KMag

93 ms·

511.
by KMag 4y ago
There are all kinds of problems with optionality not being properly represented in the data. At a C level, you really want a tagged union, and preferably you're using a higher level language that has first-class algebraic data types (
512.
by KMag 4y ago
It's human nature to repeatedly double-down on any strongly stated opinion until its defence becomes untenable. It takes repeated intentional practice to keep your ego in check.
513.
by KMag 4y ago
> HN is literally the only place online that doesn't feel like a toxic environment. I don't doubt that this is your lived experience, but if that's the case, you might want to consider adjusting your media diet. There are
514.
by KMag 4y ago
Roughly 20 years ago, setting your user-agent string to match Googlebot was a magic key through most paywalls. These days, paywalls almost certainly also check against lists of known search engine IP addresses.
515.
by KMag 4y ago
Side note: if you're using IEEE-754 doubles (not a great choice for decimalized prices), use NaN to indicate no price, missing price, etc. instead of using an "impossible" value like -1.0. It's always possible the syste
516.
by KMag 4y ago
Though, AF447 isn't a simple case of the plane being under direct control. When the two pilots give conflicting inputs, Airbus silently averages out the two inputs. The pilots were confused as to why their inputs weren't seeming
517.
by KMag 4y ago
I think by "pvp gamer", the GP means someone who preferentially targets other players in open world games rather than grinding the quests. I think they're saying he has a sadist streak, or at least a strong streak of narciss
518.
by KMag 4y ago
Minor nit pick: some products, such as exchange-traded calendar spreads, have prices that can go negative and in fact don't have a lower limit on price. When I was writing trading systems, it was a big headache to modify a system origi
519.
by KMag 4y ago
Just a wild guess, but my guess is that they intended to run everything legitimately, but bought into their own hype, and then got trapped by their egos into not admitting defeat. Once honestly admitting defeat was off the table, I'm
520.
by KMag 4y ago
MIT 6.004 was one of my favorite classes. I think you can probably find it on OpenCourseWare. Over the course of a semester, you work your way up from very basic transistor physics to basic logic gates to a DEC Alpha AXP-inspired CPU (but
521.
by KMag 4y ago
Not to mention that during events like the flash crash of 2010, even small volume traders with stop losses got screwed. A stop-limit order in some cases works better than a stop loss order, but if there's a rapid crash that's not
522.
by KMag 4y ago
That's very unlikely. Even for singly linked lists, implementations for general purpose use usually keep pointers to the first and last elements so that you can use it as an O(1) FIFO queue, as well as prepend in O(1) time. If you only
523.
by KMag 4y ago
Ahh, the memories! (266 MHz PII, 64 MB RAM ... maybe upgraded to 384 MB RAM by the time I was quad-booting Debian, Win2k, BeOS and QNX) Maybe I ran BeOS slightly before a demo CD was available, or maybe I just didn't risk burning a co
524.
by KMag 4y ago
Last I checked, most hard drives contain ARM cores, so some x86 machines actually contain more ARM cores than x86 cores. An ICE car likely has one or more ARM cores managing the engine and one or more ARM cores running the entertainment s
525.
by KMag 4y ago
In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my desktop. BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just got a popup asking permission to restart the d
526.
by KMag 4y ago
That's my experience in finance, as well. Jim Cramer mentioned that when he interviewed at Goldman, they asked him what he planned to do when he left Goldman. Lots of people hit comfortable retirement money at Goldman in their late 3
527.
by KMag 4y ago
I think plenty of people work hard to hit retirement money, and then make mid-life career switches to jobs with better work-life balance. My wife and I were having lots of trouble starting a family and were preparing to basically retire ea
528.
by KMag 4y ago
You seem to be saying that if the majority of "back the blue" folks are gun enthusiasts, that means the majority of gun enthusiasts are "back the blue" folks. I'm not sure if either is true, but if it were, you sti
529.
by KMag 4y ago
There's evidence the framers of the Constitution intended for citizens to be able to own weapons that gave the federal government pause if the federal government decided to overstep its bounds. Specifically, even in 1787 it was seeming
530.
by KMag 4y ago
I believe in the specific case of L4/Alpha, the PALCode did perform the context switches. Granted, I doubt it was as robust as the VMS or Tru64 PALCode versions that were production-ready.
531.
by KMag 4y ago
Yes, I'm familiar with the woes of the particularly weak memory model. It's mostly a problem when writing lockfree data structures, as mutex acquisition and release executed the necessary fence instructions to maintain proper hap
532.
by KMag 4y ago
Someone's going to go ballistic when they run into lecture notes on red-black trees. Skip lists are also ableist. Hopefully we don't find anything troubling in the pasts of Adelson-Velsky and Landis, or AVL trees will also be on
533.
by KMag 4y ago
sommodiversity. "sommodivergence" implies abnormality.
534.
by KMag 4y ago
So sad to see Alpha die off, especially since I haven't noticed any architectures with anything like PALCode spring up since. The Alpha's firmware was essentially a hypervisor that only supported a single guest, and the OS kernel
535.
by KMag 4y ago
Okay, so what's you over-under for Elon's IQ, or are you making a subtle distinction between intelligent and smart?
536.
by KMag 4y ago
Elon could both be smart and making huge mistakes. It happens all the time.
537.
by KMag 4y ago
This isn't remotely true, for instance: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oh-by-the-way-germany-spi_b_4... I also vaguely remember a 60 Minutes piece in the late 80s or early 90s about West Germans fulfilling their
538.
by KMag 4y ago
Having graduated from MIT, I would say that the Great Dome and other buildings surrounding Killian Court are beautiful. I don't particularly care for the modern architecture that makes up the rest of the campus, but I'm also not
539.
by KMag 4y ago
Is use of deeply nested parentheticals really a sign of ADD? Certainly, nesting the parentheticals deep enough to overflow your mental context stack will lead to losing the plot. However, if both you and your intended listener have the ca
540.
by KMag 4y ago
But several layers of parentheticals delimited by commas are ambiguous to parse in the general case.

More ›