AltVanilla
Joined 8 years ago
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Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Other quirkiness:
- Finland has 45 firearms per 100 people (3rd highest in the world) yet is was ranked the safest country in the world.
- Enough saunas that the whole population could do it at the same time.
- Most heavy metal bands, per population.
- Annual championships in wife-carrying, air-guitar, boot and phone throwing, sauna, cattle calling, swamp soccer, mosquito swatting, ant nest sitting, etc.
- Mämmi: food that looks like diarrhea.
- Candies made of tar.
- Birch branches are used to whip yourself with in sauna.
- New years tradition of throwing melted tin in water. The shape tells of the future.
- Easter tradition of kids dressing up as witches and going trick-or-treating.
- No trespassing laws, so you can roam and camp anywhere (although not too close to anyone's home).
- Finland is a 3rd world country by the original cold war definition (politically non-aligned with either NATO or the Communist block).
Comment · 8 years ago
Jordan Peterson has some good advice on this (not sure if he is liked around here). "Be Friends With Those Who Want Best For You" and "Be careful who you share good news with".
Some friends don't want you to try to succeed, because they are not trying. They would rather see you fail and say "see, that's what happens. That's why i don't try, as it just fails anyway". Its hard to tell such friends, good news. It makes them feel bad about themselves.
Comment · 8 years ago
Ripple is decentralized, in the technical sense.
If you are a programmer you will appreciate this. It explains the consensus protocol in detail. I found it fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4jq4frE5v4
Comment · 8 years ago
As nice of a theory it is, birth order has not been shown to affect personality at all.
> "Contemporary empirical research shows that birth order does not influence the Big Five personality traits."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_order
The fact that such a big environmental factor doesn't effect personality at all, to me suggests that personality is mostly genetic. Anecdotally, It sure seems like kids have very distinct personalities from a very start.
Another anecdote (that personality is more nature rather than nurture), is the stories of identical twins adopted to different families. When reunited as adults, they seem to have the same personality. One such story:
> "It's not just our taste in music or books; it goes beyond that. In her, I see the same basic personality. And yet, eventually we had to realize that we're different people with different life histories."
https://www.npr.org/2007/10/25/15629096/identical-strangers-...
Comment · 8 years ago
I think for a cryptocoin to be useful in the real world, scaling and quick transaction times has to be a priority from the start of the design. Its not something you can fix, as an afterthought.
That's why I like xrp. Low transaction times, and it scales well. It is permissioned in the sense that every validator-node needs to keep a list of all the other validator nodes it trusts. Which means validators without a reputatable company behind them, might find it hard to become trusted by anyone else. Thats a price worth paying for scalability, in my opinion.
Comment · 8 years ago
Jane Austen's "magnificent opening sentence of Persuasion" was 102 words long. I found it confusing. Replacing all the semicolons with periods, made it easy and enjoyable reading.
I prefer the minimalist style of Strunk:
Comment · 8 years ago
Sutters proposal on "static exceptions" looks like a clean solution, rather than a hack. As far as i can tell it addresses all of the issues with using C++ and STL in embedded or kernel environments.
If you read between the lines the dynamic exceptions was a fundamental design mistake by Bjarne. Once we get static exceptions, then dynamic exceptions might not be needed at all, and it can be deprecated.
"Zero-overhead deterministic exceptions": http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p070...
Comment · 8 years ago
Chimps defend territory and go to war. Its not just human nature.
Comment · 8 years ago
People often think of C++ as a Object Oriented Language. That's understandable, as it was the key feature back in the earliest days. OOP got hyped and over used. Now OOP is (almost) considered harmful in C++ community.
If you look at modern C++ libraries (like boost), you will see a lot of templates and free functions, and not a lot of inheritance or dynamic polymorphism.
Comment · 8 years ago
IQ is the last taboo. We don't want it to matter for socioeconomic success in life. We don't want it to be inherited to such a high degree that environmental factors like parenting and education hardly matters. Its all too depressing. People are born unequal, and there is little that can be done about it.
IQ correlation studies:
Same person (tested twice) .95
Identical twins—Reared together .86
Unrelated children—Reared together—Adults .04
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...
Most all murders in Finland are done with a knife while drunk.
(The Finnish police, which keeps a database of firearm permits, objected to the mentioned study that Finland is ranked 3rd in the world. The study was updated and now Finland is ranked "only" 8th:
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap... )