adonovan

15 ms·

151.
by adonovan 3y ago
To a librarian, Computer Science and Library Science are just different aspects of information systems, which are (a librarian need hardly tell HN) humanity's highest calling, thus justifying their shared Dewey classification of 0.
152.
by adonovan 3y ago
There are historical reasons for it, including the (at least historically) milder climate, and much higher cost of energy. In many older buildings there are also space and architectural constraints. I expect these objections will fall away
153.
by adonovan 3y ago
Astronauts must be nervous stepping onto the first manned flight of a new craft that has a 100% success rate in the sole previous flight, but might have only a 50% success rate by the end of their mission...
154.
by adonovan 3y ago
This 35-year gap is a great story to tell your editor whenever they ask "so how's that second edition coming along...?"
155.
by adonovan 3y ago
Wouldn't the need for labor, a supply of ore, and a means of delivering the product all argue for a port city? There aren't many railroads in those deserts. Or steelworkers.
156.
by adonovan 3y ago
That “blowing up” already happen billions of years ago. Lithium salts (ore) is what is left when lithium violently oxidizes.
157.
by adonovan 3y ago
That’s evidence that it is _not_ a coincidence.
158.
by adonovan 3y ago
I showed this to my brother, who lives in Stockholm. His response: “Typical bloody Stockholmers, thinking everything revolves around them!” ;-)
159.
by adonovan 3y ago
A distributed Léger?
160.
by adonovan 3y ago
Also, even a very stable project that is "done" will receive a trickle of minor tweak PRs (often docs, tests, and cleanups) proportional to the number of its users, so the rate of change never falls to zero until the code stops be
161.
by adonovan 3y ago
And the first antibiotic was inspired by the observation that dye stuck to bacteria better than other things! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich
162.
by adonovan 3y ago
Perhaps I fail to understand, but doesn't this comparison depend on a number of parameters such as the total reactor fuel load and enrichment, the burn rate, the cost of nuclear fuel, the cost of solar PV, the lifetimes of each system,
163.
by adonovan 3y ago
Reminds me of the classic apocryphal early ML story of the enemy tank detector that was 100% accurate at identifying camouflaged tanks… so long as tanks and sunny weather were perfectly correlated in the input data, just as they were in the
164.
by adonovan 3y ago
But only for convictions by Federal, not state, courts. That's one of the reasons the Georgia case against Trump is interesting.
165.
by adonovan 3y ago
About a third of all marine plastic comes from one country: the Philippines, which has essentially no landfill capacity. One would hope that this concentrated hot spot (to use profiling terminology) makes it "low-hanging fruit" fo
166.
by adonovan 3y ago
_Ordinary_ FT is the uncertainty principle. Fourier analysis of waves can tell you the frequency or the phase, but not both to arbitrary precision: the more precisely you can tell when the signal occurred (phase), the less precisely you can
167.
by adonovan 3y ago
It’s worth saying that visualizing 4-cubes is hard but _that’s ok_: it’s not a task our brains had any evolutionary need for, and even if we could visualize 4D, 5 would be harder still, yet it’s easy (relatively) to usefully imagine very hi
168.
by adonovan 3y ago
There are ways a Go program can fatal: by running out of heap, or stack, by corrupting variables by racing writes, by deadlocking, by misuse of reflect or unsafe, and so on.
169.
by adonovan 3y ago
Heh, dannybee once called me (we work for the same employer) and said: "I see you are using a particular pointer analysis algorithm. Stop it right now, it's tainted with patents. BTW I am a lawyer. But: I'm also a pointer ana
170.
by adonovan 3y ago
It blew my mind when I realized that all but about a dozen of the points of light that you can see at night with the naked eye are actual stars... but nearly every point of light in the Hubble deep field is a galaxy of 10^8 stars.
171.
by adonovan 3y ago
In my experience most over-engineering can be explained by a lack of understanding. When we design it, we don't know what matters and our guesses are wrong; and when we modify it later, we don't have time to figure out how it real
172.
by adonovan 3y ago
I saw Mikey Dickerson talk about this at the time, and he was very explicit that the engineers on the project were all perfectly capable, but they were hobbled by an IT services culture that made them all terrified to be the person blamed f
173.
by adonovan 3y ago
"Consultant"
174.
by adonovan 3y ago
This is a useful classification. With the benefit of hindsight--and threading--it would be nice if async signals could just go away, since the kernel can send a notification message to the application over a file descriptor (see man signalf
175.
by adonovan 3y ago
> Well, it conflicts with their other goals. Less flippantly, I do wonder whether this optimization does conflict with society's other goal of reducing average urban traffic speed to reduce danger to pedestrians.
176.
by adonovan 3y ago
Simpler to build it into the original cost. Manufactured goods are tomorrow's garbage. The price should reflect the cost of a sustainable system of disposal.
177.
by adonovan 3y ago
So too is the similarly spectacular Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow in Poland.
178.
by adonovan 3y ago
True, but I guess the amount of work that goes into a proprietary bespoke IDE is on another order of magnitude. For example our team maintains an LSP server for Go with only about 3 FTE, but I guess JetBrains has a much larger team devoted
179.
by adonovan 3y ago
> Psychiatric hospitals in Russia/USSR (психушка) are virtually prisons, they were often used to involuntarily hold political prisoners. Indeed. The fact that no-one among the entire staff of the hospital over all those decades ende
180.
by adonovan 3y ago
This is the crossing of the Rub icon. The dye is cast.

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