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anthonyb

3,481 karma · joined April 15, 2008

Author of Hello! Python: http://manning.com/briggs/ anthony dot briggs at gmail.com topcolour dfd7c3

https://twitter.com/AnthonyBriggs http://teh.oarsum.com/ http://hnofficehours.com/profile/anthonyb/

Don't bother downvoting me; I don't care any more: https://bitbucket.org/anthonyb/nohnkarma/overview

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anthonyb··on Enough Is Enough: No More Babying Women in Tech
Techraptor is a known Gamergate-friendly site, so you're not going to get any balanced articles out of them: https://medium.com/@zoequinnzel/lets-talk-about-ethics-in-ga...
anthonyb··on This Industry is Fucked
Yes, I based that on what you put in your bio:

    about:	I use this account for things I can't say
Ok, fair enough, you want to keep HN and your personal life separate. And you may be otherwise sincere (at least, you seem to be based on your posts), but that separation makes anything that you post hearsay unless you can back it up externally. You should probably take that into account when trying to bring things from your personal life over into HN.

So perhaps rather than continuing the same pattern of "Randi bad, because I say so", perhaps you can point out somewhere where she's currently failing? I also note that OAPI is more than just Randi, there are several people involved: http://onlineabuseprevention.org/

anthonyb··on This Industry is Fucked
So, the two parts:

2. Unsubstantiated smears, and categorising her as "hostile". You're using an anonymous "throwaway" account, so there's no evidence whatsoever for your claims.

5. Downplaying the extreme harassment as "egregious behavior". Perhaps you (or anyone reading) might want to go look it up yourself, there's pages and pages of this sort of unbelievably obnoxious drivel: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40freebsdgirl%20%23gamergate&s...

The only reason that Randi created GGAutoblocker and the OAPI was because she was targeted by gamergate. And their tactics are, essentially, what you're doing right now - smear tactics.

anthonyb··on This Industry is Fucked
See points 2 and 5 above: you're part of the problem. In addition, labelling Randi as a "harasser" is a common gamergate tactic.
anthonyb··on How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color
Is that actually a real question? Of course they're not going to say anything like that, but you can judge them by their actions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437599)
anthonyb··on How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color
You might not like the way he says it, but go back and read the article:

    Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the 
    company didn’t develop a better film for rendering 
    different gradations of brown until economic pressure 
    came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional
    accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate 
    confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s 
    ability to render the difference between chocolates of 
    different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture 
    manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood 
    grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
How is that not racist? The film wasn't an issue when it was just people of colour coming out poorly, but when it's chocolate and furniture being badly exposed, then they develop a new film.
anthonyb··on How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color
Er, that is pretty much a textbook example of racism.
anthonyb··on Why didn't you back me up?
Because those things are usually irrelevant, have been tried to no effect or will make the situation worse. Women get raped wearing tracksuit pants and a hoodie, and leaving a domestic violence situation is often the trigger for more violence (including murder) when the abuser catches up.
anthonyb··on Y Combinator and the Negative Externalities of Hackernews
> these comments are not representative of the entire community, or of even a single medium-profile user.

The community doesn't have to be 100% racist or sexist for there to be a problem. These are all from the same threads as the original article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342366 [7227 karma, 1269 days old]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8342896 [7401 karma, 2780 days old]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338055 [32302 karma, 2432 days old]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392928 [5003 karma, 1249 days old]

anthonyb··on Reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/Ferguson
anthonyb··on If all the ice melted
I don't think that's cherry picked; it looks like an outright fabrication to me. What are the odds that a line of regression on a graph like that would come out to exactly +0.00C?
anthonyb··on If all the ice melted
Yes, the worst case is pretty bad, both for us and life on earth. We're currently in the middle of a large extinction event, so the biosphere is probably pretty fragile even without the ongoing global warming.

If it "helps", the last time CO2 levels were this high was in the middle of the Permian. 3-4C higher than today, 10C warmer at the poles, and sea levels 5+ metres higher: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2013/12/03/wh...

anthonyb··on If all the ice melted
Water vapour has a very short life cycle in the atmosphere, so while it's theoretically the worst, it's not actually particularly bad in the long term, and it's not likely to change by much. There's also some question as to the cooling effect of clouds.

CO2 on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for quite a few years (30-95 according to wikipedia), so it's far worse in the long term.

anthonyb··on If all the ice melted
> "By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley"

That would be Lord Christopher Monckton, notorious climate quack.

anthonyb··on Solar plant has generated “supercritical” steam
Existing fossil fuel plants (ie. Coal) are designed for supercritical steam. If you can make that with solar, it should make retrofitting much easier.
anthonyb··on Why Python Runs Slow, Part 1: Data Structures
It's not "just an example", it's the core of their argument. They say "Pythonic code uses a hash table-like data structure" - but that's completely wrong.

His other argument, about summing points, makes no sense either. He doesn't seem to have even profiled his "slow" point summing code or tried basic Python optimisations like using a list comprehension or generator to sum the points. And if that doesn't work well enough, and point summing is a critical part of your program, then you'd use a library like NumPy to handle that, rather than using raw python.

anthonyb··on Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana
In theory, yes - but mutation rates of clones are going to be very, very low. Bananas are also grown from a central stock to control disease, so even if there were a mutation, all the bananas are going to mutate identically.

Bacteria reproduce in all sorts of bizarre ways, including swapping DNA from other bacteria, editing their DNA, etc., so it's not really related.

anthonyb··on Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana
I don't know about bacteria, but a banana variety is all essentially the same plant, propagated from a central stock. Have a look at the controls around planting and growing your own bananas, it's all red tape, permits and extremely fascist:

http://www.backyardbananas.com.au/faq.html

http://www.daff.qld.gov.au/plants/fruit-and-vegetables/fruit...

And for very good reason: every banana of a variety is susceptible to (eg.) a virus outbreak - there won't be any pockets of genetic variability like you would get with potatoes or citrus. If anything that affects bananas becomes widespread - no more bananas.

anthonyb··on Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana
The several varieties of bananas that you'll see in the store are most definitely caused by human intervention (actively trying to cross slightly different plants to produce a new hybrid) and propagation. Normally hybrids die out in the wild.

Also, once you have a sterile hybrid, there's not much in the way of selection pressure. And since bananas are clones, there's nothing for the selection pressure to act on.

anthonyb··on Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana
Nitrates aren't harmful in themselves - it's the Nitrosamines that they can produce under certain conditions, which are very definitely carcinogenic.

Probably not so bad these days, since there have been steps taken to reduce the amount of nitrosamine in all sorts of foodstuffs. There's a good overview at http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/f-w00/nitrosamine.html

Given most of the information there, it's possibly a good reason to avoid the hippie celery juice bacon (though I've never seen it in the stores), mainly because you don't know how much nitrate you're getting. But it's a little more complex than "Lol, hippies."

anthonyb··on Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana
Bananas don't have any seeds - they're a sterile hybrid, and normally propagated via cuttings. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-t...
anthonyb··on OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
I don't think Theo's reaction is really warranted. I mean, really? "slimy hypocritical asshole"?! And the follow up later on when someone calls him on this is pretty telling: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134896

I don't know the full history of that thread, but it's not mentions of non-free packages that RMS was talking about - it was ports in OpenBSD that allowed people to easily install non-free packages.

Ah, found the original: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2

And FWIW, I think Linus is a dick, too - but Linux has a much larger following, mainly due to reasons other than Linus.

anthonyb··on Girls Who Code
Friendly reminder that "meritocracy" is intended as an anti pattern, in the same way that waterfall is.

Edit: here's a thoughtful piece on the term and its implications, from the original coiner of the term: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

anthonyb··on Maintainer Hall of Shame
Right, but then the very next thing down in his list of gists is the ubiquitous "curl something and install as root":

https://gist.github.com/steakknife/8032911

It's easy to start tearing things down with a "wall of shame" ("Security-oblivious, amateur-hour."), but a bit harder to be constructive and help fix it.

anthonyb··on PHP functions originally bucketed by strlen, were renamed to balance length
Well, that was the parent's point:

PHP, heavily used in production, godawful language.

Perl, heavily used in production, godawful language, but at least it's not PHP.

Python, heavily used in production, pretty good language most of the time. (It's refactoring effort is Python 3, but ended up not changing very much.)

anthonyb··on Cars Kill Cities
You are being overly pedantic. Try s/every day/frequently/g and see how you go...
anthonyb··on Cars Kill Cities
Bear in mind that you're comparing mostly-decent road transport to generally-awful public transport.

Buses, for example, suck - they're always going to be a worse experience than a car (walking 10+ minutes to the stop at each end + waiting, to be stuck in exactly the same traffic).

Now if public transport had the same investment as private, it'd be a different kettle of fish. Take a look at http://carfree.com/intro_cfc.html and http://carfree.com/topology.html as an example of what might be possible with rail and sufficient political will. <5 minutes to a train stop, <30 minutes to anywhere else, <5 minutes to your final destination == max 40 minute trip in a city of 1M people.

anthonyb··on Show HN: RiffBank – A reverse guitar tab search engine
Interesting - if I click through to the tab found via your link (http://www.guitaretab.com/l/ledzeppelin/30410.html?no_takeov...), the first bars look to me like they should match my original search:

  4/4
   Gtr I
   E E E E E E E E   E E E E  E E E E
 |-5-----5-7-----7-|-8-----8\-2-----2-|
 |---5-------5-----|---5--------3-----|
 |-----5-------5---|-----5--------2---|
 |-7-------6-------|-5--------4-------|
 |-----------------|------------------|
 |-----------------|------------------|
   H       H         H        H
Not sure what's going on there - but clicking on the 'raw text' button shows me pretty much the same as I've posted above, so I assume that it's been mis-transcribed somehow? It looks like the 7+5, 7+6, 8+5 and 2+4 columns aren't being included.
anthonyb··on Show HN: RiffBank – A reverse guitar tab search engine
Probably true, but if you want to get "technical", Jimmy Page never played anything the same way twice :)

Even your version doesn't turn up anything though - just 7 5 5 5 gives a whole bunch of Jon Bon Jovi and Scorpions knockoffs.

anthonyb··on Show HN: RiffBank – A reverse guitar tab search engine
It didn't find Stairway though, unless I'm remembering the intro wrong:

  5--5--7--7--
  -5-----5----
  --5-----5---
  7-----6-----
  ------------
  ------------
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