Pinus

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121.
by Pinus 4y ago
Applied to the problem of picking a toilet at a music festival: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWib5olGbQ0 .
122.
by Pinus 4y ago
I skimmed the comments quite quickly so I may have missed it, but it seems that nobody has mentioned what I think is one of the biggest issues with make (as actually used, as opposed to some ideal): recursive runs. I have seen several packa
123.
by Pinus 4y ago
A bit off topic: Like Amazon, Fnac.com seems to be drifting towards being a "marketplace" rather than a vendor. (I have only shopped in their brick-and-mortar shops, as a tourist in France, so maybe it has always been like this; I
124.
by Pinus 4y ago
The M-W article says that "it appears to have won some measure of acceptance" in en_UK, and quotes the Daily Mail for an example...
125.
by Pinus 4y ago
Somebody noticed ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/StephaneP/diary/390290 ) that OSM isn't even consistent about which datum it uses. (Discussed in HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.co
126.
by Pinus 4y ago
At one point in time, they would have, had they existed at all: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31283950/ "Intra-rectal tobacco insufflation as a resuscitation method for drowning victims: A gold-standard in the 1
127.
by Pinus 4y ago
I agree that TeX sources are often damn near impossible to read. That stuff is... ugly. But at least it's there. You can see it. You can manipulate it. You can understand it (though it sometimes takes more time flipping through the TeX
128.
by Pinus 4y ago
You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always
129.
by Pinus 4y ago
Cartographic generalization is an AI-complete problem. It is doable for a human to decide what to show or not, in order to get a useful map without too much clutter. It is much harder to program a computer to do it. It is very tempting to t
130.
by Pinus 4y ago
Not quite as wild, but there was a similar thing in Sweden 50 years ago, where an oil burner was retrofitted to the cancelled nuclear power plant at Marviken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R4_nuclear_reactor . The reac
131.
by Pinus 5y ago
In the early days of Vuescan, you got unlimited updates for something like $40 and, as far as I can tell, those agreements are still being honoured. I suppose Hamrick could have said "Sorry, your license is for Vuescan, but now it’s vu
132.
by Pinus 5y ago
There is a legend in Sweden, that during some power struggle in the 16th century, several high-ranking persons had put their seals on a document which, after a change in political tides, put them at a very real risk of losing their heads in
133.
by Pinus 5y ago
(Fellow Swede here). I really want to agree with you, but in practice, the difference between "internal" and "external" is not always clear. For example, if I was producing a printed document in Swedish, I would definite
134.
by Pinus 5y ago
Very likely. For some background on the Hershey fonts, the tech stack where they were born, and mr. Hershey himself, there is this presentation by Frank Griesshammer: https://vimeo.com/178015110 .
135.
by Pinus 5y ago
For a site called "drawing matter", it is interesting that with, I think, one exception the illustrations have no direct connection with the text.
136.
by Pinus 5y ago
If you're pulling in LAPACK anyway, wouldn't just calling dgels to compute the least-squares solution directly be easier?
137.
by Pinus 5y ago
It's probably possible to do this in a one-liner using half of the stuff in itertools, but just changing the output data structure to a dict (at least temporarily; one can always make a list from it at the end) would yield code that is
138.
by Pinus 5y ago
Back in the day, this got published in SIGGRAPH proceedings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220721478_Ray_traci... .
139.
by Pinus 5y ago
IIRC what happened in France was indeed that the platforms were out of spec, or perhaps the specs were out of platform. The rolling-stock people asked the tracks-and-platforms people for the specs, and got the latest version. The fact that
140.
by Pinus 5y ago
Wasn't there a period recently — around 1995 or so — when the Linux kernel had to be compiled with a C++ compiler?
141.
by Pinus 5y ago
There is a legend that (ABBA) sound engineer Michael B. Tretow used to have a small (and completely illegal) FM transmitter in the studio. When he thought he had the mix right, he'd patch the sound out to that and then go down to the c
142.
by Pinus 5y ago
About error messages: There are quite a few questions on Stack Overflow where understanding the error message followed by a tiny bit of debugging would have found the problem. I always wonder whether such questions are the effect of people
143.
by Pinus 5y ago
I have noticed that when a Stack Overflow question says "the problem can't possibly be X, because <something>", that is very often exactly where the problem is (and <something> is a misunderstanding).
144.
by Pinus 5y ago
Isn't "not knowing how to type in a URL" what the web was supposed to be like? The URL:s were supposed to be a behind-the-scenes thing; the users were just supposed to navigate hypertext? Instead URL:s ended up front and cent
145.
by Pinus 5y ago
The official "keeper of place names" in Sweden is Lantmäteriet, the Swedish geodetic survey. Unfortunately, the search feature at minkarta.lantmateriet.se seems to be down at the moment. However, OpenStreetMap lists at least five
146.
by Pinus 5y ago
I totally agree that books written by "insiders" are often not the most interesting ones. In the worst cases, you get long descriptions of organisational changes and anecdotes about the quality of the coffee machine (though I supp
147.
by Pinus 5y ago
The confusing bit is that the rules about middle names and double surnames have changed at least twice in... my lifetime, which is becoming much longer than I care to think about. :-) I didn't do a very good job of conveying that in my
148.
by Pinus 5y ago
The Swedish situation is... confusing. :-) There are first names ("förnamn"), possibly more than one. The one in daily use — not necessarily the first one! — is called "tilltalsnamn" (something like "addressing name
149.
by Pinus 5y ago
Heck, Microsoft got it wrong — Swedish versions of Windows used to have a folder called "Vanliga filer" (Ordinary files). This was, of course, the "Common files" folder, but the translator, probably having no context, pi
150.
by Pinus 5y ago
If you want to read more about this kind of thing, there's a book named "Move Along, Please" by Mark Mason, who travelled from Land's End to John O'Groats (i.e, from one end of Great Britain to the other) using only

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