gchpaco

17 ms·

121.
by gchpaco 14y ago
I worked for a startup that was like this but with a grand total of five employees. It did not sit well with me.
122.
by gchpaco 14y ago
The most successful Soviet camera designs were to one degree or another rip offs of stuff Zeiss was doing before the war; the LTM cameras in the FED and I think ZORKI series, the folder I have that is near on a dead copy with the opposite h
123.
by gchpaco 14y ago
As you might imagine, the print industry put in a lot of research over the course of the 20th century to ensure that e.g. Coca-Cola's cans come out the same color no matter which factory makes them. As such there are a number of mathematic
124.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Doesn't mean it can't be statistically valid, the noise just means you need to run more tests.
125.
by gchpaco 14y ago
You can do that in base Tcl; the libraries won't exactly help you and unless they've fixed the dynamic scoping problem it had a decade ago when I last looked at it closures would be obnoxious, but the language itself is really clean and sim
126.
by gchpaco 14y ago
That's still possible in a negative sum game; all negative sum means is that the sum of the benefits to all parties is less than the sum of the costs to all parties. So if say the US hoses the Mexicans but good it can still come out ahead
127.
by gchpaco 14y ago
War is actually a negative sum game today; even "winning" you lose a lot. It's not clear to me if this was ever different for anything larger than Viking raiding parties, though.
128.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Compiler optimizations, CPU pipeline and branch prediction would be my guess, although I'm sure someone else can jump in with more detail. XOR is basically immune to optimized tricks.
129.
by gchpaco 14y ago
It looks as though they're pursuing the unarmored combat of Liechtenauer than the armored knight combat of later period, where swords basically stopped being useful against breastplates and the like and folks went in more for maces and war
130.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Right now it's Samsung SyncMaster 2443s. The trick is to go into the font stuff and explain the LCD layout to the font renderer. I think MacOS already does this but on Linux it's usually somewhere in Appearance.
131.
by gchpaco 14y ago
I typically work around this by having dual monitors and having one mounted vertically and the other horizontally.
132.
by gchpaco 14y ago
This article is superficially correct but omits enormous amounts of detail. Woodblock printing is ancient, mostly used for religious texts but requires very little infrastructure. Obviously not suitable for small printing runs, as the enti
133.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Funny you cite Germany as not as reliant on consumer demand; one of the things that keeps being cited as hurting Germany right now is that the rest of the Eurozone is its major customers, and they can't afford German goods on account of dep
134.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Because rebase, and rebase -i especially, gives you the ability to break your patches into discrete this-one-one-goddamn-thing patches (which is awkward in a "oh, you committed it? Then you committed it forever" SCM like Perforce or SVN),
135.
by gchpaco 14y ago
If you think of the change set as the subject, so the question is 'what does this do?' and the answer is 'fix X' then it makes more sense. Past tense suggests you might be thinking of it as a journal or something that you're not supposed t
136.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Well, fclose can fail, for example; it can as part of the closing process flush its buffer and that can fail like any other I/O process. Further, sometimes the error than happened during a previous write(2) call is only detected in the clo
137.
by gchpaco 14y ago
This problem is easily resolved by noting that you think the method has to 'belong' to one type or another instead of exist as a first class object of its own. In practice this was done first in Lisp (the 'generic function' works better wi
138.
by gchpaco 14y ago
I use the split keyboard all the time and for some reason my fingers seem programmed for the y key on the left hand, almost always. I've been using and noting this for a while but didn't realize that it extended to other keys. I think it's
139.
by gchpaco 14y ago
Yup, in the working world it was not unusual for secretarial professionals to be expected to turn out a perfect page every time or redo it until it was perfect.
140.
by gchpaco 14y ago
The one thing the M doesn't convey of the total Selectric experience was the immediate and alarming belief that, after every keystroke, the typewriter had launched itself an inch forward (no mean trick considering how heavy they are!). The
141.
by gchpaco 14y ago
What they're actually doing is conflating programmer and sysadmin here; the tasks they're assigning to the 'on-call programmer' are very similar to the ones I would expect as a sysadmin to get. Things like monitor the service, act as first
142.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Ada 95 is a very different language from Ada 83, cleaning up a bunch of rough edges in the latter. That said I still don't really like it, for aesthetic reasons more than anything else.
143.
by gchpaco 15y ago
That's a good point, and what I actually did last time this came up. signalfd on Linux just codifies this convention, but it is (particularly in evented code) an excellent idea.
144.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Signals do not interact gracefully with the rest of libc or the kernel, let alone concurrency. Signals can come in and interrupt kernel system calls--this is what EINTR is there for. When in the signal handler itself, the list of libc fun
145.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Actually anything that's gotten as far as journal publication should be exactly reproducible; I remember having to include the packages I was using and everything else in one archive for my couple of journal publications. Conceded that folk
146.
by gchpaco 15y ago
The TeX community in general has a philosophy that anything written since 1983 (TeX'83) or so should a) compile and b) produce precisely the same typeset document if it is recompiled today. This has obnoxious issues and is one of the reaso
147.
by gchpaco 15y ago
I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation. It's cute and I liked th
148.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Tufte's books are actually very readable and approachable, unlike say TAOCP (which is very well written but so unbelievably dense…). I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to actually read them.
149.
by gchpaco 15y ago
If you want to go IDE qua IDE, with the shell linking everything up, tmux is much easier to control from the command line than screen is. The multiple sessions business is actually quite cool with a utility like tmuxinator; you can switch
150.
by gchpaco 15y ago
I am actually of the opinion that UEFI isn't "complex" enough—the best BIOS I've ever used is OpenBoot, with the Forth interpreter. Simple in some ways but very very flexible, more than enough to blow your while leg off. And yet more pleas

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