adonovan

42 ms·

241.
by adonovan 6y ago
In many languages, equality is often intransitive when you consider implicit conversions. For example: type T int const a = 0 var b T = a var c interface{} = b fmt.Println(a == b, b == c, c == a) // true true fal
242.
by adonovan 6y ago
Our high-school chemistry teacher told us that if one ever needs to party in a lab, mix orange juice with the 97% ethanol, but avoid the 99%. The former is distilled with water, but the latter with benzene. Number of times I have saved some
243.
by adonovan 6y ago
The gravitational attraction between spheres of lead is strong enough to be measured in a high-school science lab (if you can remove the students and air currents); this is the famous Cavendish experiment of 1798. I remember it blowing my m
244.
by adonovan 6y ago
The new NYC lampposts also spread wide light cones, which is good for road safety but means they intrude through house windows. Astronomers have also complained about the lights worsening the "seeing", which is already bad.
245.
by adonovan 6y ago
Faster context switches. Vastly larger recursion depth before stack overflow.
246.
by adonovan 6y ago
Also, beer was 3.3% ABV when I was in college in the UK, so intake matches renal clearance. By contrast, a session of today’s “session beer” can be practically life threatening.
247.
by adonovan 6y ago
When I was I high school I played some mental chess against the school’s star player. (He could beat me when he alone was blindfold.) I’m not a great chess player but I was surprised how far it was possible to play before making a mistake.
248.
by adonovan 6y ago
Treat yourself to this map, you've earned it: https://marvellousmaps.com/stgs-great-british-place-names-ma...
249.
by adonovan 6y ago
In case it's not obvious, this is a cynical parody of the original cartoon.
250.
by adonovan 6y ago
In the last 6 months, many of the posher shops in my gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood have suddenly started selling a new category of "serious" craft beers that come in a four pack of tall shiny 1pt cans with all the branding on
251.
by adonovan 6y ago
Exactly. The whole liquor industry would collapse overnight were it not for their hard-core alcoholic customers. But "Drink responsibly", everyone.
252.
by adonovan 6y ago
Was #1 a flat-out lie? I though the CDC said that "masks work" was a statement with insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time, especially as they were cognizant that a run on masks c
253.
by adonovan 6y ago
I took up the violin just a few years ago---my midlife crisis: neither cheaper nor less noisy than a motorbike---and it's been fascinating to dive into the maths of music in a way that my school music teachers were never able to satisf
254.
by adonovan 6y ago
> On my current street there's ~100 cars parked on it, and at least 10 of them haven't moved in the last week (my own included). If we replaced (even) half of those cars with for-hire cars, it would be a perfectly usable system
255.
by adonovan 6y ago
Exactly. It's a convention, not a law of physics. If a string's UTF-8 validity is important to the correctness of your function, check it. It's not expensive.
256.
by adonovan 6y ago
It's success is in part because of that, not despite it. Contrast with Python3, which alienated masses of users by making breaking language changes.
257.
by adonovan 6y ago
I agree, but we already conceded humanity's view of the daylit earth to private companies, so this is just another depressing step in the exact same direction.
258.
by adonovan 6y ago
Because it's simpler. C has no concept of nested functions. If it instead allowed users to write the statements of 'main' at the top level, it would complicate the rules for scoping. For example, can an inner function access
259.
by adonovan 6y ago
Hello! You must be a fellow Googler. (The program we at Google use just to build our bloated programs is itself 180MB.)
260.
by adonovan 6y ago
In addition, Mac and Windows always lift the most recently clicked window to the top, whereas RISC OS would not, making it much easier to set up a screen layout in which several apps cooperate as equals. I still find this to be a pain on my
261.
by adonovan 6y ago
oh this is so much fun! It's like tuning an old radio and suddenly hearing speech amid the static. A tiny nudge on the dial and it's a different accent/topic/language altogether.
262.
by adonovan 6y ago
Very recent scholarship suggests Beethoven's deafness was less profound than is widely assumed: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/01/beethoven-not-...
263.
by adonovan 6y ago
The rule about no parallel fifths exists to help the listener distinguish several melodies played together (counterpoint)---a bit like the rules of English style governing unambiguous use of pronouns. In a rhythm guitar part, there typicall
264.
by adonovan 6y ago
Just to clarify: Steele has been documenting, not perpetrating, the abuse. See for example https://labs.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=94065:40150:0::::P40150...
265.
by adonovan 7y ago
In Iran there is a tradition that runs to the present day of swinging heavy clubs, often to chanting, called zirkhuneh (house of strength). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlevani_and_zoorkhaneh_ritua...
266.
by adonovan 7y ago
Thanks. I was making a cryptic reference to this important document of maritime law: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GI6CfKcMhjY
267.
by adonovan 7y ago
An act of piracy off the island of Tortuga? Cue Michael Bolton!
268.
by adonovan 7y ago
The formatter that set the expectation of standard formatting was that for Go (gofmt), which applies a very light touch: it never removes newlines and rarely inserts them, so you still have latitude to arrange the code in a way that respect
269.
by adonovan 7y ago
The difference between 0.5% and 3% case fatality rate is in large part determined by whether hospitals become overwhelmed, and that in turn will be determined by whether we take immediate and widespread preemptive action to reduce the expon
270.
by adonovan 7y ago
Tune in for next week's installment: how I threw out a garbage can!

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