jerf

56 ms·

721.
by jerf 9mo ago
The press love to write this "gee whiz" sort of story where nobody knows anything and everyone is baffled about everything isn't that just so amazing, but I'm sure the reason why the honey itself is purple is not a myste
722.
by jerf 9mo ago
Result<User, Error> result = ParseId(inputId) .Bind(FindUser) .Bind(DeactivateDecision); This does not implement monads as Haskell has them. In particular, Haskell can do: do id &
723.
by jerf 9mo ago
Everyone's brain builds a model of the world. One of those higher levels of maturity that some people never reach is to realize that when your model becomes incorrect, that doesn't necessarily mean the world is broken, or that som
724.
by jerf 9mo ago
The problem with NULL is that it is forcibly adjoined as a value the compiler considers valid to every pointer type. In the languages in question, you can't have a non-nil pointer, no matter how much you might want one. I do agree that
725.
by jerf 10mo ago
I think we can safely steelman the claim to "every Python programmer should know", and even from there, every "serious" Python programmer, writing Python professionally for some "important" reason, not just eve
726.
by jerf 10mo ago
String concatenation is mentioned twice on that page, with the same time given. The first time it has a parenthetical "(small)", the second time doesn't have it. I expect you were looking at the second one when you typed that
727.
by jerf 10mo ago
Consider the ideal gas law: pV=nRT Five continuous quantities related to each other, where by default when not specified we can safely assume real values, right? So we must have real values in reality, right? But we know that gas is not con
728.
by jerf 10mo ago
All the transcendental numbers are "manufactured in a mathematical laboratory somewhere". In fact we can tighten that to all irrational numbers are manufactured in a mathematical laboratory somewhere. You'll never come acro
729.
by jerf 10mo ago
Yes, not having a length along with the string was a mistake. It dates from an era where every byte was precious and the thought of having two bytes instead of one for length was a significant loss. I have long wondered how terrible it woul
730.
by jerf 10mo ago
I'm actually not a big fan of people who recite "concurrency is not the same as parallelism" like a mantra because I don't think it's anywhere near as orthogonal as those people think. But then, that's also lar
731.
by jerf 10mo ago
Technically, your computer is not Turing Complete because it does not have access to infinite memory. Technically, once all the input has been given to a program, that program is a finite state automaton. That "once all the input has b
732.
by jerf 10mo ago
I find it a bit weird that I find it intuitive how things like the Super Nintendo did their work, and how modern games and systems work, but comparing the hardware specs of the Dreamcast/PS2/XBox/Gamecube era to the best of t
733.
by jerf 10mo ago
It runs fine. It is perhaps a bit pricey for a 200MHz system, I'd certainly focus on having only a few of them and doing most of my work by looping over some sort of user-defined tasklet (or, in other words, "standard game archite
734.
by jerf 10mo ago
Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive . We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even
735.
by jerf 10mo ago
I gave up understanding GPU names a long time ago. Now I just hope the efficient market hypothesis is at least moderately effective and as long as I buy from a reputable retailer the price is at least mostly reflective of performance. They&
736.
by jerf 10mo ago
You can still find things like an Arduino Micro that has less ROM & RAM than the lunar lander. But finding something new slower than a 2MHz CPU is probably a challenge nowadays; even the Micro is 16MHz and can probably be overclocked a
737.
by jerf 10mo ago
The problem I have with a lot of these "oh I've heard it all before"-type posts is that some of what you heard is true . Yes, IDEs did make for some bad programmers. Yes, scripting languages has made for some bad programmers
738.
by jerf 10mo ago
This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You&
739.
by jerf 10mo ago
One of my frustrations with AI, and one of the reasons I've settled into a tab-complete based usage of it for a lot of things, is precisely that the style of code it uses in the language I'm using puts out a lot of things I consid
740.
by jerf 10mo ago
No screenshots. Not even a title screen. No game videos, preliminary or otherwise. Barely a reference to what the genre is. Not a very good announcement for a game, from a strictly technical perspective.
741.
by jerf 10mo ago
That linked story is pretty horrifying too: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ If he can't get his account back in any reasonable amount of time what chance do I have? (I see I missed a big HN discussion on thi
742.
by jerf 10mo ago
"Sega broke ground in the late 90s with one of the first digital game distribution systems for consoles." By the time this came on to the scene the idea was already 14 years old. Intellivision was doing it in 1980: https:/&#
743.
by jerf 10mo ago
"Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones?" There is. We had to basically create a new category for them on /r/golang because there was a quite distinct step change near the beginning of thi
744.
by jerf 10mo ago
This is about minimizing attack surface. Not only could secrets be leaked by hacking the OS process somehow to perform arbitrary reads on the memory space and send keys somewhere, they could also be leaked with root access to the machine ru
745.
by jerf 10mo ago
In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of de
746.
by jerf 10mo ago
Humans don't understand their thought process either. In general, neural nets do not have insight into what they are doing, because they can't. Can you tell me what neurons fired in the process of reading this text? No. You don&#x
747.
by jerf 10mo ago
I remember back in the late 90s that, if you ignored the matter of hardware driver quality (and that is a big "if", no question) that open source software tended to be higher quality in general than a lot of commercial software. N
748.
by jerf 10mo ago
"there were certain historical characters removed from Sora 2 because people kept making racist videos that are hard to censor, and it became increasingly unhinged" Also Google "Elsagate" to see what sorts of things peop
749.
by jerf 10mo ago
In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority o
750.
by jerf 10mo ago
Which can rapidly exceed in size and count the "non-user-facing" objects. This objection really needs to die. GC does not instantly mean you can't program games. At most it locks you out of the tip-of-the-tippy-top AAAA games

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