pjscott

33 ms·

331.
by pjscott 5y ago
I checked the documentation for the ICU Unicode library and Apple's Foundation library, and they both say that numerical formatting is a property of the locale rather than the language. I'd be surprised if other major platforms di
332.
by pjscott 5y ago
Well said. And as Peter Chane himself noted in one of those emails, "there are 20 more sites like this that Yahoo could go out and buy". In order for Google to effectively gobble up the competition, they would need to go on a vide
333.
by pjscott 5y ago
> Living expenses are high, work demands are high, people are stressed and all the easy options are terrible for you. It's not obvious, but there are some ways to trade relatively small amounts of inconvenience for food that's
334.
by pjscott 5y ago
They have their own chip designs, but the manufacturing is done by TSMC.
335.
by pjscott 5y ago
Doctorow seems to be missing the meaning of that quote (which is also not the title of a talk, ironic or otherwise). It was specifically a comment on the usefulness of computer language models created manually based on linguistic theories o
336.
by pjscott 5y ago
If this were the cause then you would expect blue states to have better-functioning government agencies than red states, but as far as I can tell they don't.
337.
by pjscott 5y ago
Moral arguments aside, there's an interesting empirical question here: how many straight men actually feel no attraction to (pubescent) teen girls? That sounds like a set of preferences that would have a hard time evolving, and one tha
338.
by pjscott 5y ago
The Gregorian epoch was chosen for UUID v6 in order to make it as similar to v1 as possible, for ease of updating existing software. There are two more types of UUID proposed in this draft RFC: v7 which uses the Unix epoch and allows more t
339.
by pjscott 5y ago
Today I learned! That sounds fascinating; is there anything written down about it somewhere?
340.
by pjscott 5y ago
I'm not worried about collisions and I agree that being able to put metadata in the UUID is a big meh of a feature. The problem with v4 is what happens when people try using them as database keys: the random sort order can really hurt
341.
by pjscott 5y ago
Which of the 5 existing kinds of UUID do you consider the One True UUID? No matter which you pick, I guarantee that there's something badly wrong with it for at least one common use-case that can be improved by switching to either v4
342.
by pjscott 5y ago
Section 7, "Distributed UUID Generation", mentions that you MAY hold some of the most significant random bits constant per-machine to act as a machine identifier.
343.
by pjscott 5y ago
Yeah, I'm a bit torn on this security-wise. On the one hand, their only real security-relevant ambition here is to avoid leaking MAC address info, a classic UUID foot-gun, and they do achieve this. Probably a much better set of default
344.
by pjscott 5y ago
Splay trees aren't a dynamic programming thing (and aren't used in any database storage backends I know of). They are, however, conjectured to be no more than a constant factor slower than a dynamically optimal binary search tree.
345.
by pjscott 5y ago
Since there's no valid way for part of the node to be put in front of the timestamp and sequence counter bits -- that would contradict the format specifications in section 4 -- they probably meant to write "succeeding" or &qu
346.
by pjscott 5y ago
A precision of 100 ns is not bad, just inflexible; I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The epoch is weird, though. Here's a thought experiment: imagine that a hundred programmers are each asked to pick an epoch for a timestamp, an
347.
by pjscott 5y ago
They're to be generated for each individual UUID. (However, this RFC recommends using the entirely random UUID4 for anything that's meant to be used in a security-related context, presumably with a CSPRNG.)
348.
by pjscott 5y ago
A somewhat oversimplified summary of the new UUID formats: UUID6: a timestamp with a weird epoch and 100 ns precision like in UUID1, but in a big-endian order that sorts naturally by time, plus some random bits instead of a predictable MAC
349.
by pjscott 5y ago
Many are the sects who pursue the Way, and countless their contradictions! Those who write accounting apps, in contrast, are just hella boned by uninteresting complexity. In my experience OS kernels just make more sense than most front-en
350.
by pjscott 5y ago
RNA uses an error-correcting code, and if that fails all that should happen is that some of the proteins your ribosomes create will be misshapen. Your body is good at dealing with foreign proteins.
351.
by pjscott 5y ago
He’s halfway there in terms of how many of his shares of stock have been given away.
352.
by pjscott 5y ago
They certainly have money, but money doesn't seem to be the problem here. None of the things that the article talks about have any obvious connection with school funding, but with the culture of the school and how it's run. If the
353.
by pjscott 5y ago
I'm not Patrick Collison, but if I were then I might say that there are already a bunch of impressively plausible-looking carbon capture and sequestration technologies, they look like our best bet on the margin, and what they mostly ne
354.
by pjscott 5y ago
That depends on how much money it takes to get a bit more of the market and how much money you expect to get from them. Ideally you'd reach the point where those two derivatives are equal, then stop.
355.
by pjscott 5y ago
In rural areas, contention should stay low enough that the speeds will continue to be at least decent. And of course the latency is much lower than geosynchronous satellites, independent of bandwidth.
356.
by pjscott 5y ago
The micro-reactor designs I looked up generally fell into one of three categories: 1. Very high enrichment fuel because they need fast load-following, e.g. for naval use. 2. Very high enrichment fuel because they're for use in space, a
357.
by pjscott 5y ago
You can make a reasonable utilitarian argument for some kind of redistribution, progressive tax, welfare, etc., based on poorer people having greater marginal utility of money. The book's reply, in the "Robin Hood Sells Out"
358.
by pjscott 5y ago
That sounds a bit off. Presumably something is worth more to you than what you pay for it -- otherwise you wouldn't buy it. If someone drives up the price of something by making it artificially scarce, its value to you hasn't go
359.
by pjscott 5y ago
Historical fiction, I would say, and a beautiful entry into the genre.
360.
by pjscott 5y ago
It's bizarrely hard to find good explanations of this! The National Malaria Eradication Program, between 1947 and 1951, cut down on malaria transmission enough that the parasite was driven locally extinct. They drained wetlands where m

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