moomin

35 ms·

661.
by moomin 2y ago
Counterpoint: Unix deciding on a non-standard line ending was always a mistake. It has produced decades of random incompatibility for no particular benefit. CRLF isn’t a convention: it’s two different pieces of the base terminal API. You ha
662.
by moomin 2y ago
They say programming languages never die, but Boo’s definitely in palliative care. I liked it, but the better C# got, the less reason you’d have to use something with worse tooling.
663.
by moomin 2y ago
IIRC what this comes down to is Copernicus had no desire to tangle with the church. I remember reading he has some footnotes that go “Hey, obviously it works in epicycles but the maths works really well with ellipses and heliocentrism.”
664.
by moomin 2y ago
I can probably answer the r^2 question: it’s the scaling associated with the surface area of a sphere. So if you have light source, or a sound source, that’s how it scales with distance. It would have been relatively simple for someone as s
665.
by moomin 2y ago
I've got a nasty feeling you're right. I can't find any references at all really. My understanding was the shuttle was using very similar tech to Apollo but I can verify almost nothing.
666.
by moomin 2y ago
What is going on here? I understand that open source companies have a free rider problem, and will naturally take steps to deal with that, but some of the recent activities seem… strange. I’m thinking part of the problem is that the softwar
667.
by moomin 2y ago
The thing is, we may have an ear preference but switching doesn't seem to be that big a deal. UK cops are taught to pick up the phone with their non-dominant hand so that their dominant hand can take notes. I'm guessing _most_ peo
668.
by moomin 2y ago
When Margaret Hamilton developed the Apollo guidance systems, she ran three teams which all wrote completely independent guidance systems. She then wrote herself a program to arbitrate between them when they disagreed.
669.
by moomin 2y ago
A funny one is that there was so much objection to General Relativity that they compromised by giving Einstein a Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics. His acceptance speech was about general relativity.
670.
by moomin 2y ago
The thing is, it doesn’t really help. A system I’m working on can have hundreds of monetary amounts in the same currency. Storing the currency against each one is an awful waste of space. Equally the allocation trick is good, but you’ll fin
671.
by moomin 2y ago
I owned one. I barely used the keyboard. I barely used the internet connectivity. I even sat out the first iPhone. But I went into a store and tried one out and I knew I was getting the 3G when it came out. Phones may have had those feature
672.
by moomin 2y ago
In yet another “crypto is just speed-running regular finance” moment, they ran the same crock about _Nick Leeson_. And that was a far from victimless crime as well.
673.
by moomin 2y ago
It isn’t correct to infer that from the fact that hurricanes exist, no. Nor is it correct to ignore the decades of peer-reviewed research that concludes that we really are causing more hurricanes on the basis that hurricanes have always exi
674.
by moomin 2y ago
“apart from” doing a lot of work here. That’s a big moat.
675.
by moomin 2y ago
So, I hung around in Twitter a lot longer than many (it’s not a principle thing, it’s an addiction thing) but I have a theory about the behaviours OP is describing: they’re not caused by algorithm, or at least not entirely. The algorithm al
676.
by moomin 2y ago
To explain the thought process: most people doing this aren’t doing this to help CloudFlare. They’re doing this because they want to hurt patent trolls. Their time might be better spent forming a lobbying group and calling their representat
677.
by moomin 2y ago
People need to stop looking at the implied valuation of the stock purchase and take into account the rest of the financial terms. If the tiny stock trade values it at 10 and the attached huge preferred debt at 1, I know which valuation to b
678.
by moomin 2y ago
Yes, but the ideas behind COBOL were older still. Flowmatic, COBOL’s predecessor, dates back to 1955, so it really just depends how you count.
679.
by moomin 2y ago
In my experience, often it’s hard to find that person with deep domain knowledge, and even when they do, it’s unstructured, they take things for granted they shouldn’t* and the have no appreciation of the demands of formalism. Getting anyth
680.
by moomin 2y ago
>> and 70% of the world's supply comes from just one place in North Carolina > A quick search seems to say there are more places available for getting that than North Carolina. I mean, I deduced it straight from “70%”.
681.
by moomin 2y ago
Looking through the comments there are a number of people here who are determined to defend the company’s lousy morals. They are missing the point. What the company did was not just shady, it a lousy business proposition all round. If defen
682.
by moomin 2y ago
“ When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
683.
by moomin 2y ago
Yeah, but they used to care about your moat and “Did some easily replicable work on a product anyone can duplicate.” ain’t it.
684.
by moomin 2y ago
Seen from a certain angle, the real question is: why don’t more companies do this? This isn’t charity, this is enlightened self interest paired with understanding that pissing off your free supplier is a bad idea.
685.
by moomin 2y ago
It makes no sense but it’s common parlance. It’s like “Northern Rivers” in Australia meaning “an area on the east coast south of Queensland”. Similarly “The North East” rarely means an area containing Aberdeen, which would make more sense.
686.
by moomin 2y ago
Dijkstra said he thought the question of whether a computer could think was as interesting as asking if a submarine could swim.
687.
by moomin 2y ago
I’ve said this before, but the whole function colour thing could be summarised as: “here’s a pain point easily addressed with monads, but I don’t want to consider monads, so let’s turn everything inside out to avoid thinking about monads.”
688.
by moomin 2y ago
Yes, if you make it legal to commit crimes like murder, the murder rate will hugely go down.
689.
by moomin 2y ago
If CoLo meant I had Rachel Kroll as my sysadmin, I’d regard it as a pretty good deal too. Unfortunately, it means I’d have me.
690.
by moomin 2y ago
I doubt Adam Smith would agree with anything the Adam Smith Institute says.

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