Viewing profile — ubernostrum

Your key flaw, and HN's key flaw -- and to be fair, one shared by a lot of other people! -- is the pursuit of civility as an end in itself. Horrendously evil people can accomplish …

Generally an "undisputed champion" title would require a level of effort that the AlphaZero team apparently isn't interested in. They like to run matches between AlphaZero and Stoc…

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So to prevent an angry mob from taking away someone's platform, you insist we need the ability for an angry mob to take away someone's platform. I think you need to think this thro…

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I don't know for certain, but what I would guess is that strptime() without a day-of-week indicator is ambiguous. strptime() produces a datetime object, which consists of year, mon…

It could just as easily be argued that, instead of "flipping", or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, the consistent trend of the past 400 years or so is toward increased tole…

Inventing your own pseudo-normalization of Unicode is a worse idea than using the actual normalization forms Unicode defines. Also, if you think you can decompose without allocatin…

I have a soapbox. I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too. Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out…

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I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line fr…

And just to clarify a bit: the specific restriction Python imposes is that if a strptime() format string contains one of %G (ISO year) or %V (ISO week number), it must also contain…

From the perspective of Unicode, no. What you're looking for here is what Unicode calls "equivalence", and it comes in two variations: canonical equivalence and compatibility equiv…

A lot of languages take their date/time formatting from C strftime (and quite a few simply use light wrappers around actual strftime), where the format code for ISO year is %G. And…

Only if you churn -- signing up for a card, redeeming the signup bonus, then signing up for another, and so on. And card issuers know about churning. The highest-value cards also h…

As others have noted, this is not the same thing. What the parent was talking about is usually called "same-day change" (abbreviated "SDC"), and is in fact only available free of c…

The value of loyalty programs, for the customer, tends to inversely correlate to the state of the economy. In very broad terms: tourism is a larger part of the travel market than b…

Some of his short stories are particularly interesting. "The Roads Must Roll", for example, though written before Ayn Rand started churning out books, anticipates and attempts to b…

If people who have issue with military are given someone else to do, you can't simultaneously claim they have to be willing to die. Without committing to any position on the book i…

On the other hand, there is no substantive content in metaphysics (at least as far as ontology goes) if the statements do not pick out real entities. You've just committed the fall…

The general idea you're missing here is that it's very hard -- perhaps impossible -- to develop a clear, bright-line method for distinguishing between fields that deal with concept…

So, write the program correctly. Show me. You just want to fight someone because you're angry, and I don't do that. No matter what someone writes you'll find a way to argue into it…

I referenced people who've tried this before and were made to shut down or change tactics before it escalated to a court ruling. You also keep citing copyright cases. You cited a c…

The way I usually put it is that Python 3 shifted its priorities. Previously, if you were a UNIX-y scripter writing UNIX-y scripts on your UNIX-y OS, the fact that Python just kind…

The courts have ruled many times using content that is in the public domain is fair use, you have no claim to trademark protection If you take all your legal advice from people who…