kabdib

55 ms·

721.
by kabdib 7y ago
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and was surprised how much ice a square meter of solar power can make in a day. But to scale ice making machinery to planetary capacity you'll probably need to use all the metal we've mined
722.
by kabdib 7y ago
Just walk away from the Mac. Windows is perfectly viable for doing development, so is Linux. You can easily get a laptop that is cheaper and more reliable than a Macbook. About the only thing you'll be missing is a cool Apple sticker,
723.
by kabdib 7y ago
Until they fix the keyboard for real I'm not going there. I might hold out for a USB type A port, too -- other companies make perfectly good laptops with these. How dependent is Apple on the "nerd factor" with its laptops?
724.
by kabdib 7y ago
I started out doing hardware, as you say. Lots of bad soldering (initially). Expensive smoke and shitty chips from Radio Shack that appeared to have had their magic smoke removed prior to being shipped to stores in packaging that definitely
725.
by kabdib 7y ago
I've got a Huawei laptop that's pretty nice . . . but I'm reluctant to use it for anything even remotely sensitive. Am I being overly paranoid? Or should I treat it as basically trustworthy as any other major brand of compute
726.
by kabdib 7y ago
The ISBN mappings were maybe fifty percent reliable, service by service. So you'd do three or four ISBN lookups and paw through the results, and then failover to the LOC. The Library of Congress numbers were more accurate, but more eff
727.
by kabdib 7y ago
I tried doing a book catalog about ten years ago. I got about 80% recognition rate by using multiple numbers (ISBN, and the Library of Congress number) and multiple online data sources. It was a pretty slow process, to the point where simpl
728.
by kabdib 7y ago
IIRC the IBM Microchannel stuff was perceived as a ploy to recover control of the PC industry by licensing a new bus. The licensing terms were pretty bad (it could be that "free" was the expected bar at the time, though) and the i
729.
by kabdib 8y ago
They were adding features to the language (e.g., "Koenig lookup") in the CFront era to accommodate iostreams. I was sad that they were spending a bunch of resources on that relatively useless stuff, rather than a sorely needed set
730.
by kabdib 8y ago
There's enough wiggle room in the standard that two compilers would be happy making two compliant but still different physical layouts for the same struct declaration. I'm not even worrying about cross-platform issues or bitfields
731.
by kabdib 8y ago
I work in a shop where there was a significant effort in a cross-platform library a long time ago, but that old code has been showing cracks and emitting creaks ("Hey, folks, guess how many debugging hours it took to find out that lamb
732.
by kabdib 8y ago
Back when rocks were young, one of my hobbies was writing assemblers because the ones available were generally terrible. My first few attempts were pretty bad. The fifth or sixth assembler that I wrote was commercial quality; it was fast, h
733.
by kabdib 8y ago
Good code isn't written, it's re-written. It is scary when something "works the first time", because it probably doesn't.
734.
by kabdib 8y ago
I wonder if the eventual fate of most lumber is to be burned, on the scale of tens of decades (as buildings deteriorate, are remodeled and older bits thrown out). In which case you're just postponing the need to sequester anyway.
735.
by kabdib 8y ago
I've seen very-underpaid people go through the realization that they've been taken advantage of. Sometimes it's worked out; the company gives them a big raise, a lump sum in the key of "Sorry!" and the person remain
736.
by kabdib 8y ago
Gahhh. Ignore most of that stuff about language, it doesn't add much value. Just use common sense: Be clear, be informative, don't waste people's time. You're not writing deathless prose or trying to craft the Greatest C
737.
by kabdib 8y ago
I made a bunch of money from ISOs at large, established companies. I made zero (well, negative, really) from startup stock options, even before things got really shifty in the 2000s. One startup that I left, that is now a billion dollar c
738.
by kabdib 8y ago
The Apple Newton. Tons of really interesting stuff under the hood (a scripting language inspired by Self, an object store with transactions, a micro-kernel inspired by Mach that supported threading, virtual memory and fine-grained permissio
739.
by kabdib 8y ago
The ST didn't use CP/M-68K (it did during early development, but pivoted to a newly written file system and loader before it shipped). The ST failed because the Tramiels didn't really understand software platforms. They got h
740.
by kabdib 8y ago
A cow-orker of mine mentioned this card a few months before it was actually released. "Transparent water," he would say, wistfully. I wasn't convinced it would be that interesting. We both bought cards. I was convinced. I rea
741.
by kabdib 8y ago
... and now you have to synchronize access to your handle table, grow it to meet demand -- let me tell you, that is a fun thing to do when there are thousands of things in flight, all expecting high performance -- and so on. And what NUMA n
742.
by kabdib 8y ago
Place some trust in your reports; they're going to be working with the candidates if they are hired, they might as well interview them, too. And they could probably use the practice. In fact, the worst hires I've had to work with
743.
by kabdib 8y ago
(Asking for legal advice on the Internet. Double oops). There's a point in the application process where you need to affirm, under penalty of perjury, a bunch of legal stuff about the invention. I can see having second thoughts about (
744.
by kabdib 8y ago
One favorite trick of Microsoft IT is to delete old instances of SharePoint servers for projects. Where "old" is maybe 3-4 years. Goodbye design documents. Goodbye test plans. Goodbye user studies. Goodbye meeting notes. Goodbye j
745.
by kabdib 8y ago
Blockchain industry . . . firing employees . . . few customers. I wouldn't bother, you're going to lose your money. If the company pulls through, or finds a buyer for their product, it's highly likely they will play games a
746.
by kabdib 8y ago
They didn't say anything concrete about money. I'm guessing developers will be compensated with "exposure" :-)
747.
by kabdib 8y ago
Verizon has my cell phone in some kind of trial for a new service that's supposed to filter out robocalls. They'll want to charge me for it soon, I'm sure. I'm betting that as soon as the trial is up (one that I never as
748.
by kabdib 8y ago
Er, no. Just assuming that weightlifters are a representative sample of the general population. There will, of course, be exceptions to this due to geographies and special-interesting groups ("The Usenix Lambda Lifting Association?&quo
749.
by kabdib 8y ago
Encrypting results seems indistinguishable from holding the customer's data hostage. That's not a great place to be, especially if an event is in Outer Qlyphm and the participants want their results now , not when the caravan ret
750.
by kabdib 8y ago
Occasionally a resume crosses my inbox from someone claiming to be "the idea guy". Sometimes it's that stark, "I'm an idea guy" or "People came to me for ideas." Sometimes you have to read between the

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