Viewing profile — sam-s

Gawain uses his sword to cut the ropes and free himself. Then he appears to be running around without the sword. Why?! PS. I understand that he is somewhat of a moron, but leaving …

Is it possible that the causality goes in the opposite direction - hormonal levels affect job selection?

I find it fascinating that no one dares even to mention IQ, either here or in the original article.

I learned that "garbage collection" is not just a memory management technique but also refers to big trucks removing the content of trash cans when I took a "nerd test".

The US nationality is listed as "American" between "Tuvaluan" and "Ugandan". Nice joke.

Why can't the server inherit the clipboard from the program being shut down? (unless the program crashes, it should go through the "official motions" and one of them should be noti…

They are not hoarding anything people need (like food or clothing). They are not even hoarding anything people don't need (like gold or diamonds). The "money" (they don't hoard cas…

Everything is possible. Feasible is a different issue. It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important elements)…

American civilians are being murdered by the police all the time - with complete impunity. This will continue until (1) the courts eliminate Qualified Immunity and (2) police union…

Nope. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

What if a therapeutic bacteriophage (mutates and) attacks symbiotic gut bacteria? Note that 10% of a human's weight and 90% of the cell count are those symbiotic gut bacteria.

It was fashionable in the USSR to blame all problems on the legacy of WW2 ("we suffered so much destruction and made so many sacrifices, this is why we are so poor compared to the …

The Institute for Justice ( https://ij.org/ ) has a podcast ( https://ij.org/podcasts/short-circuit/ ) were they regularly discuss these kinds of issues. It is hard to summarize th…

> ...companies can’t expect to capture most of the value they create... One does not have to capture "most of the value" to be profitable. In fact, aiming to capture _most_ of the …

> A dialect of Python with more explicit blocking instead of whitespace sensitivity would be excellent. It's called Scheme ;-)

Cultural imperialism is part and parcel of Russian literature. Brodsky derided the Ukrainian quest for independence 30 years ago just like Pushkin did the same for the Polish one 1…

1. Lotteries are not taxes because the participation is voluntary (unlike the soviet lottery/got's bond combo). 2. People buy lottery tickets just like they buy movie tickets - it …

I am surprised no one mentions the elephant in the room - rent control. It makes it harder to discover the true rent (one has to pay a large lump sum to the previous tenant to get …

at that speed, the angle does not matter, the crater will be circular because the impact vaporized the rocket.

You (almost) never have to do pushups in RL, but you do them in a gym. Examples and exercises in textbooks are for _conceptual learning_. They have to be simple - and thus unrealis…

I am surprised no one has mentioned the awful [garbage collector]( https://stackoverflow.com/q/14580233/850781 ). The R garbage collector is imperfect in the following (not so) sub…

Same reason Gulag prisoners were released. It's a bureaucracy. The law says that this "crime" warrants a 15 year sentence. So he is sentenced to 15y. He is kept in the same labor c…

One might consider the fate of Salvator Lombardo at Cornell University... No "aristocratic tutoring", just a self-driven genius, who was denied a stipend because he has the wrong s…

While I can commiserate with the author's feelings and dispute some of his observations, as others already did, I want to make an orthogonal observation. Software development diffe…