I could not get into Lord of the World although I really enjoyed another novel of Benson's.

worth it for book 3 though

I’ll have to go back! I remember loving that series as a kid. Thanks!

Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?

Well it was a kind of hand wavy pronouncement on my part.

With respect to the ‘Fall of Rome/Dark Ages’ narrative I had Pico della Mirandola and Edward Gibbon in mind.

Considering their takes on monasticism, I suppose monasticism as the savior of civilization was actually a much later add on.

> a much later add on.

Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I'm going to re-read Canticle soon-ish but I wonder to what extent Miller endorses even the latter. I feel like his concerns were much more immediately spiritual than cultural. I'm thinking particularly of the scene where the main character of whichever volume meets the Pope up-close and is taken aback to see that his garments are moth-eaten and threadbare.

Yeah I think Miller was using the nuclear holocaust as a vehicle to reflect on original sin (i.e., the inevitable tendency of human beings to engage in self-destructive behavior) and the antidote to it offered by the Catholic Church. If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.

> If he had written the novel today it probably would have been something other than MAD that nearly wiped out civilization twice.

Maybe last year, but we're back to nuclear sabre-rattling and great-power conflict now.

Reminds me of Jakob Nielsen's rule for writing a good "About" page. If you can insert a "not" into a sentence and get something that no other company would ever put on their own About page, the sentence is worthless.

Your password was probably reset: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31255450

I can't be the only person who uses the Quickbooks Online API for private, non-interactive integrations between internal systems. This new process – a 40-minute legal/security questionnaire that includes questions like "how do you mitigate against CSRF?" – is preposterously draconian for our use case.

Compare with the process for getting a Stripe API key: Step 1 - Point. Step 2 - Click.

Sigh. I've been wondering for a while at what point our business would outgrow QB Online. Maybe this is the answer.

ah, ratpoison. I passed many a fair hour doing network-appliance dev with ratpoison + screen + vi (not even vim) back in the day.

It seems like this is your argument:

1) If some religions are false, then all religions are false

2) Pacific-tribe cargo cults and ancient Greek mythology are clearly false, plus there are some stories in the Bible that are hard to swallow

3) Therefore God doesn't exist

Is that right?

No, but most proof look the Bible as implausible, biased, full of contradictions and then contrary to what science have been told since millenia.

Twice a year we have to deal with calendar screw-ups because a third of our employees are in a locale that doesn't observe DST and the rest are in locales that do observe it. If an employee from that first group sets up a recurring meeting, the meeting time changes for everyone else in March and November.