pacaro

64 ms·

721.
The rave that changed British law(bbc.com)
1 points by pacaro 9y ago|0 comments
722.
by pacaro 9y ago
Whistles can be a fun way to control a system, the DSP needed to do this is really simple, and whistles really punch through the noise floor like nothing else! I've always used discrete change in pitch as the "symbol", so com
723.
by pacaro 9y ago
Yes. I think that there a bunch of interesting ideas in blockchain technology, not all of which are necessarily new, but they are often new to the blog writer and/or audience. So introductory articles often focus on those basic concept
724.
by pacaro 9y ago
I think Merkle got there first, in about 1979 or so. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree
725.
by pacaro 9y ago
Calm assertive energy is a useful skill to be able to tap into in many of life's circumstances
726.
by pacaro 9y ago
The etymology of broccoli to mean weed, at least amongst my family/acquaintances, comes from the practice of trying to persuade children to eat broccoli by referring to florets as "trees"
727.
by pacaro 9y ago
This is an "aspect marker" that is distinctive of Ebonics/AAVE, and is grammatically distinct from other dialects of English. IIRC it either doesn't occur, or is rare, in Indo-European languages
728.
by pacaro 9y ago
Writing screen savers was a lot of fun too. There are some constraints, but you have a blank canvas. I wrote a rock climbing screen saver in the late 90s that used a very simplistic inverse kinematics model to animate a couple of climbers t
729.
by pacaro 9y ago
Me experience is that at the first evidence of fraud or compromise the card is cancelled. The replacement arrives 7-10 days later. I'm sure it depends on the issuer, but banks in the US tend to a lowest common denominator customer expe
730.
by pacaro 9y ago
Leaving you without a card for 7-10 business days.
731.
by pacaro 9y ago
I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only Cambridge HPS graduate here. It would be interesting to see some of the thinking behind current approaches to HPS being applied to development teams, both as teams and as part of the larger
732.
by pacaro 9y ago
Of course, because doctors knew that patients couldn't see their records, they wrote stuff in them with the expectation that it would never be read by a patient. When the law changed, this was a major point of contention.
733.
by pacaro 9y ago
Indeed, and at the time when this was done to her, and for most of her life, she had no legal right to see her own medical records. IIRC That was only introduced sometime in the 80s in the UK.
734.
by pacaro 9y ago
It's to keep the page weight balanced. Prose is considered to have neutral buoyancy, but code is naturally heavier and will tend to drag the page down if that isn't compensated by a lighter font. FWIW poetry can be so light, that
735.
by pacaro 9y ago
Where my education in the history of science overlaps with Neal Stephenson, there is often not too much agreement. Naturally, he has license to make things work however he choses in his fictional universe. I'd be wary about thinking th
736.
by pacaro 9y ago
You could probably do the same with PeekMessage in win32, maybe call it periodically in a green threading library, or similar. But the most common mechanism is an event loop. I'm sure people have developed X applications that talk the
737.
by pacaro 9y ago
Also win32/16 and X both have event loops at the core
738.
by pacaro 9y ago
Did I miss something? I see nothing on this list that touches on mentoring or growing. I do see a line about firing underperformers. I've heard a metric that it costs between 2.5-5 time annual salary to replace someone. Sometimes an un
739.
by pacaro 9y ago
Not everyone can hire the best. Everywhere I've worked in the last 15 years has aimed to hire the best, none have succeeded. A "hiring the best" motivation can easily become anti-diverse, because it plays on people's bia
740.
by pacaro 9y ago
Yeah, my recollections are from a talk I attended 17 years ago, so details may be a little off. It was the first time that I ever saw refactoring demoed. I have no idea what happened to it in the longer term, I know that Simonyi left Micros
741.
by pacaro 9y ago
This sounds a lot like Simonyi's "intentional programming" Code stored as AST in a database, text representation in a specific language is just one of many possible views
742.
by pacaro 9y ago
Yes. It certainly isn't a one way street. I'd also add that having seniority/tenure has its own value within a larger organization. There is certainly no one-size-fits-all advice here!
743.
by pacaro 9y ago
Another simpleapproach to exception handling (beyond calling abort) is to allow an exception callback to be registered. This can allow appropriate diagnostic logging, and/or compensation
744.
by pacaro 9y ago
Having to move to get promoted is frustrating and real. Within large companies you can usually move to another team (how hard this is varies), but it is typically required that this be a lateral move, which then slows velocity, whereas chan
745.
by pacaro 9y ago
And don't have a yard, or if you do, don't allow letting the dog into the yard be a stand in for taking the dog for a walk. Obviously that defeats the point for you, but it also doesn't do the dog any favours either. My large
746.
by pacaro 9y ago
Clearly there are good examples either way. I'm more interested in the idea that this strong mismatch between the complexity of the code and the complexity of its tests is, in itself, a code smell that may point to an issue that is not
747.
by pacaro 9y ago
This depends on how you think of things. Some languages (Eiffel?) have pre- and post-conditions, which do some of this job. Much of the boilerplate testing done for dynamic languages is done by the compiler for static languages. The borrow
748.
by pacaro 9y ago
This was one of the fun things about working on Midori, the whole system was available to us, components all communicated through well defined interfaces, you really could (if necessary) mock the interfaces above and below and be sure that
749.
by pacaro 9y ago
It grates for me when I withdraw cash. The most convenient ATM for me charges $3 when I withdraw money. My approach to this is to never pull less than $300, so the fee is 1% or less. But for people who are pulling $20 because that's wh
750.
by pacaro 9y ago
I don't know about "wild success" but the 3doodler is now sold in ToysRUs, so that seems like a reasonable metric for entering the mainstream given their area. MicroPython seems to have acquired a reasonable level of traction

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