qntm

8 ms·

31.
by qntm 14y ago
> the 4 bytes sequences (Supplementary Planes) are very rarely used (most used languages and useful symbols are already in the Basic Multilingual Plane) and also more complicated so I did not vectorize that case for the scope of this bl
32.
by qntm 14y ago
> Valuable as surprise launches may be, are they that valuable? Or is there more to this, in which case what is it? It's about staying so far ahead of the competition that nobody can ever hope to catch up.
33.
by qntm 14y ago
There's no largest integer, but the integers still form a set with an (infinite) cardinality, namely aleph-zero. Likewise, there's no largest cardinal, but you'd think that the cardinals also formed a set with an (infinite) cardinality of i
34.
by qntm 14y ago
Those sets have the same cardinality...
35.
by qntm 14y ago
A much harder question is "How many infinities are there?" http://everything2.com/user/sam512/writeups/How+many+infinit...
36.
by qntm 14y ago
They should just give them year numbers. This is the 2012 iPad. Older models are the 2011 iPad and the 2010 iPad. The system is perfectly simple to understand and has planned obsolescence.
37.
by qntm 14y ago
The axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory don't admit the construction of a "set of all sets that don't contain themelves".
38.
by qntm 14y ago
Subtract the nice wallpaper and the problems here become much more obvious. It's wrong in exactly the same way that the new Gmail UI is wrong. Too much white space, too little colour, tiny grey abstract buttons without obvious hit boxes. Sc
39.
by qntm 14y ago
That's a fair point. Strawberry Perl, I'm looking at you. I stand by the rest of what I said, though. If a piece of software can't handle spaces in paths, the software is broken. I'm not adding a top-level directory to my C: drive just to a
40.
by qntm 14y ago
Program Files My Documents Also, why wouldn't I? Why shouldn't I? There isn't a single file system that prevents me from doing so and there isn't a single other computer program in the world which has a problem with it.
41.
by qntm 14y ago
Fair warning: GNU make cannot handle directory names or file names which contain spaces. This is a show-stopper defect which has been present since the day it was written and shows no signs of ever being fixed.
42.
by qntm 14y ago
The only explanation for 110,000 transactions taking a whole weekend is if bank employees are handling them manually. That amount of work should take 60 seconds.
43.
by qntm 14y ago
6th April, actually.
44.
by qntm 14y ago
Same reason two plus two equals four.
45.
by qntm 14y ago
"Ton" would be ambiguous, but "tonne" is unambiguously the metric tonne (1000 kilograms).
46.
by qntm 14y ago
> Vehicles using this interface may include light vehicles in the range of 5-8K kg, and medium vehicles in the range of 8-25K kg. These vehicles will dock to each other, to large space complexes in the range of 100-375K kg, and to large
47.
by qntm 14y ago
Not that the floppy disk being used as a Save icon was actually floppy, of course.
48.
by qntm 14y ago
Well, for one thing, the total number of digital computers in the whole world increased by a factor of about a hundred million.
49.
by qntm 15y ago
Mathematicians are able to quickly pick up new technical concepts and systems. Also, studying mathematics trains you to recognise and focus on important edge cases. That's good for designing software to be robust, finding problems in specif
50.
by qntm 15y ago
All of Inception is a dream except the final scene. It's a movie about a father (Michael Caine) trying to rescue his son.
51.
by qntm 15y ago
The terminology isn't fixed, but in my book, a traffic circle is where traffic on the rotary has to yield to traffic entering, whereas traffic on a roundabout has priority over traffic entering. Roundabouts are typically smaller (down to a
52.
by qntm 15y ago
Getting up to go to the bathroom between typing in the password and hitting Enter?
53.
by qntm 15y ago
Point being, no amount of money can replace time spent off work with your family. What are you going to do, pay your spouse and children as an alternative to actually eating dinner with them? Only replacement time can make up for that sacri
54.
by qntm 15y ago
> In practice what this often means for the developer is unpaid overtime (also known as "crunch time"), something very familiar to game developers, and also common in traditional software development, as the project nears its deadline.
55.
by qntm 15y ago
I guess nobody in your entire organisation knows to mute their microphone until they're talking?
56.
by qntm 15y ago
Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, eit
57.
by qntm 15y ago
Is it acceptable to not know sed, grep or awk but to know Perl?
58.
by qntm 15y ago
You're correct, the major disadvantage here is the ambiguity not just in this JSON/S-expression translation but in any possible JSON/S-expression translation. Linear arrays and key-value dictionaries in most programming languages are intu
59.
by qntm 15y ago
It seems[1] that GPS at least already broadcasts "GPS time", which is fixed at TAI plus 19 seconds, and hence doesn't include leap seconds. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timek...
60.
by qntm 15y ago
This article doesn't give clear enough reasons for abolishing leap seconds. One passage says: > But those seeking to abolish the leap second say these one-second jumps are becoming increasingly problematic for navigation and telecommuni

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