mek6800d2

11 ms·

61.
by mek6800d2 4y ago
Read the comment again ... slowly -- mod has a dense writing style that may be difficult to comprehend on first reading. People can actually live "close to the land" all over the world. Farmers, for example. I think a few may e
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by mek6800d2 4y ago
I haven't looked at this in years, but IIRC Knuth's program could be built and run on almost any OS that had a Pascal (?) compiler, whereas McIlroy's solution obviously required a Unix-like shell, piping, and the necessary co
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by mek6800d2 4y ago
A little late to the discussion! The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (JHU/APL) uses or used to use FORTH for non-critical satellite flight software (and Ada for mission-critical software). Back in 2009, I came across this
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Ringo?
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
What does this mean? C defines the mechanism(s) for passing arguments to a function? That's news to me. The parent's point was that the binary mechanisms are OS- and architecture-dependent. (And compiler-/build-dependent
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
In 9th grade c. 1970, I was in a special studies class where, one quarter, we had to write a paper on any subject. My father, an economist, suggested I write about "Oil Import Control" (not a topic to excite a 9th grader, but ver
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
I assume you're talking about the Keystone XL pipeline. The biggest problem is that it has to be built before it can be closed and then opened again.
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Who, except for people too young to know better, saw value in C but not in Algol? The Bell Labs folks obviously thought enough of Algol such that C is a descendant in the family of Algol-like languages. Algol was widely used in Europe whe
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Yes, Sowell has that effect on people. Once you get your mind back together, I recommend that you (and anyone) read Zola's masterpiece, Germinal , a testament to the virtues of capitalism.
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
A liveable Earth? Look up "nine planetary boundaries". The "biogeochemical boundary" especially pertains to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, both necessary to plants. Nitrogen- and phosphorus-supplying fertilizer i
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Wait a minute! Douglas Hofstadter predates Plato??!! I learn something new everyday! :)
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
I'm having a little trouble interpreting (pun a happy happenstance!) your comment. Judging whether an application of a law is "appropriate" basically gives judges free rein to do whatever they want, although I can't thi
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Nuker was basically apologizing for the poor phrasing in his parent comment; smoldesu understandably used the same phrasing in his correction to make his point, but, in doing so, his correction suffered from the poor phrasing too. The subj
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
(Late, I know -- a comment in this thread was referenced a few days later.) Yeah, 2008 was a banner year for the U.S. economy (not to mention the world economies). The economy was humming along so smoothly that, IIRC, McCain was able to t
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Thank you for your insight! What about ship size? I don't remember if I saw this previously on HN or if it was a path I went down trying to find out the height of the Baltimore Beltway bridge in Maryland. The issue I came across was
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
I too miss the good old days before the FDA was established. If a person taking a lethal snakeoil medicine dies, he has only himself to blame (posthumously).
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
If one dismisses psychological disorders as "weird lizard brain hurty emotions", then, yes, teaching children "healthy communication" (whatever that is) and "what emotions are" will solve all our problems ...
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction . A classic, written in an engaging style that makes the book very readable and conveys important ideas about programming and software engineering (and object-oriented thinking
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Yes, the younger generation will not be prepared for the meritocracy that awaits them out in the real world.
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Really. It's been a couple of decades, but when I used to do a lot of Tcl programming, I too noticed that coding in Tcl had a certain Lispish quality to it.
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
That's a reasonable way to look at it, but there is a missing component. In the early 1990s, I was a subcontractor at a large firm which had software people who were only interested in designing software, down to a medium-level pseudo
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Shades of the 1980s and prior decades! In the 1980s, I worked in the aerospace division of a Fortune 5 company. A headhunter called me up, was chatting, and asked me what I did. I said I was a "programmer". Silence on the othe
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
You're confused: the annual "deficit" and the total "national debt" are two different things. The deficit is the difference between income and spending in a fixed time period. The national debt is the cumulati
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Maybe I misunderstand, but if a product breaks regularly under "fragile and bespoke" testing, won't it break just as often, and probably more often, under robust and comprehensive testing? And if the product fails tests, who
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
>... a vehicle that has shown generational abilities to generate growth and returns and beat deflationary effects ... The stock market? "Appears to show" - FIFY. I'm reminded of the periodic 401(k) presentations at our c
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Unrelated to the trailer issue, but everyday we should thank our lucky stars that there's no such thing as "stupid private sector bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are."
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
It's been a good while since I read Guns, Germs & Steel (and Diamond's equally excellent Collapse ), but my remembrance is that physical obstacles in the north/south-oriented Americas and Africa -- e.g., deserts and ex
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Wow! I think we would all like to come work for that perfect organization where you've found a place. Perhaps I am the only person in the world who has ever heard the phrase "office politics", but, in my experience, as ilei
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
Except that doing so does NOT avoid signed overflow. You're converting effectively w -1 bits of precision (plus a sign bit) to w bits of precision, doing the calculation, and then converting w bits of precision back to w -1 bits
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by mek6800d2 5y ago
I didn't read the blog post you linked to. It appears from the date in the link that the guy analyzed temperature data from 1890 to 2010, roughly. He threw out out data from weather stations that hadn't been continuously in serv

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