drpixie

15 ms·

451.
by drpixie 5y ago
Absolutely. I'm continually amazed as how much and how hard people have tried to push everything into their OO framework. Android development is the classic example - it's ALL OO - and most of the time, that's pushing the pro
452.
by drpixie 5y ago
I'd be looking at microPython on an ESP - programming is simple; you get easy access to the GPIO/UART/etc; there are MQTT libraries; and the software & platform will be stable. What's not to like? If you go for the L
453.
by drpixie 5y ago
I'm the first to admit the terrible history of centralised planning, but that is a different question to price controls. America and much of UK/Europe have a long history of successful price controls, eg. rent controls, public tra
454.
by drpixie 5y ago
Fair enough - it was quick cynicism - apologies for my quick reaction. Not really up to Hacker News standards. For some perspective, I've been around long enough to have seen many many similar things before ... generally not for the be
455.
by drpixie 5y ago
Google: "So ... we're loosing search ... and people don't trust our email ... and we killed Reader ... Android is falling to bits ... but we have money, and we need a new business ... ... lets get into FPGAs!"
456.
by drpixie 5y ago
Ummm - it's open source, you don't protect the code. You build on what people have done before, on the condition that others can build further on your work.
457.
by drpixie 5y ago
Not exactly what you're asking for, but how about: * use ZFS (or any snapshot capable file system) * trigger snapshots at regular (short) intervals (as chosen by you). ZFS snapshots are very low cost, and you can browse them using your
458.
by drpixie 5y ago
Absolutely. Google search is now my choice ONLY when I want to buy something, and it's likely to be from someone who'd advertise through google. Otherwise you've got to go a long way through the results, and then you get to j
459.
by drpixie 5y ago
Rather misses the whole point of Turing's machine - it was the SIMPLEST machine he could devise that could be said to "calculate". Turning never made and never intended to make such a machine - it's a mathematical abstra
460.
by drpixie 5y ago
I call bulls*t here. Facebook has a long history of change-the-name-of-the-setting-and-the-new-flag-defaults-to-ON as a method of changing users' settings back to what facebook would prefer. Excuses aside, it looks like the same thing
461.
by drpixie 5y ago
I recall someone (nameless) who tried to teach Pascal by putting the semicolon at the start of every line. It actually works (as the Pascal semicolon is a separator, not a terminator), although you end up with many null/empty state
462.
by drpixie 5y ago
Nothing crazy about the "letter", but it is crazy that there are multiple different ways to encode the "letter".
463.
by drpixie 5y ago
As someone who uses advanced autopilots very regularly, I can inform you that there is no intelligence. Even the best APs use only very basic feedback loops, which are tuned by the aircraft designers and fixed. Their behaviour is not modifi
464.
by drpixie 5y ago
Spot on - anything else renders software less useful.
465.
by drpixie 5y ago
Agreed. We now live in an environment of "just throw another feature at it". It doesn't matter that the feature is not really wanted; or that it screws up the system; and that nothing is properly documented - just throw more
466.
VideoCore IV Processor Manual (Raspberry Pi GPU)(github.com)
6 points by drpixie 5y ago|0 comments
467.
by drpixie 5y ago
Great to see this catalogue of language features, thought provoking. The thing that makes a language good (instead of just usable) is how well its various features fit together. All that I can think of, fail with this - their usability dama
468.
by drpixie 5y ago
Make it small, simple and consistent - few features, simple syntax, and useful library. (Don't provide things as language features, put them in the library or not at all.) Then don't add to it - avoid the "which python"
469.
by drpixie 5y ago
"a critical part of human intelligence is pattern recognition" almost certainly true. But a wheel is a critical part of a car, but a wheel is not a car.
470.
by drpixie 5y ago
I certainly consider that exemplar child intelligent. I'm happy to consider my pet dogs intelligent - some more than others:). And they are all leagues ahead of any "artificial" systems we've got. And sorry, I don't
471.
by drpixie 5y ago
Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO. We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We
472.
by drpixie 5y ago
I think it's a proof-of-concept operation. Last thing I want is 5 minute old, bad coffee, left in the garden. (Australians are generally very selective of their coffee, we like proper Italian style coffee. Melbourne (Aus/Vic) is q
473.
by drpixie 5y ago
Really like it, and love that you've done this yourself. I'd prefer if it does just one thing and does that really well. Don't waste your time on calculator and conversion functions, or pseudo-natural language queries. There
474.
by drpixie 5y ago
Now, imagine you're sitting with your boss, the average typically incompetent project manager or lead programmer ... Them: type type type ... accept accept ... save (unaware or choosing not to understand the meaningless uncompilable ga
475.
by drpixie 5y ago
Afraid not. We'll just accept programs 10x more bloated, and demand systems 10x faster to run them.
476.
by drpixie 5y ago
Quelle horreur - has Mr Adams not noticed that that vast majority of financial transactions are completely digital, with all the risks that he details? Not blockchain (thank god) but every card debit/credit/charge transaction is p
477.
Mersenne Twister(en.wikipedia.org)
2 points by drpixie 5y ago|0 comments
478.
by drpixie 5y ago
One general change and one specific: - A general idea: Arrange so that sending packets costs way more than receiving, just like snail-mail. (At the moment, a large website or spammer pays very close to $0 per message, individuals pay much m
479.
by drpixie 5y ago
I'd love to use unicode on a current project - but just the unicode library is bigger than the memory of the small computer being used :( Seriously, unicode is appallingly messy and heavy-weight. With all that code-point space to burn,
480.
by drpixie 5y ago
Mortoray, I'm inclined to agree with you. Modern strings/unicode has completely confused quite different things - storage (bytes), glyphs, typesetting, and language. So we're mixing single characters, with multiple characters

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