mprovost

15 ms·

151.
by mprovost 4y ago
It used to be pretty common (in the late 1980s) to run Sun workstations without hard disks, all booting off an NFS server. But then disks got cheap... I always set up a boot server hosting a bunch of BSD/Linux images so I could install
152.
by mprovost 4y ago
Thanks for the kind words! I'm desperately polishing the next chapter for publication...
153.
by mprovost 4y ago
How is hiring a few people to write a transpiler any different than hiring a few engineers to write a JIT compiler? Isn't a JIT just transpiling code at a different level (bytecode instead of source code)?
154.
by mprovost 4y ago
This is a really interesting observation: "Stateless programs like command line tools or low-abstraction domains like embedded programming will have less friction with the borrow checker than domains with a lot of interconnected state
155.
by mprovost 4y ago
It's missing a third group: the ML researchers developing the LLM. I'm not sure what the best analogy in the legal world is - the politicians writing the laws?
156.
by mprovost 4y ago
I feel like this is something that people said when they started using compilers instead of manually writing assembly.
157.
by mprovost 4y ago
Well, the article says: "There is no way to distinguish between the Tab key and Control+i. It’s not just ‘the same’ as Tab, Control+i is Tab." So you'd be mapping Tab to Escape to get out of insert mode.
158.
by mprovost 4y ago
I love those clocks! But from memory, the second hand gets "stuck" at 12 and then when it moves again, the minute hand advances at the same time. On this one, the minute hand jumps forward at the same time that the second hand goe
159.
by mprovost 4y ago
True, but I was matching on "or, why" not just "or".
160.
by mprovost 4y ago
The earliest title with this format that I know of is "Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do" by James Thurber and EB White from 1929. But, that book was a parody so presumably copied the form of its title from contemp
161.
by mprovost 4y ago
When Apple (temporarily) got rid of a physical Esc key I (permanently) retrained myself to type ctrl-[ which is the same character (91 - 64 = 27).
162.
by mprovost 4y ago
But that still doesn't result in a control character. In my terminal (testing with cat -v) I just get a beep (and it's not a BEL character!). Because the 7th bit of 35 ('#') is already 0 there's nothing to convert i
163.
by mprovost 4y ago
For my Rust book I've just been diving into the old BSD 4.4 source code for cat which converts control characters into printable ASCII with the -v flag and it handles DEL as a special case: putchar(ch == '\177' ? '?&#x27
164.
by mprovost 4y ago
This is the downside to pizza at home. Step 1 is always "go back in time 3 days and make dough".
165.
by mprovost 4y ago
It's more the case that the panic around IP space exhaustion turned out to be unfounded - or at least we've been able to work around it for much much longer than expected. Back in 1994 the IETF predicted that the internet would st
166.
by mprovost 4y ago
"Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-...
167.
by mprovost 4y ago
Most programming jobs now require someone who can specify the exact syntax to satisfy the requirements of a compiler (or interpreter) and basically nobody checks the correctness of the (assembly) code that it generates.
168.
by mprovost 4y ago
It's almost like there's an agenda behind the headline when it could have just as easily been "Switzerland Bans HD Streaming" or "Switzerland bans hot wash cycles" based on the list of "potential bans&quot
169.
by mprovost 4y ago
Newington Blue by Nettle in London is great. You can find it at Planet Organic sometimes.
170.
by mprovost 4y ago
We had 8 systems in the Top 500 list at Weta Digital back in 2008 which were liquid cooled HP servers for rendering Avatar. We used one of the techniques mentioned in the article: liquid to liquid heat exchangers. Each rack was fully sealed
171.
by mprovost 4y ago
Italy wanted an exception to the EU regulation banning ICE sales after 2035 for their supercar industry (Ferrari etc) but only managed a 12 month extension to 2036. After that only manufacturers making less than 1000 vehicles a year can con
172.
by mprovost 4y ago
"The old Model A had a spark advance you could manipulate. I don't know why they got rid of it. Well, that's your Detroit smarties. The hand choke too. That's gone. Been gone." - Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
173.
by mprovost 4y ago
They often have those in locker rooms at swimming pools to dry off your swimsuit quickly.
174.
by mprovost 4y ago
The newer generation of grep-like utilities (ack, ag, rg) recurse through a directory parameter by default. Of course you could always do this with find.
175.
by mprovost 4y ago
Sorry if I was unclear. It's basically this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234042/should-i-...
176.
by mprovost 4y ago
My microwave has a picture of a cup with a spoon in it, this stops superheating.
177.
by mprovost 4y ago
My microwave has a picture of a cup with a spoon in it to warn you to only boil water with something in it. Despite being warned for years not to put anything metal in a microwave it's actually fine to leave a metal spoon in water to s
178.
by mprovost 4y ago
Someone on this site suggested that programs open another filehandle along with stdout and stderr (stdjson) for their json output which struck me as a way to make this work in a backwards-compatible fashion.
179.
by mprovost 4y ago
Also the father in law of the new UK prime minister...
180.
by mprovost 4y ago
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock

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