3chelon

16 ms·

121.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Exactly. We think of things recognisable to us, in scale and environment, but as the article pointed out before it got too fanciful, it seems far more likely we'll find actual life by looking outside these constraints.
122.
by 3chelon 8y ago
While I agree with most of the other comments that there's little evidence for the argument of the article, it is refreshing to see a different take on the whole "earth-like planets" topic. I am regularly shocked by how littl
123.
by 3chelon 8y ago
I totally recognise where you're coming from. I was the same, skip raiding, etc. One Christmas I asked for a present which was a job lot of ex-mainframe PCBs I'd seen advertised in the back of an electronics magazine, Can't r
124.
by 3chelon 8y ago
In the early 80s we had an electronics factory a few miles away from home. A friend and I used to cycle there in the summer evenings and weekends and avoid the security watchmen and raid the rubbish skip. Amongst all the general detritus we
125.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Phenol... ah, the nostalgia. As a teenager, I once added a drop of fuming nitric acid to some phenol. I understood that I may be able to make picric acid that way. I just didn't appreciate quite how unstable the resulting compound woul
126.
by 3chelon 8y ago
When I was a school kid, a friend and I were into blowing stuff up and general chemical mayhem (those innocent pre-9/11 days!). We used to synthesize fuming nitric acid and mix it with oleum and potassium permanganate. The resulting fu
127.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Yeah, I read this with a weird sense of deja vu.
128.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Sure, but that's not the debate.
129.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Is it really discredited? What are your sources? I tend to believe (with no actual evidence, since there is none), that the ecosystem will adapt to whatever damage we do to it using the tried-and-tested method of natural selection. Most mai
130.
by 3chelon 8y ago
Interesting that this showed up today also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43639704
131.
by 3chelon 8y ago
I've been expecting this ever since I read Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is Harsh Mistress" as a kid. In this age of elections being influenced by social media botnets, it's simply too close to the truth.
132.
by 3chelon 9y ago
It was Douglas Adams (I think) who described a VCR as a machine to watch TV for you, so you didn't have to. It's good joke, but joking aside I've been thinking for some years now that it could apply to social media. You coul
133.
by 3chelon 9y ago
You're right in guessing I'm not American, and I do appreciate you have a fairly unique situation there with the Second Amendment and the sheer number of guns already in circulation. But, a while ago everyone outside the US thoug
134.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. Most of the western world is a gun-free zone, and there are very very few shootings, except in the US, where there are apparently more guns than people. Only in the US would it be argued that taking away guns
135.
by 3chelon 9y ago
> Some employers and landlords demand to see Facebook profiles I may be wrong - please correct me if I am - but I'm pretty sure that's illegal?
136.
by 3chelon 9y ago
You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' p
137.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Forgive my ignorance here, I'm genuinely intrigued: what's so special about MSVC's volatile as opposed to the regular volatile keyword?
138.
by 3chelon 9y ago
> In fact, I would wager I use Facebook more to broadcast my ego than interact with real humans You don't say?
139.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Of course. Makes sense.
140.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Surely something from <stdio.h> as well?
141.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Well... the declaration you cited resolves down to a pointer to a wide integer. Part of C's simplicity is its small number of keywords, many of which have become way too overloaded as architectures have grown more advanced. The keyword
142.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Yeah, I remember very little about it except a _lot_ of parentheses. Interesting to hear it is a lot more "real world" than I thought - seems my understanding is flawed... but equally interesting that I was unaware of it, having n
143.
by 3chelon 9y ago
Horses for courses, surely? I've never coded in Lisp except for one undergrad assignment in the early 90s... but I know it's good for functional, heavily recursive, algorithmic type problems. But the world is far messier than that
144.
by 3chelon 9y ago
That's the second time I've seen Ada mentioned in as many days. Before that, I did Ada as an undergrad about 1989 and never heard of it again. Is it becoming a thing again?
145.
by 3chelon 9y ago
I'm also concerned for your son's safety. Is he strapped in? I seriously hurt myself when I was a kid in a dodgem car at a fairground when my face hit the steering wheel. 7-10km/h may not sound very fast, but trying jogging f
146.
by 3chelon 9y ago
That was my first thought too. Neural networks are stochastic by their very nature. I've been reading about binary neural networks for embedded devices and FPGAs recently because I'm convinced machine learning is about to get a wh
147.
by 3chelon 9y ago
The technique I used was to always leave a few bytes spare at the end of each subroutine so I could add code later on without breaking every single jump address. The pain we went through!
148.
by 3chelon 9y ago
I had heaps of trouble with this. Kids have an obscene amount of choice nowadays, and it's crippling. Back in the day, we had no choice: you learned BASIC, and when you realised it was too slow, you learned assembler. I was shown my fi
149.
by 3chelon 9y ago
I like that analogy - but is there anything to back it up?
150.
by 3chelon 9y ago
>If you are listening to melancholy, nihilistic music, especially, change your habits I really have to take issue with this. Some of my most productive coding sessions have been to the full-volume soundtrack of Nirvana, Joy Division, Pix

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