amalcon

19 ms·

271.
by amalcon 3y ago
I went to high school (secondary school) back when it was pretty normal to forbid students from typing assignments because "not everyone has a computer". I happen to be personally responsible, via my terrible handwriting, for at
272.
by amalcon 3y ago
The bigger schools like Harvard often have that for the first year classes, especially classes that are required for all or many majors. The class itself, and the lectures, will have many students -- but there's usually ample availabi
273.
by amalcon 3y ago
I've actually heard of research into putting celestial navigation in guided missiles (from people who've worked on it -- so the idea that this is possible seems to not be a secret). Cameras and optics have become good enough to m
274.
by amalcon 3y ago
I can say definitively that many of the easier puzzles are just obvious forks. Don't ask how I know, though :P.
275.
by amalcon 3y ago
This reminds me of the old tools that tunnel more or less whatever over DNS. I.e. behind the scenes, the tool would look up "base64encodedpacket.domainyoucontrol.example.com", and it would respond with encoded data going the othe
276.
by amalcon 3y ago
I agree that's pretty obvious when it gets there. I think we just disagree on how far we are from that point. I think there's essentially no chance that the Quest 3 is good enough, and would put the hypothetical over/under[
277.
by amalcon 3y ago
Interestingly (confusingly), Linux's OOM killer is invoked for a different notion of OOM than a null return from malloc / bad_alloc exception. On a 64-bit machine, the latter will pretty much only ever happen if you set a vsize u
278.
by amalcon 3y ago
I played Deus Ex because it came with some PC part I was buying at the time -- I forget whether it was a graphics card or a sound card. The part in question came with three other games, but I can't name another one of them. On the ot
279.
by amalcon 3y ago
The typical strategy for doing that in a context like this is string interning. That's literally what most of the types described in the post are doing behind the scenes, in one form or another. The post is literally about doing your
280.
by amalcon 3y ago
My parents live in a community where one of the roads is named something like "High Street" (not actually that; it's a little road within their development). That sign gets stolen a few times a year by college students from
281.
by amalcon 3y ago
Being rarely used is an advantage, though. You can solve the safety hazard component of the problem with a few hundred dollars worth of signs and barriers, rather than by actually repairing the thing. The convenience part can then be igno
282.
by amalcon 3y ago
Integer cents is fantastic for POS software and similar things that deal with at most a few thousand dollars at a time. The place where it starts to fail is when the absolute numbers get really large, not really small. Think "United
283.
by amalcon 3y ago
That's an illustrative example. You're not meant to actually use such code, but the relevant insight (that code with binary shifts is rarely portable with types of unspecified size) is accurate.
284.
by amalcon 3y ago
"Easily, but there's a big scary warning that the person asking you to do this might be trying to hack you" is still "easily". That obviously seems more consumer friendly than either extreme.
285.
by amalcon 3y ago
In theory, yes. In practice, I need to heat my house to at least 60F (16C) while my family is asleep in it more or less regardless of what it costs.
286.
by amalcon 3y ago
The problem with unrestricted spot pricing is that it's easy to end up with a surprise bill due to circumstances beyond your knowledge or control. E.g. the heating system fails in the apartment complex next door, so everyone plugs in
287.
by amalcon 3y ago
> (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works). I thought that was because only humans and other legal persons can legally author things, not because of anything subtler about the nature
288.
by amalcon 3y ago
This way of doing things (which I agree is often the correct way) is the reason for Greenspun's Tenth Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule Though it's less true today and in languages
289.
by amalcon 3y ago
The problem is that "just typing the date manually" actually has quite complex i18n issues. It can be done well, but that generally means you make the user explicitly confirm the date they just typed.
290.
by amalcon 3y ago
Unquailfied "freedom to publish without retribution" is obviously impossible. Publishing can be retribution; for an extreme example, see: "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?" You can make "freedom to pu
291.
by amalcon 3y ago
It's more likely India than the US. They have a moderately higher adoption rate and a lot more people.
292.
by amalcon 3y ago
It's theoretically possible, but practically difficult. They can tell whether you loaded something from fast.com or netflix.com prior to the data stream, or they can give full speed initially and throttle after a minute or two (longer
293.
by amalcon 3y ago
> They don’t “confiscate” meds. They steal them. Which is why you put them in your carry-on: so that it is never in possession of the baggage handlers. The TSA employees at the security checkpoint won't generally steal things ri
294.
by amalcon 3y ago
The first rule of flying with medication is that it goes in the carry-on, over everything else. If you can't fit so much as a book alongside your meds? Tough, meds have priority. In the US at least, the airline simply isn't all
295.
by amalcon 3y ago
Reminds me of the time a Star Trek writer was asked how the Heisenberg compensator works. The response was that "It works very well, thank you!"
296.
by amalcon 3y ago
Where I've landed on this one is that the difference is whether the characters understand the plot device (or investigate if they don't understand), not whether I understand it or whether it comports with my notion of what is poss
297.
by amalcon 3y ago
Most popular lawn grasses were created using selective breeding. People will argue about whether they are properly considered native to anywhere, or whether they belong in some third category of man-made organisms.
298.
by amalcon 3y ago
You can just do the same thing in the integers modulo any value greater than 1, creating a bounded domain without creating a fixed point. I imagine this runs afoul of a different precondition which I haven't identified, though -- it&#
299.
by amalcon 3y ago
The word "anonymized" needs to be excised from our collective vocabulary. "Anonymization" is not a thing that can be meaningfully done to a dataset about individuals. Coarse aggregation is possible, and the only practi
300.
by amalcon 3y ago
Most obviously, personal information about students.

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