pja

78 ms·

871.
by pja 11y ago
IIRC the correlation between lead exposure & violent crime rates 20 years later is fairly good: you can track it on a state by state level as each state banned lead additives in fuel at different times. But proving any cause with a with
872.
by pja 11y ago
Yup: The Electron came later & was a cut down BBC Micro. Unfortunately for Acorn, they ramped production right into the early 80s home microcomputer slump & the ensuing financial problems eventually forced the sale of the company to
873.
by pja 11y ago
Friendships are formed most easily when people work together over a period of time on a shared mission. Find something that you want to do & go do it with other like-minded people. Talk to them about more than just the thing you are doi
874.
by pja 11y ago
Scott Alexander wrote a whole article on the difficulties in bringing competitors to out of patent drugs to the US market: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/24/the-problems-with-gener...
875.
by pja 11y ago
In the US, you still have to get FDA approval to sell drugs that claim to be reformulations of another manufacturer’s product. This isn’t entirely baseless - demonstrating your version’s bioequivalency to the original is part of the process
876.
by pja 11y ago
The redshift binary can be built without any of the GUI stuff at all, so some of the bloat complaint is a bit over-blown - more a fault of the port provider to not offer the option of a stripped down install perhaps?
877.
by pja 11y ago
Introversion is a bit bigger than just two people IIRC. They also predate the post Steam indie boom: they have a longish history of creating interesting, innovative games that weren’t always that commercially successful going back to around
878.
by pja 11y ago
I think we tried changing the level multiplier & it not making much difference - although I didn’t write the code, someone else in our team did. The problem space was a seen-set store for a exhaustive prover. (ie, a continuous loop of:
879.
by pja 11y ago
Yup. That exactly matches my past experience from when we tried levelDB as a possible replacement for our key-value store in a past project. On paper level DB looks great but the extra write load from the write amplification thanks to the m
880.
by pja 11y ago
There’s still the possibility of malicious Chrome extensions: I had to eliminate one or two from my son’s Chromebook recently. The naive will always be vulnerable to bad actors unfortunately.
881.
by pja 11y ago
Ah, but that was the beauty of the (putative) NSA hack on the standards process: you only leaked the state of the random number generator to an entity that knew the factors of the parameter used by Dual_EC_DRBG to feed the algorithm. Using
882.
by pja 11y ago
Pretty much: Odds are that, if you roll your own, you’ll make mistakes which make your code trivial to break for a motivated attacker that is willing to put the effort into targeting you personally. It’s also quite possible that the NSA&#x2
883.
by pja 11y ago
So they paid next to no corporation tax. Meanwhile their employees will have paid a stack of income tax & the new rules on VAT should mean that all Facebook Ad sales to UK customers are subject to UK VAT. I don’t think the UK is being s
884.
by pja 11y ago
Related: “Eroom’s Law”[1], coined in this Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html which states that the cost of discovering a new drug has been increasing exponentia
885.
by pja 11y ago
Rate limiting on password logins ought to be the default, not some optional extra that only the security savvy know to install. Defaults matter: not implementing rate limiting by default in sshd has left an open door for these people to wal
886.
by pja 11y ago
PPC Debian runs just fine on my old Mac Mini. I could replace the thing, but it just keeps chugging on.
887.
by pja 11y ago
Reading the source blog post rather than boingboing, it looks like this code is supposed to just report back to Lenovo on the user’s use of the Lenovo specific code on the machine in question. Unfortunately, Lenovo has seriously blotted t
888.
by pja 11y ago
In this case, the URL alone is enough to tell you that it’s probably worth reading.
889.
by pja 11y ago
I guess if we’re returning to a simpler age then all ads are display ads & rates are set by guesstimating website reach using old school methods: things like actually going out and surveying your target audience to see how many of them
890.
by pja 11y ago
Is it a buffer overflow? - I suspect the OS is killing the LockScreen task due to memory exhaustion from the length of time it takes to trigger the bug.
891.
by pja 11y ago
Yeah, it’s exhaustive search. Fortunately storage costs have dropped like a rock over the last few decades, so problems that were hilariously impractical only a few years ago are now checkable on commodity hardware. A fully interlinked (ie
892.
by pja 11y ago
Exactly :)
893.
by pja 11y ago
http://intellectualicebergs.org/kidputer/ was my original source. I’ve tweaked the exercise a bit though, so I’ll see if I can get those changes written up - the original author gave us permission to use the work as we
894.
by pja 11y ago
I should get round to submitting my updated version of the 'have a bunch of kids be logic gates & simulate a binary adder' exercise I found on the net a few years ago which has gone down really well the last few times I'v
895.
by pja 11y ago
For those who are unclear on the significance of this, Christopher Alexander’s works were foundational to the pattern movement in software architecture & design. There are some links on Ward Cunningham’s software patterns wiki: http:&#
896.
by pja 11y ago
IIRC docker (or any other virtual machine filesystem) in a single image file and hashing filesystems mix really, really badly. Docker could use BTRFS / ZFS snapshots instead of using whole filesystem image files though, so this ought t
897.
by pja 11y ago
raid1 on all data. This isn't a backup - it's for end-to-end detection of bit flips in (some of) the storage path (and at rest). This needs a better solution (zfs?) Yeah, btrfs or zfs are the better choice for this than RAID1 in
898.
by pja 11y ago
So, do I prioritise Stockfighter or TIS-100? Decisions, decisions :)
899.
by pja 11y ago
The diagonal on the 's' is also far too heavy in small point sizes - hinting again?
900.
by pja 11y ago
It is fine on Linux for me, but on Windows 10 I’m seeing either a very heavy top to the loop of the lowercase a or a very light one, depending on the font size. I suspect the hinting is going haywire somewhere.

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