cperciva

33 ms·

601.
by cperciva 3y ago
In the sense of being "charitable", sure; but the legal sense of being "a charity" is quite a different matter. I record most of this as "sponsorship" and get Tarsnap's logo put in various places; if the
602.
by cperciva 3y ago
Heh, I wondered if anyone would catch that. I do think it describes developers and journalists though.
603.
by cperciva 3y ago
Nothing unique about December in terms of revenue. Even if people were prepaying large amounts in December (which isn't happening as far as I can tell) that would go into the "unearned income" reserve; profits are only reali
604.
by cperciva 3y ago
No, that's USD. Most of the amounts were in USD to begin with; the rest (e.g. the $1000 award at my alma mater) I converted at the relevant exchange rate for the month, which is why they're not round numbers.
605.
Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source(daemonology.net)
426 points by cperciva 3y ago|191 comments
606.
by cperciva 3y ago
As the post says, I'm wondering if anyone else got a weirdly unfilled templated email from YC.
607.
The {{MEETUP_FRIENDLY_NAME}} is coming up today
4 points by cperciva 3y ago|9 comments
608.
by cperciva 3y ago
Easy if you know what you're doing. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/651/
609.
by cperciva 3y ago
Two ways -- first, as already a couple other people mentioned, the battery could get crushed in a hinge; and second, a phone which is turned on and wedged between two cushions might overheat. This second danger is why modern phones are req
610.
by cperciva 3y ago
Air Canada announcements specifically say "inform a member of our crew immediately as it may pose a fire hazard". I guess it varies from airline to airline.
611.
by cperciva 3y ago
Peppa pig, too. My wife and I banned it from our toddler after seeing older kids copying violent behaviours from it.
612.
by cperciva 3y ago
Oops! You're quite right of course. I remembered Japan because that's where we had the written records of the event.
613.
by cperciva 3y ago
It's possible, but if that's the case then it wasn't the earthquake which this story has been linked to, since that earthquake was in Japan.
614.
by cperciva 3y ago
Margins need to be up in order to pay for the increased cost of capital.
615.
by cperciva 3y ago
Conceivably there's a subset of weak values and Jerry tried "Give me more money", "Jerry deserves more money", etc until he found a phrase which produced a weak value. I don't think that's what happened, b
616.
by cperciva 3y ago
Assuming "the DragonflyBSD approach" is the same as when it forked 20 years ago: FreeBSD's approach was definitely the right one, for two reasons. First, adding locking is fundamentally easier to get right than rewriting ever
617.
by cperciva 3y ago
FreeBSD 5.x was a very stressful time -- bringing full SMP to the entire kernel was a massive technical challenge, and it didn't help that a lot of the people who were expecting to work on it lost their jobs during the dot com crash. 5
618.
by cperciva 3y ago
I was being euphemistic. It was a "doesn't play well with others" issue, but it came to the fore with SMP.
619.
by cperciva 3y ago
DragonFly and FreeBSD have radically different ideas on how multithreading should work. (Understatement of the century right there!) To elaborate for people who don't know the history: Disagreement about how multithreading should wor
620.
by cperciva 3y ago
Milk is better than formula, but formula is better than starvation. There are way too many instances of infants "failing to thrive" because their mothers are bullied into relying on breast milk which they simply aren't produc
621.
by cperciva 3y ago
No, FreeBSD Update only does the base system. For packages I believe the relevant command is `pkg check -sa`.
622.
by cperciva 3y ago
For reasons I still can't fathom, a contractor for the Israeli military purchased many copies, apparently so their tanks and troops could remain oriented after all other electronic systems failed. Possibly in case of EMP attack?
623.
by cperciva 3y ago
It's more that they're kind of magical. You think you have a handle on how they behave, then you see a theorem and them and you're like "how the hell do they do that?"
624.
by cperciva 3y ago
As one Putnam Fellow to another: I took a graduate course on modular forms and I still don't really feel that I know what they are. I can't help feeling that they're the mathematical analogue of quantum mechanics: "If y
625.
by cperciva 3y ago
I know some plumbers recommend Pex because it fails catastrophically -- if you run a nail through a pipe you'll know it -- whereas copper can have pinhole leaks which will slowly grow mold all over the inside of your wall without you n
626.
by cperciva 3y ago
Not a poker player, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, but: How did he think you were cheating? You had no way of knowing what that card was, right? And if you did somehow know what it was, surely you could have pre-arranged mor
627.
by cperciva 3y ago
Edited to remove misinformation. Sorry, I was misled by news articles about the individual's status in Canada which were published prior to the announcement earlier today that he became a citizen in 2015.
628.
by cperciva 3y ago
Tarsnap's pricing is in picodollars (1e-12) but the accounting is attodollars (1e-18). Tarsnap uses 128-bit balances -- 64 bits of attodollars and 64 bits of whole dollars. If I ever have someone paying me more than 2^64 dollars, I&#x
629.
by cperciva 3y ago
Huh. I know lime plaster can contain significant levels of iron impurities, but I think even in the worst case those would be low enough to have an insignificant effect. Now I'm really curious too.
630.
by cperciva 3y ago
It's probably not the plaster blocking the signal, but rather a wire mesh which was put up to support the plaster.

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