ken

60 ms·

541.
by ken 7y ago
If you think exceptions look messy as a flow chart, try conditions! It’s be like exceptions x come-from. And yet in practice, it’s really not that confusing. Expressivity counts for more than the number of branch opcodes generated by the
542.
by ken 7y ago
The (famously robust) SQLite has 92 million lines of tests, for 139 thousand lines of code. How many person-years did that take to create? And then there are the hundreds of software libraries I've seen throughout my career that I n
543.
by ken 7y ago
Maybe weird but not unique: every non-saturated color is like this. Try to set your RGB lighting strip to gray. Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage.
544.
by ken 7y ago
That's an interesting case, because there's actually a lot of variety in cars. In my circle of friends, everyone has a very different vehicle. We've got an SUV, a hatchback, a sedan, a pickup truck, a supermini, a sport wag
545.
by ken 7y ago
> If a computer programmer were to allocate similar priority to reliability in an app for chatting with friends, I'd argue this would make them less qualified for the title of engineer. While it's entirely correct for an engine
546.
by ken 7y ago
It prints to stdout so you can of course grep your "gh issue list" (or at least the 3 fields that it displays: number, title, labels), but since it silently truncates output to at most 100 records, this doesn't seem terribly
547.
by ken 7y ago
I agree with your criticism of hero worship, and the personal issues with the early pilots / astronauts, but modern space flight is nothing like that. It's still dangerous, but our success rate with rockets is far, far better than
548.
by ken 7y ago
This pains me. They saw the "what" but not the "why". The point of using a command line is not because a VT100 emulator is an ideal way to view data (it's not). It's so we can combine commands, using pipes an
549.
by ken 7y ago
Fashion. We're not bad at software engineering. We're bad at correctly labeling what is "software engineering" and what is not. "Software engineer" today is just a job title. It makes us sound cool, but it h
550.
by ken 7y ago
Yes, but SQLite is probably the least expressive SQL dialect there is. If you're choosing SQL because of its expressiveness, you probably aren't thinking of a dialect with only 5 types (including NULL).
551.
by ken 7y ago
> If you think you have aphantasia, you almost certainly do. I took the VVIQ online and it concluded that I "probably don't" have aphantasia (but merely "You do not have a vivid imagination"). Basically it seems
552.
by ken 7y ago
The full crew list (per IMDB) for any 1929 movie I've found fits entirely on one screen. The full crew list for a current day movie takes many dozens of screens, often well over 1000 people in all. The first 2019 movie I picked has mo
553.
by ken 7y ago
It shouldn’t be. We never want to build the same app multiple times. What I (as a developer) want is for OS companies to stop with all the proprietary crap and cooperate so I can write an app once. Web apps and web-as-native (and previousl
554.
by ken 7y ago
Just because history played out one way doesn’t mean it could only have played out that way.
555.
by ken 7y ago
I disagree: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/03/history-of-human-powe... > "There is no limit to the weight that humans can lift by sheer muscle power. Nor is there a limit to the height to which this w
556.
by ken 7y ago
> With the ability in Swift of adding extensions to conforming to a particular protocol to a class, you gain some of the same flexibility in Swift as in Julia. You can add methods or computed properties, but that's about it. That&#
557.
by ken 7y ago
> Wash your fucking rice Even better: use no-wash rice. It's easier for you, and better for the environment: > [...] believe it or not, the cloudy water consumers pour off when washing their rice has been identified as a signifi
558.
by ken 7y ago
Can I make plastic myself?
559.
by ken 7y ago
Does standardization count as an invention? Then I'd put the metric system higher than shipping containers. I'm not sure "you can pretty much build it yourself", either. The actual process is pretty involved [1]. Even
560.
by ken 7y ago
Anyone who can click a mouse could make a HyperCard stack. You could draw like in MacPaint, and create connections between cards almost as easily. You could create template pages, and save data in the stack itself. You could send it to y
561.
by ken 7y ago
I would say this demonstrates that the cost of communication is not near zero.
562.
by ken 7y ago
> feel dramatically more complicated, even though they're nominally more "abstract" than they would be on bare metal One problem I have with most of these systems is that they use completely foreign concepts. A programmer
563.
by ken 7y ago
> X selections could be used. For example, if the user clicks on a filename in another program, it could take the FILE_MANAGEMENT selection; I tried to bring (part of) this feature from Mac OS X (as it was called back then) to Linux &#x2
564.
by ken 7y ago
This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services, or why the error-handling and documentation is never up to par, or wh
565.
by ken 7y ago
I wonder if there's any correlation between static/dynamic typing fans of programming languages, and people who organize their lives with highly structured apps versus a big text file. I've tried to use various to-do apps and
566.
by ken 7y ago
I tried the search which I used a few weeks ago when someone here claimed that DDG was pretty good. Google found what I wanted above the fold. DDG found it at hit #87 or so (click “next” 7 times). Lycos didn’t find it in the first 100 at l
567.
by ken 7y ago
And yet, there are plenty of products which never expire. Petzl says their plastic and textile products have a lifespan of 10 years, while their metal products (which I regularly trust my life to) never expire. https://www.petzl
568.
by ken 7y ago
"Amadeus" is famously fictitious. In real life Salieri and Mozart were friends. It's good dramatic writing but that's all. I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell abo
569.
by ken 7y ago
Having worked at Boeing, I can tell you their specs take way longer than two months to write. That's a good thing. What's the point of delivering this type of software piecemeal? A new airliner takes 10 years or so to produce.
570.
by ken 7y ago
Are we not there already? Last I checked, I thought Swift had more reserved words than C++.

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