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Helianthus's profile
Helianthus

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recent comments, posts, and shares:
Helianthus  ·  4593 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Would You Teach Left from Right to an Alien Civilization?
I'm not so certain that this would be that difficult. Left and Right, Clockwise vs. Counterclockwise are simple opposites; that is to say, they are emblematic of opposities in that it's arbitrary what you call one ('flurgle') as long as the other is not-flurgle.

Maybe it's because "Alien Civilization" to me automatically means both civilizations are probably advanced enough to understand spin-up and spin-down--the fact that we use a right-handed coordinate system by convention, but in a left-handed system spin-up is spin-down and spin-down is spin-up--so any contact with such a civilization would have us both shrugging our shoulders and going "Huh, yeah. Opposites."

Helianthus  ·  4593 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A couple minor CSS suggestions
While we're giving tips, I _need_ need __need__ some form of markup. Trying to do an inline link/citation in another topic didn't work like reddit, which is the sort of use case I presume you are considering when you're advertising directly as a reddit alternate...

I searched for some list of available things and couldn't find it.

Edit: ah, so \works\ works. And bold? -strikethrough-?

I need a place to look this stuff up!

well, you can't escape asterisks that I see. #* /*

Helianthus  ·  4593 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Paul Graham: The Patent Pledge
My first instinct was to say, "The only people who will pledge are those who aren't really a problem anyway."

But pg defends himself in the (HN thread)[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2947462] rather well, I think: a small positive step is still a visible change.