osullivj

15 ms·

151.
by osullivj 7y ago
Nearly 40 years for me; I remember reading about The Last One [1] back in 81. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
152.
by osullivj 7y ago
Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is excellent on the Holodomyr. He cites various sources estimating the victim count at 3M to 10M, and suggests 6M himself IIRC. He also details Stalin's orders in 32 and 33. The NKVD confiscated grain.
153.
by osullivj 7y ago
Surprised to see Ferguson assert that the UK is more than 400 years old. The UK came into being in 1801, as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It's predecessor was the Kingdom of Great Britain, itself created in 1707 with
154.
by osullivj 7y ago
Mixed langs on the same stack view in VS was a breakthrough for me, coding in a mix of C# and C++.
155.
by osullivj 7y ago
The King Edward St side of the building is more than just a facade. Some of the original stairs and rooms are preserved, and are connected to the early 2000s Merrill Lynch Financial Centre building. I've worked in a lot of offices in t
156.
by osullivj 7y ago
I'm always amazed by how few shooting fatalities there are in the US. 330M population, 33K gun deaths per annum [1]. And two thirds of the gun deaths are suicides. So that's only 10K homicides per annum. That's 1 in 33K. In t
157.
by osullivj 7y ago
Plus ca change!
158.
by osullivj 7y ago
Son of a friend works for Rolls and gave me the same story on protective coatings. They tried to trim costs too far on the final stage of the blade hardening process. The BBG article has an Emirates exec demanding fit for purpose aircraft.
159.
by osullivj 7y ago
The article is about maths, but could equally apply to debugging or software design. The overworking a problem phenomenon described earlier in the article sounds like "analysis paralysis".
160.
by osullivj 7y ago
Loved the Model M [1] keyboard supplied with PC AT and the RS/6000. A colleague had one recently; we had to rig it up with a DIN/USB converter. Then it was a pleasure to use, but very loud with its clicketty clacketty action. Let
161.
by osullivj 7y ago
Re school play: the phenomenon also neatly explains why Gene Hackman's line as Royal in The Tenenbaum's - "just a bunch of kids in animal costumes" - is so funny.
162.
by osullivj 7y ago
Seconding you're point on SSRIs. I'm currently reading Ed Bullmore's Inflamed Mind, and he makes the point forcefully that there's no way of measuring SSRI levels in regular clinical practice, they way blood pressue, cho
163.
by osullivj 7y ago
Market making dealers in govt bonds provide liquidity to different types of fund managers. For instance, hedge funds, insurance funds, pension funds. All fund managers must preserve and/or grow funds. Pension and insurance funds are re
164.
by osullivj 7y ago
Trump withdraws US from UN perhaps? The US never participated in the League of Nations after WWI, even though it was Wilson's idea, because Congress wouldn't ratify.
165.
by osullivj 7y ago
All good points. However, it's important to remember that France remains at the core of the EU, and has her own nuclear weapons (force de frappe) and large military. There was always a tension between UK participation with EU diplomat
166.
by osullivj 7y ago
Interesting to see that insurance is ahead in adoption, compared to capital markets, where I work. Suspect that the tree based models reported as popular are used for underwriting decision making. We sales & trading capital markets peop
167.
by osullivj 7y ago
Didn't know that the Cabinet War Rooms only came into operation after the Blitz; I'd always assumed all those underground scenes we see in war movies like the recent Gary Oldman Churchill movie were set in the War Rooms.
168.
by osullivj 7y ago
Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuiti
169.
by osullivj 7y ago
That amounts to repartioning Ireland. The original partition in 22 was traumatic, and we're still living with the consequences today. The partitioning of India in 47, and the British Mandate of Palestine in 48 were also traumatic and b
170.
by osullivj 7y ago
Catholic/Protestant history and the British colonisation of Ireland are inextricably linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster
171.
by osullivj 7y ago
42
172.
by osullivj 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
173.
by osullivj 7y ago
Sounds like the author is describing techniques to avoid Kahnemann & Tversky's anchoring effect. Avoiding one's own cognitive biases is important in debugging too; I mutter "listen to the system" as I read logs and e
174.
by osullivj 7y ago
The 1707 Union created the Kingdom of Great Britain. 1801 created United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 gave us the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So if Scotland lea
175.
by osullivj 7y ago
Heidegger perpetrated nonsense like "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself nihilates) [1], which positivists and empiricists rightly disdained. Obviously I am firmly in the analytic camp. If you like a bit of mysticism in
176.
by osullivj 7y ago
"Executive Director" is a clue. That's a common title at investments banks inc JPMC, GS, MS. I suspect the story will recount political machinations typical on Wall St or City of London.
177.
by osullivj 7y ago
Sounds like Athena at JP, or Quartz at BAML. Those off graph errors drove me nuts.
178.
by osullivj 7y ago
I've used MS Detours to hook my own C++ interceptor functions into dispatch from Excel to XLL extensions via the internal Excel4V interface. It worked very well, showing me the XLOPER values. But that was for a 32 bit Excel. I didn&#x2
179.
by osullivj 7y ago
I used to work with an old IBMer from the MQ team. He'd also worked at DEC and the BBC before joining my team at Chase in the late 90s. He used to joke that it was no accident that IBM almost collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Un
180.
by osullivj 7y ago
Indeed. Libra, solarii, denarii == pounds, shillings, pennies in the old pre 1970 British system. Sometimes referred to as LSD.

More ›