

I initially read the title as "Drawing fractals with PostScript," which is also fun. Here's a fractal fern in ps: /t0 [ .85 -.04 .04 .85 0 1.6 ] def /t1 [ .2 .23 -.26 .22 0 1.24] d…

My only objection to Hyperloop is that it's so damned ugly . What ought to be an inspirational feat of engineering looks, under the proposed pillar design, like an elevated oil pip…