alephnil

14 ms·

91.
by alephnil 10y ago
It is not that you don't trust your party, but that anyone with access to the servers or network between you can learn about who you are communicating with and when. Such metadata are often more useful to use against someone than the a
92.
by alephnil 10y ago
If I remember correctly, they were using Solaris at the time, and I know for sure that Solaris did not have this safety net, nor did Linux at the time. The requirement of --no-preserve-root was introduced almost a decade later.
93.
by alephnil 10y ago
Norway is heating houses almost exclusively using electricity, and also has a cold climate. In addition, a substantial aluminium production and other smelters, as well as running many oil and gas platforms as well as processing plants and r
94.
by alephnil 10y ago
It is not completely arbitrary though. Usually 1.0 for proprietary software means "the first version shipped to customers", while for open source, the very first commit is 0.0, and then it goes from there. Since it is public from
95.
by alephnil 10y ago
What is described in job announcements and what the job actually consists of can often be quite different though. Job announcements are a combination of what the management think or wish will be needed in the future and what they think will
96.
by alephnil 10y ago
> Nothing that they had to constantly resist manglement trying to mangle: Such a failure to hold up standard was the main reason for the failure of the first Ariane 5 launch. They reused some subsystems from the Ariane 4 rocket, that cra
97.
by alephnil 10y ago
Only if implicitly declared. You could define them as reals, and in well written code, you would. That is why you have the old joke that "God is real, unless declared otherwise".
98.
by alephnil 10y ago
> How the hell do you test such a monstrosity? That is very complex, and a large part of the design process is to make sure it actually is testable. The article actually describes the result of some of the system testing of the device. T
99.
by alephnil 10y ago
You will in practice hardly ever see outliers like you descrivbed in system A, where one run is significantly faster. You will often see cases where one run is significantly slower. The reason could be things like cache misses, swapped out
100.
by alephnil 10y ago
Yep. In 2001 http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup/ http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/vegard_bilder/
101.
by alephnil 10y ago
In addition that the code you consider including should have high enough quality, it is also important to consider external dependencies. If the library require 35 external dependencies, it is likely to be a maintenance burden in the future
102.
by alephnil 10y ago
Some people even apply for that other job just to get a counter offer. You have a better negotiation position for salary and benefits if you actually have a job offer somewhere else. While you should think that valuable employees should be
103.
by alephnil 10y ago
> As simple as possible, as flexible as necessary. That requires knowing the future. Knowing the future in this case should usually mean that you have requests for a feature from customers, but you don't have time to do it in this
104.
by alephnil 10y ago
Or the journalist understand that it is automatic, but does not want a society where algorithms blindly determine what is allowed or not. After all "it's the algorithms" is a very convenient excuse for Facebook that allows th
105.
by alephnil 10y ago
The V1[1] was a pulsejet powered cruise missile, and while it also had a analog guidance system, I guess you mean V2[2], that was the first long range ballistic missile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
106.
by alephnil 10y ago
When reading this, I remember that while I was studying computer science back in the early 90s, such programs was known as "polyglot" programs. One such example that circulated on email and usenet groups back then had at least 6 p
107.
by alephnil 10y ago
I used to work as a bioinformatics programmer, and in some cases I did some processing in an afternoon, including writing a python script, that a postdoc had used a month doing manually in Excel. While the tools often are crude, a problem i
108.
by alephnil 10y ago
If you break someones kneecaps, you may get the information they have, but you will never get anything more. After that they and their whole network will take precautions, even going as far as never communicating electronically if required.
109.
by alephnil 10y ago
From the article: > [] Three of the twelve subjects did not use the recommended high-level language JTS for solving the task, but rather programmed in assembly language instead. Two of these three in fact required the longest working tim
110.
by alephnil 10y ago
The argument is that Python spend most time in the C runtime, but that is really only a property of the current implementation. If I use Jython or even implement Python on top of bare metal, making Python the OS, that will not be spending a
111.
by alephnil 10y ago
Yes, only children programs are dubbed here, although I disagree that people ignore them. We even subtitle programs movies in languages that more than 95% of the people don't speak, and assume that people can read the subtitles. You do
112.
by alephnil 10y ago
There is no problem firing people in Norway as long as you have a real need to reduce the workforce, or even reduce the headcount in one profession and at the same point increase in another (like in restructuring). This is easier in Norway
113.
by alephnil 10y ago
Now I don't know vkontakte, but facebook at least let users tag their photos with who's on them. That should be pretty good training data for a machine learning algorithm, so your profile photo is not necessarily needed.
114.
by alephnil 10y ago
In terms of education this makes sense. You can read the code of common numerical algorithms, written for clarity rather than speed, and learn how they works. Not very comprehensive yet, but it can get there. Also, contributing to this repo
115.
by alephnil 10y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that the consequence of misjudging the situation is so much worse that a situation where you wrongly decided to use the brakes. The speed if something goes wrong is much higher, so the injuries will be muc
116.
by alephnil 10y ago
The point of having PR-people in this case was not to ensure that the science was communicated in a clear way. It was rather to make sure that scientific findings that conflicted with government policies was never communicated to the press
117.
by alephnil 10y ago
They do, but that is not the problem. The problem is that they usually try to impose a database design based on the class structure of the application, which will be something that you never would design by hand, and not is optimized for ta
118.
by alephnil 10y ago
Indeed. I included that quote precisely because it shows such a lack of perspective. To get programmers with experience in safety critical real time programming is much harder than learning Ada, and training them to learn safety critical pr
119.
by alephnil 10y ago
Seems like most of it is written in C++, while some parts reused from F22 is in Ada 83. This was done "due to programmer availability" according to Wikipedia (links the article cite for that claim are dead).
120.
by alephnil 11y ago
The sagas was also mostly written down in the 11th century, long time after the event, based on the oral tradition. Although they put more pride into retelling stories accuratly back then, it is not unlikely that the details had altered dur

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