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kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

> a consensual hallucination

Gee, kind of like money. So let's all ignore money.

Even in hawaii, haolie white dudes of north american extraction look ridiculous in shorts. I'll cut them slack if they're speaking hawaiian and support secession.

> I work in Hawaii.

So did these guys: http://pappastenant.com/investigation/Hawaii50.jpg

I dare you to mentally substitute shorts on them and not laugh.

kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

I bet you've never worn summer weight fabric pants. They are actually cooler than shorts of conventional fabric. You can go with seersucker or linen if you're adventurous.

I am almost positive that shorts were not common attire in the south 50 years ago.

kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

> I work in a building full of men in shorts and sandals.

You work in a building full of men who look ridiculous. They and their peers may not care, but many do. And what's the point of needlessly alienating others?

I think fashion and the disdain programmers have for it play a role in creating the popular misconception among non-programmers that skilled software people should be very cheap. Skilled professionals dress like skilled professionals. Look at doctors and lawyers. Deal with it or deal with the consequences.

kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

Same problem. 30 inch waist, but my thighs are bursting out of 30 inch pants. I typically buy 32 inch and have them taken in for $6 at the dry cleaner.

kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

> clothes are made for normal, maybe slender and fit people

Ha! How wrong you are! I am what I consider should be a normal, fit size but all the competitively priced stuff is made for fatties. I am forced to go pay more for proper fitting clothing.

kingkongreveng_on Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

Let's focus in on the three major geek failures:

Jeans: Don't wear them constantly. Get decent proper fitting wool pants; plain blue, black, or brown. You instantly look five times better. Also, they're more comfortable.

Shorts: almost never. You're not 9, or trailer trash. Get summer-weight wool/cotton pants and they're about as cool as shorts. Adult men look ridiculous in shorts and it's somewhat rare to see it in most places outside of America.

Synthetics: never. Clothing is made of wool and cotton.

Tailored dress shirts sounds excessive to me. Just favor those marked trim-fit if you're thin, and be careful about the styling; cheaper ones often have outdated over-sized collars.

kingkongreveng_on Aquaponics, a Gardening System Using Fish

I didn't imply this in particular is water inefficient, just that it's probably inefficient in some way.

I suppose this system really amounts to scrap food recycling. You're feeding the fish various waste organic material that was already grown on a real farm.

The real question is probably: why not just feed it to pigs or goats, the traditional solution? Older folks tell me it was common for there to be residential garbage pickup, separate from trash. The garbage would be taken to farms.

kingkongreveng_on Aquaponics, a Gardening System Using Fish

The real question is what are the water, energy, and labor hour inputs.

Agricultural scientists and businessmen are no slouches. If this were truly an economical way to feed lots of people it would probably already be widespread.

Most "high yield" methods you hear about, like raised beds and square foot gardening, basically amount to upping the watering.

kingkongreveng_on Aquaponics, a Gardening System Using Fish

melons -> squash, at least for the traditional meaning.

kingkongreveng_on Business School is a Joke

Accounting, supply chain, and finance are fairly empirical and solid skill based everywhere. Actuarial science programs are practically straight-up math. Sure, in general undergraduate business programs are less rigorous than engineering or physics, but some are certainly based on legitimate hard skills and knowledge; you can't write them off as wishy-washy BS.

kingkongreveng_on Why nobody talks about Lua

If the app you need to script is C++ there are much more appealing options than Lua, which is very C. You get ugly C style code in your C++.

QScript, ChaiScript, and projects like boost.python and libperl++, play much better with your C++.

kingkongreveng_on Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt

> Corn-fed beef is more extensively marbled and more tender.

I don't think there's much debate that corn fed is fattier and more appealing to the average palate. The issue is health and omega-6 to omega-3 ratios. Even a small amount of corn or other seeds in the feed put omega-6 way up.

kingkongreveng_on Turn $5 steak to $50 steak with salt

> table salt tastes like shit

What's the chemical difference? Doesn't the mined salt just come from old dried out seas?

kingkongreveng_on [dead]

To my understanding, the financial picture of North American cities is essentially driven by public employee salary and benefit costs, which are out of control due to unions.

Whether a city is struggling or not right now, or will struggle in the future, is largely a question of how high they let the payroll and pension benefits drift.

kingkongreveng_on Ask HN: Steady 4-5% on $5 million?

> Treasury bonds as they have no credit or call risk

Arguably not 100% true anymore. Some people are buying insurance on treasuries these days.

kingkongreveng_on Ask HN: Steady 4-5% on $5 million?

Everybody should use the Permanent Portfolio. It's a testament to human and market irrationality that most people aren't doing this. Fortunately, most people never will, so the stability and returns of this approach should extrapolate forward.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/26525858/Fail-Safe-Investing

kingkongreveng_on Writing Compilers Quickly

Well the CaPerl project he mentions just translates perl5 with his special keywords to standard perl5 code, I think. Who knows what he's doing here.

kingkongreveng_on Writing Compilers Quickly

A perl programmer talking about compilers in 2010 doesn't mention Parrot? Parrot has to be the easiest and fastest way to get a compiler up and running these days.

kingkongreveng_on The War on the Young

You generation is screwed, too. Social security net revenue went negative this year. You'll never see a dime. Medicare will also be bankrupt much sooner than anyone thinks.

Only the "next older generation" has made out on these ponzi schemes.

kingkongreveng_on Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

It's related to the arguments by Hans Herman Hoppe that monarchies throughout history have on net demonstrated better long term decision making and planning than democracies. A hereditary monarch has some level of incentive to optimize tax revenue over generations. An eight year politician has only incentive to ensure reelection.

kingkongreveng_on Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back

I want the restricted republic back. No interest in democracy.

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." --Mencken

kingkongreveng_on Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code

You don't have to "build" the data structure. You are using your native structures.

kingkongreveng_on Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code

Chill out man. I'm just pointing out this stuff has been around in commercial products for a very long time.

> AFAIK Redis is one of the first DBs exposing basic computer science data structures as abstract types

With something like ObjectStore you've had persistent storage of arbitrary templatized data structures for ages. You want a hash of hashes ultimately pointing to a void* value? Easy.

kingkongreveng_on Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code

There are absolutely super performant in memory sql databases. You just have to pay for them.

There's also csql. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSQL

kingkongreveng_on Redis Virtual Memory: the story and the code

> solve this problem from scratch

I'm not detracting at all, but object databases with way more advanced feature sets have been around for well over ten years (http://web.progress.com/en/objectstore/). Making a stripped down version of an object database is not exactly forging new ground. I know you weren't necessarily implying otherwise.

kingkongreveng_on Hitchins: North Korea is even weirder and more despicable than you thought

Did you read the article? That's pretty much what he's saying. He also insinuates that deep down South Koreans may share some of these properties.

kingkongreveng_on More exercise better in long run

http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/29/15/1...

"The more marathons run, the higher the likelihood of heart disease. The number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the likelihood of myocardial damage.

The runners had about the same prevalence of non-zero coronary calcium compared to age matched controls randomly assigned from a survey population."

kingkongreveng_on More exercise better in long run

There are many controlled intervention studies into diet and exercise. It is done. They provide the only results worth any consideration. More often than not regression analyses and "risk-adjustment" models are invalidated.

kingkongreveng_on More exercise better in long run

Marathon running appears to cause heart damage. 12% of asymptomatic marathon runners had evidence of myocardial damage. Only 4% of the sedentary controls had damage.

This Breuckmann study repeatedly found about a 2.5 to 1 increased incidence of heart attack from marathon running over sedentarism. The number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the likelihood of myocardial damage.

http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2009/11/1/cardio-causes-h...

kingkongreveng_on More exercise better in long run

"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study."

People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation?

The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this.

Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.