pjscott

41 ms·

451.
by pjscott 7y ago
To build intuition for this, here's a contrived example. You own a widget-making company, and they're very successful: you get a profit of $1 for each widget sold, and each widget factory produces 1 million widgets per year. You c
452.
by pjscott 7y ago
That could lead to buffer overflow.Å��
453.
by pjscott 7y ago
Unicode is complicated because the languages it needs to handle are, alas, complicated. UTF-8 is super simple. It's a variable-length encoding for 21-bit unsigned integers. Wikipedia gives a handy table showing how it works: https
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by pjscott 7y ago
Stuck in an appendix is a fascinating mini-essay, "How many computers are in your computer?" https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete#how-many-computers-are...
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by pjscott 7y ago
Fundamentally, decision-making is what predictions are for . We mainly care about information to guide our actions. There are some interesting implications of this for how we should do research. https://www.gwern.net/Resear
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by pjscott 7y ago
The voices on this particular video are all conservative because it's a clip from the Daily Show, not an unbiased sample, and of course they're going to mainly pick on the other side. People on the right are making similar lists
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by pjscott 7y ago
If anybody at AWS is reading this: congratulations! Thank you! Keeping infrastructure running is hard in the best of times, and these times definitely are not the best.
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by pjscott 7y ago
At the moment it's reputational enforcement: if enough people badmouth them on Hacker News, the money will flow to competitors. (There are other ways to enforce norms, but they have their own problems.)
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by pjscott 7y ago
I agree, but it's not obvious that courts would agree, and lawsuits are expensive even if you win. The legal liability worries are still there, alas.
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by pjscott 7y ago
There's a phrase for when an online forum becomes less of a bubble and more representative of the real world. It's called the Eternal September, and people usually aren't happy when it happens.
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by pjscott 7y ago
They fall under the category of monopolies.
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by pjscott 7y ago
Exactly: protection is probabilistic . Hand-washing isn't perfect, social distancing isn't perfect, and therefore in a sense you could say that they also "don't work" -- but they work in the sense that matters, i.e
463.
by pjscott 7y ago
I want people to rush to testing all sorts of drugs, this one included. How quickly should testing of a drug expand? That depends on a balance of risks. The faster you go, the more danger there is of the drug having bad side-effects while
464.
by pjscott 7y ago
When I buy something from Amazon, typically what I get is exactly what I expected, at a good price, with quick delivery. I bought socks from my preferred brand and got them. I bought a pair of trail running shoes that someone recommended, a
465.
by pjscott 7y ago
The most egregious offenders here IMO are C++'s map and unordered_map. The spec constrains the possible implementations, and it's hard to implement them as anything better than a red-black tree or a badly-unoptimized hash table, r
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by pjscott 7y ago
Probably the best we can do is to have a variety of places to discuss things, with a variety of rules and norms and purposes -- and an acknowledgement that one person's safe space is another person's nightmare. https://
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by pjscott 7y ago
The serialization format here was designed so you can parse it (or detect a parse error and bail out) in a single O(n) pass through the message data. No backtracking required. (You mentioned strings, so I'll use that to give flavor: a
468.
by pjscott 7y ago
The data types that msgpack supports aren't quite the same as JSON -- msgpack has encodings for signed and unsigned 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit integers, as well as single- and double-precision floats. (This runs into trouble if you'r
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by pjscott 7y ago
How does software get reliable at all, ever? In my experience there are two ways: 1. You write reliable software from the start. It feels a lot like writing a mathematical proof, or at least sketching one. After a few dumb bugs are fixed th
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by pjscott 7y ago
How many HTTP request does nginx usually serve before crashing? How long can a Linux kernel stay up before panicking? Some complex software is startlingly reliable.
471.
by pjscott 7y ago
A small minority of unusually smart inventors is all you really need to explain impressive past technological achievements. This doesn't really prove anything one way or the other. I'd be surprised if people hundreds of years ag
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by pjscott 7y ago
Just regular B-trees for row and index storage. There's a reason why it's such a popular data structure! https://www.sqlite.org/arch.html
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by pjscott 7y ago
Induced demand is where more of some good is supplied, which drives down its price, which increases the amount consumed, which means the price isn't driven down as much as it would have been if there had been no change in amount consum
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by pjscott 7y ago
This particular collection of blog posts is IMO the most valuable part of that canon. It does have some redundancy, since some points are worth belaboring -- but if you'd like to skip that and just read the parts that interest you, t
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by pjscott 7y ago
I think this is the talk you're referring to. If not, it's still definitely worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPR8h4-qZdk
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by pjscott 7y ago
Most regulations aren't price controls, but the historical regulations being discussed here are. In the US, routes and prices used to be decided by the Civil Aeronautics Board, removing price competition between airlines. After the pri
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by pjscott 7y ago
Air travel is so much safer than traveling by car that anything you can do to bring down its price is probably a big safety win -- including corner-cutting on airplane safety.
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by pjscott 7y ago
"Cloud", in this case, is a buzzwordy but brief way of saying "capacity quickly scalable up and down, with fixed costs mostly replaced by variable ones".
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by pjscott 7y ago
I looked into Zume a bit more and as far as I can tell it actually makes sense. They're not reinventing the wheel. It's odd that people are jeering at them. Their initial focus was on incrementally improving the way pizza delivery
480.
by pjscott 7y ago
After looking through some of the threads there, I have to applaud the moderators. They're very explicit about not wanting to be hateful, and (if the number of deleted comments is any indication) they're very willing to enforce

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