badlibrarian

8 ms·

61.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
No, because gunpowder has no loyalty, no terms of service, no American CEO who can be forced to testify before Congress and say interesting things about European defense customers or provide lists of who has a tattoo or not.
62.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
Change it to "Some people" if your pedanticism won't let you follow the flow. Or better yet point out the better paths they chose instead. Were they wrestling with Java and "Joda Time"? Talking to AWS via a Python l
63.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era
64.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
It's a community that delayed progress for a decade while they waited for everyone to put parenthesis on the print statement. Give 'em enough time and they'll figure out best practices.
65.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
6 MHz was there from the start. If it wasn't, the CBS field-sequential might have won. Both government (FCC) and industry (RCA) were pushing for a backward compatible system and there was enough bandwidth to pull it off. OP asks what w
66.
by badlibrarian 7mo ago
You could argue that if extra bandwidth were available it might be better allocated elsewhere for improved picture quality. But yes. It would've reduced lots of engineering complexity and probably would've looked very much like PA
67.
by badlibrarian 8mo ago
If you sign up with a Google account you don't need to give them a phone number. I realize the irony here.
68.
by badlibrarian 8mo ago
Versus Python, it seems to fork into the "thinkers" vs "doers" camp. Julia provides a level of abstraction that some people find comforting. I thought I could use it as a sort of open source Matlab for a lot of thinky, 1
69.
by badlibrarian 8mo ago
Adding my voice to the chorus here: they've established a pattern of introducing new features and never really getting them past the 80% point. No qualms with the CDN; it's a sweet spot among providers. But their other offerings h
70.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
I wish them the best (and support them in ways they're not even aware of). But they really need to get their act together. The public statements and basic stats do not match reality. An actual board and annual reports would be a nice s
71.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
No, really: access to the server racks is solely protected by a battery-operated camera nestled into the fake dirt of a plastic floor plant.
72.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
During the recent power outages in San Francisco, the site repeatedly went down. When a troubled individual set the power pole on fire outside their building, the site went down. Happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on data redundanc
73.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
No climate control. No backup power. And it's secured by a wireless camera sitting in a potted plant. Bless them, but wow.
74.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
For genuinely useful workloads, it's available for $5/month (per database, not per server) on Azure. There's a free version if you hunt around. I'm paying $10/month since 2012 and happy. Cannot find even a hint of t
75.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
This thread has it all: child pornography, copyright violation, and gambling. All we need is someone to vibecode a site that sells 3D printed graven images to complete the set.
76.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
Copyright detection would kick in and prevent the Harry Potter example before the CSAM filters kicked in. Claude won't render fanfic of Porky Pig sodomizing Elmer Fudd either.
77.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
It's an argument you can make in any performance effort. But I think the "let's save power using GPUs" ship sailed even before Microsoft started buying nuclear reactors to power them.
78.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
Right. The question is does Skia grows its broad and useful toolkit with an eye toward further GPU optimization? Or does Vello (broadened and perhaps burdened by Rust and the shader-obsessive crowd) grow a broad and useful API? There's
79.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
Author uses a lot of odd, confusing terminology and brings CPU baggage to the GPU creating the worst of both worlds. Shader hacks and CPU-bound partitioning and choosing the Greek letter alpha to be your accumulator in a graphics article? O
80.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
I know lots of broke-ass people who manage to travel and have a cup of coffee while there. It's choices, not privilege. Author of the piece sure is insufferable, though.
81.
by badlibrarian 9mo ago
Buffett's restraint was legendary and his transparency even more so. Bill Gates also initially dismissed him, thinking he had nothing to learn. General Electric also tried to "make a number go up" and effed up the insurance p
82.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
Almost. A modem sometimes had a phone jack as well as a coupler, for those cases when the handset was hardwired into the phone and the phone was hardwired into the wall. We tapped where we could and we were happy. Bonus points if the rotary
83.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
I thought I was being clever by coining the term "non-invasive phrenology" but it appears people are already using it non-ironically.
84.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
The Fourier Transform isn't even Fourier's deepest insight. Unless we're now ranking scientific discoveries based on whether or not they get a post every weekend on HN. The FFT is nifty but that's FINO. The Google boys a
85.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
I'm reminded of the 1983 deal to corner the market on Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.
86.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
That's not the point of the Identity. You exponentiated the beauty right out of it.
87.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
Which would be e^(i*tau) - 1 = 0 if you wanted to honor the spirit of the Identity.
88.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
"Transpose this MIDI file down a third" requires neither a specialized data format nor fancy prompt engineering. ChatGPT asked: "A) Major third up (+4 semitones) or B) Minor third up (+3 semitones)" then did it.
89.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
It's not the 19th Century. You don't need to punch holes in cards to help the machine "think" any more.
90.
by badlibrarian 10mo ago
There are major gaps in platforms slapped together in the VC Party / Ruby era that seem to have unresolvable tech debt. Or perhaps Ruby just attracts the types of people who would rather talk about F1 racecars on Twitter than instruct

More ›