dublin

22 ms·

181.
by dublin 4y ago
While the Therac 25 incident is pretty famous, this is the first time I remember hearing of this one. It's different though, in that the software itself was not at fault, but rather ignorance in using (and checking) it, and an unbeliev
182.
by dublin 4y ago
I call B.S.! Neither I, as a child, or my many ancestors that obviously did survive, could have done so here in Texas (or most of the South), if this were true. Near 100% RH and temperatures in the 100s are not common, but neither are the
183.
by dublin 4y ago
Is there anything today that really chases that original, beautiful vision of Meteor: To be a platform that would allow ordinary smart people who are NOT programmers to develop real, solid, fully capable web applications? I haven't loo
184.
by dublin 4y ago
I'm on desktop (Firefox) and the top image is the only one I see, too - I spent a minute or so hunting to see if they were hiding somewhere, to no avail...
185.
by dublin 4y ago
Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine is also a great book taking a great look at this era, but from the larger minicomputer perspective...
186.
by dublin 4y ago
Absolutely EVERYONE who ever wants to do anything with computers should read Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. It is one of the most important computer books ever written. (The Mythical Man-Month being the other.) Although
187.
by dublin 4y ago
My (formerly) $55 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB has more memory, more storage, more compute power, and more network speed than the Cray X/MP I worked with in the early '90s... Don't tell me you need a bigger, faster computer. You nee
188.
by dublin 4y ago
Good times! Capsule history of the computer world: Before I ever had a computer, I devoured Popular Electronics and the early computer magazines (I still have a copy of "Interface Age" that includes a "Floppy ROM" - one
189.
by dublin 4y ago
Not an alternative, but if you want to get a feel for Kubernetes and managing various kinds of servers, check out KubeSail and their options for K8s/K3s It's ridiculous overkill, but I'm looking at a NextCloud server on one o
190.
by dublin 4y ago
Fact: An well-equipped Raspberry Pi 4 has more memory, more compute power, more storage and vastly faster networking than the Cray supercomputer I worked with at a major oil company in the 1990's! With the exception of the craziness
191.
by dublin 4y ago
Yes it does, and as I mention above, TiddlyWiki is another place to look for inspiration for a tool like this. It's been doing this sort of thing for 20 years now, and being a web-first tool, it's as open and standards-based as p
192.
by dublin 4y ago
TiddlyWiki has hit most of these capabilities for many years now, and is nearly unique in wrapping up all the code and data in a single unit that can be run in any regular browser, from either local storage or a remote server or storage. (
193.
by dublin 4y ago
It'd be nice to be able to browse and search the recipes (e.g., to see what people have come up with for the ingredients you have on hand, etc.) I like the quick hack nature of it, though...
194.
by dublin 4y ago
Well, to be fair, parking is AT LEAST as important as housing, since housing without parking is pretty damn useless in almost every city there is. There are very valid reasons that most of the population of the world (and especially the US
195.
by dublin 4y ago
The old 'dsh' (distributed shell) command in DEC Ultrix gave you the ability to do something similar from the shell - kind of rsh on steroids. (FWIW, Ultrix remains my overall favorite Unix - it was very well thought-out, and jus
196.
by dublin 4y ago
But is it really Python if it doesn't have dictionaries? I'd argue No - they're the fundamental data structure of the language (like tables in Lua, arrays in FORTRAN, etc.). Pikascript could be useful, but it seems to me it&
197.
by dublin 4y ago
I've worked in two aerospace companies that were unionized - the first a very well-run company in California, the second a passably well-run company in Texas. The Unions were a constant impediment to improving product quality and produ
198.
by dublin 4y ago
Water is not even remotely an unlimited resource: https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-savage-scientific-fact-... We should not go about destroying it, or losing it to space (especially if not using the hydrogen to burn or
199.
by dublin 4y ago
Ammonia and plastics are the toughest ones to replace by far, as they rely on what the fossil fuels are rather than just on the energy they produce (steel and cement). What the hell is China doing with all that concrete, BTW?? That'
200.
by dublin 4y ago
The article acts like hydrogen from electrolysis is an energy source, but this side of fusion (and fusion has remained 30 years in the future for nearly a century now...), hydrogen is really an energy storage mechanism, not an energy sou
201.
by dublin 4y ago
Belief in free speech is a fundamental prerequisite to free thought. We express all critical thinking in words - if that speech cannot be shared, then neither can the ideas. There is nothing more tyrannical than restricting speech, which i
202.
by dublin 4y ago
And I doubt there is a stronger argument anywhere for why no manufacturer should ever be allowed the ability to remotely disable their products. THIS IS WRONG, and an especially evil use of this capability, because it extends conditional pe
203.
by dublin 4y ago
The important thing to understand about AWS (or Azure or GCP, for that matter) is that you're not eliminating learning how to deploy and use an OS underneath your apps, you're just using a different (sometimes better/easier,
204.
by dublin 4y ago
Although he doesn't mention API Gateway in his list, I used to design AWS solutions for people, and it was by far the biggest mistake I saw them make cost-wise: It can get scary-expensive in a hurry, especially if you aren't caref
205.
by dublin 5y ago
Every question, and every answer carries with it a plethora of presuppositions. Cornelius van Til wrote some excellent works on presuppositions with respect to worldviews, but his work is much more easily understood by reading the works of
206.
by dublin 5y ago
The art of teaching (or management, or any other kind of leadership) is not communicating information and directing activities, but instilling a curiosity, want, or desire to learn and do. Once you do that, there's no stopping an in
207.
by dublin 5y ago
Units are units, they're fungible and convertible by nature. As an engineer in the US, I can assure you that there are cases where Metric units are handier, and other cases where Standard/English units are handier. It's not
208.
by dublin 5y ago
DuckDuckGo is (for the most part, and to a much greater extent than Google) just delivering straight-up search results. Google has been suppressing sites for political reasons for decades now - I ran into my first blatant Google site suppr
209.
by dublin 5y ago
Just a warning that exploring James Lileks' site will suck you into spending a completely unreasonable number of hours marveling at his outstanding sense of humor (he wrote a great piece last week on the passing of P.J. O'Rourke)
210.
by dublin 5y ago
There is still plenty of IPv4 space available, it's just very badly distributed, for instance, due to early limits in Cisco's IOS, Chevron acquired an insane 26 Class B address blocks when connecting to the net back in the early

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