mschaef

51 ms·

181.
by mschaef 5y ago
> So what would I do to "winterize"? They were not speaking to home owners as much as utility and energy infrastructure owners. There is a great deal that could be done to make the system overall more able to withstand winter.
182.
by mschaef 5y ago
This article hit home... I took a similar approach and spent bit of time over the summer to familiarize myself with the language by writing a ray tracer. (Super simple, not as fancy as the one in the article.) https://github.com&
183.
by mschaef 5y ago
Several years ago, I wrote something similar for Clojure, as part of a way to make it super simple to put a SQL database behind a Clojure all. Essential goal was for close to single jar file deployment. https://github.com/ms
184.
by mschaef 5y ago
> if you used area-lamps (in Blender) for example. They probably exist in POV-ray, They do: http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.2/38/ > a 3d GUI to move-and-place these objects around gro
185.
by mschaef 5y ago
I can think of several things that may have contributed. In no particular order. * Their application business lost out to Microsoft many times over the years. (Sidekick, Quattro, Sprint, etc.) * The availability of free and open source deve
186.
by mschaef 5y ago
My experience with ImmutableJS was to remove it and see performance go up by a factor of 100-200. https://github.com/mschaef/react-matchstick/commit/070802b69... This was something of a worst case scenario (a
187.
by mschaef 5y ago
> I remember running DesqView ... it must have been on a 286 (is that possible?), I Yes. In fact, I once ran it on an original 4.77MHz 8088. Just as an experiment, I ran two copies of BASICA in two separate windows. The two interpreters
188.
by mschaef 5y ago
I recently heard a podcast with the CEO of MidAmerican (based in Iowa). They had materially colder temperatures than TX and operated 91% of their wind capacity. There's nothing inherent in wind that keeps it from operating in cold weat
189.
by mschaef 5y ago
> If not for natural gas, the blackouts would have been even worse, because at least they were able to be ramped up Natural Gas, Coal, and Nuclear accounted for over 80% of the lost generation. Most of that was gas. See page 16 here: ht
190.
by mschaef 5y ago
Natural gas plant outages were around 30,000mw, and there were issues with both coal and nuclear plants going offline also. Wind was only a few thousand MW below planned values. Not close to being entirely a wind power issue. (Even though
191.
by mschaef 5y ago
> My parents are in their 70's and they still have furniture that was (second hand) given to them when they got married. Can you imagine an piece of IKEA furniture being used daily and lasting for >40 years? Two answers: 1) Yes.
192.
by mschaef 5y ago
I may be imposing my own views on his wording, but my interpretation is that his concern is related to the fact that macros have similar syntax to everything else in the language. Consider these two forms: > (and a b c) > (and* a b c)
193.
by mschaef 5y ago
> Imminent collapse means? Nothing without more context.
194.
by mschaef 5y ago
It's a large system and operates on timescales that are at least generational in human terms. So it feels slow to us, even if it's very, very fast in geologic times.
195.
by mschaef 5y ago
For personal stuff, I tend to keep it about as simple as possible with an HSQLDB instance hosted in-process. (All JVM/Clojure) I use a small library that encapsulates the use-case (including some schema migration stuff that should prob
196.
by mschaef 5y ago
You may find SIAG (Scheme in a grid) interesting. It explores some of the same ideas: https://siag.nu/siag/ There's also been some work along these lines in Excel itself, although using the Excel formula language
197.
by mschaef 5y ago
The one that gets me is that ENIAC was (mostly) live in 1946 and the IBM PC first shipped in 1981. The upshot of this is that there's more time between now and the IBM PC than there is between the IBM PC and ENIAC. (18K vacuum tunes, f
198.
by mschaef 5y ago
A big part of the performance of these machines came from high bandwidth memory access. This is high performance more in the sense of an 18-wheeler than in the sense of an F1 car. The point is more about predictable control flow and bulk ma
199.
by mschaef 5y ago
I still like what I wrote initially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107735 The tl;dr is that this architecture imposed costs on essentially everybody involved in software and offered benefits that were abstract at b
200.
by mschaef 5y ago
At the time it happened, I'd have been sympathetic to that phrasing. In the couple decades then, I'm grown much more sanguine about it. The notion that users are being somehow kept hostage by not being able to pick and choose thei
201.
by mschaef 5y ago
> I think the big reason OpenDoc failed is because it was completely steamrolled by Microsoft OLE 2. I think the bigger reason may be this, from the original article: > Most folks at Claris, Apple’s application group, didn’t want it a
202.
by mschaef 5y ago
> don't forget that the form change was done with hp49, Good point - I keep forgetting that one. (In fact, now that you mention it, I think the 49 may have been the first output from the reconstituted calculator team.)
203.
by mschaef 5y ago
> I missed the glory days of hp-48 (plus they never seemed very popular in Poland) Is that true for the earlier HP's too? > Ever since then, I keep an emulated HP48 with me. Oddly, even though I used 48's and still have a co
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by mschaef 5y ago
> I've seen this touched on several times across various threads, but if you can compile down to assembly, is there an advantage to use a custom forth as essentially the bytecode to compile down to? Forth is compact and performant a
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by mschaef 5y ago
> why practically I would prefer this over a computational solution? The camera lens has a bunch more information to work with in terms of depth. Along the same lines, an iPhone can fake bokeh by applying a filter masked by depth inform
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by mschaef 5y ago
For context, the 50G came out at the tail end of HP's development of calculators. (In fact, the original Corvallis calculator group had disbanded and the group that produced the 50G was a reconstitution assembled in part from the HP48
207.
by mschaef 5y ago
Like others who have commented, I've spent significant time (>10y) in both sorts of environments, and am currently at a product company. Like you might expect, there are pros and cons to both types of employment. For consulting, it&
208.
by mschaef 6y ago
They addressed that quite a long time ago, with a switch away from floating point math: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39... Somewhat related, HP calculators used floating point BCD inte
209.
by mschaef 6y ago
> What would installation have cost? What would maintenance have cost? More or less than a year's worth of profits? Power that's selling right now for $25/MWh was selling at the $9,000/MWh cap. A 36,000% increase in p
210.
by mschaef 6y ago
The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state.

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