Viewing profile — twinkletwinkle_

It sort of exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Dragon,_Cancer

I think your summary is spot on, but how could you miss listing the premier (in my opinion) example, Wine?

Without going into too much detail, I once encountered an Experian identity verification question on behalf of someone else. This person was an Uber driver making ~$20,000 per year…

I think you nailed it. If the question were posed as "Two envelopes with $A and $(A+1)" then there would be no talk of ratios and no "paradox" would ever emerge.

The helicopter is already outside its original mission parameters. It was only supposed to make 5 flights - probably the engineering team didn't want to invest money or weight or c…

It's not about minima/maxima, it's about the rate of change. Xkcd has a beautiful illustration: https://xkcd.com/1732/

It's kind of like junk food. A little bit is enjoyable, too much makes you sick.

I think that's just Andy Weir at this point. I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. Characters were indistinguishable from one another, they were all just Andy trying to …

There's a song by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mulvey, which touches on this point. It's more of a spoken word poem, titled "Vlad the Astrophysicist". In the song, Peter asks …

I once worked at a tiny startup where we were trying to sell a dataset to GS. Before we could even send a sample, they sent over some boilerplate forms for us to sign. I remember t…

Anecdotally I have a French acquaintance who dreads his trips back home because the food is so terrible. Paris might be famous for fine dining at the extreme top end, but that does…

The rate of change. There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the past than it is now. No one disputes this. The prob…

For some reason this criticism reminded me of one of my favorite Heinlein quotes. I set out to google it so that I could reproduce it correctly. I searched for "Heinlein a man shou…

My company takes a reasonable approach to this I think. The hackathon itself takes place Thursday and Friday, so it happens on work days. But the judging takes place Monday, so the…

I think if I'd instead written "This is what people mean when they say 'Crime is a social construct'" it wouldn't have been downvoted from the outset. "X is a social construct" is …

Crime is a social construct. edit: A poor person who steals is charged. A rich person who steals behind the facade of a company is not. We call the poor person a criminal. It's ent…

Agree that ugly is subjective. But adjusting spaces when things get refactored is bad, not because it's tedious but because it pollutes history. Changing whitespace on surrounding …

You know the adage usually applied to Facebook, "If you're not paying for anything, you aren't the customer, you're the product" ? . Daytraders and WSBers and other small fish like…

Better off just playing Powerball. Order of 1 in 10 9

It's not "impossible", just not natively obvious. The solution I remember using is 0 * * * * foo() 0 * * * * sleep 30; foo() It's not the prettiest but is a reasonable imitation of…

I think of those as "logical" merge conflicts, as opposed to "literal" merge conflicts, the kind detected by git. Having good integration tests is crucial!

What exactly happened to Experian? Their stock is up almost 100% since the breach announcement, and no one went to jail. If I were an executive looking to Experian as an example I …

The key word is definitely "only".

Is it made up? I thought they meant "Of content identified on Facebook, 99% was identified by Facebook's own systems". Not that Facebook captures 99% of terrorists. Just that it do…

Sure, but the flip side is that if you had a billion dollars you couldn't acquire this many BTC because the price would move against you the other direction.