raddan

11 ms·

181.
by raddan 9mo ago
Ugh, wow, somehow I missed all this. I guess he joins the ranks of the scientists who made important contributions and then leveraged that recognition into a platform for unhinged diatribes.
182.
by raddan 9mo ago
Interesting idea. How do you distinguish between critical and uncritical citation? It’s also a little thorny—if your related work section is just describing published work (which is a common form of reviewer-proofing), is that a critical or
183.
by raddan 9mo ago
Ahh! Don’t replace your coax with Cat5e/6! Coaxial cable has excellent noise rejection—better than Cat5e. Instead, get a MoCA adapter like this one [1]. You can get 2.5Gbps over coax! [1] https://a.co/d/e2FYGWj
184.
by raddan 9mo ago
The hardest part is figuring out how to use leftpad.
185.
by raddan 9mo ago
That’s a strange argument. There are plenty of stochastic processes that have perfectly acceptable guarantees. A good example is Karger’s min-cut algorithm. You might not know what you get on any given single run, but you know EXACTLY what
186.
by raddan 9mo ago
> a lot of people hiked both the PCT and AT on a shoestring budget Agreed. I was one of those people. My budget for the entire trip, including a fair amount of equipment (I already owned boots), was $2000. This was in 2003. I worked a fa
187.
by raddan 9mo ago
I suppose I should have said “nominally want to learn” etc, but I think you are right: most students simply want the credential. I maintain that this is still a strange attitude, since at some point, some employer is going to ask you to do
188.
by raddan 9mo ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. Plaintext is universal in a way that nothing else really is. Outputting structured data means that consumers would have to process structured data. That definitely raises the difficulty of the programmi
189.
by raddan 9mo ago
There’s a pretty rich literature around this style of pedagogy going back for decades and it is certainly not a new idea. My preferred formulation is Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” [1], which is the set of activities that a stude
190.
by raddan 9mo ago
I’m curious: what do you see as unnecessary about the CLI? Or, to put it another way, in what way should the CLI be changed so that the only remaining difficulties are the necessary ones?
191.
by raddan 9mo ago
Ditto. I found that people whose attitude was “let’s just try it” tended to be a lot more capable and effective. Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom when I was in IT was that if you had a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution, you had
192.
by raddan 9mo ago
At the university level in the US, few faculty get any kind of training before they are expected to start teaching. And the teaching requirement is more or less “do no harm.” If you’re at a research university, which includes many publicly
193.
by raddan 9mo ago
I sort of did the opposite of you. I hiked the AT before I started my career. The interesting thing is that it has always given me a reserve to draw on when I am feeling burned out or upset like the original poster. I can always say “you kn
194.
by raddan 9mo ago
It is definitely true that the labor cost of a solar installation is the largest driver of cost. In my area, there are solar incentives to offset this. For example I was able to cover a large portion of the loan with a 0% interest rate thro
195.
by raddan 9mo ago
That appears to be true in places in the US that have time-of-use rates. Sadly where I live, there are no time-of-use rates for residential customers, otherwise I would absolutely do this.
196.
by raddan 9mo ago
Generating your own power does not necessarily mean cutting ties with the grid. I think for most people in most places being off-grid would be a real challenge. I’m not sure how Australia does it but in my neck of the woods (northeast US) s
197.
by raddan 9mo ago
Also, power companies did not necessarily kill energy export incentives. Here in Massachusetts my meter “runs backward” when I export to the grid. This does not earn me money but it does earn me kWh credits, which means that if I am net neg
198.
by raddan 9mo ago
None of this is fresh in my mind, so my recollections might be a little hazy. I think the only issue I personally had when writing a decoder was keeping the alignment of various fields right. I wrote the decoder in C# and if I remember corr
199.
by raddan 9mo ago
I tried vibe coding a BMP decoder not too long ago with the rationale being “what’s simpler than BMP?” What I got was an absolute mess that did not work at all. Perhaps this was because, in retrospect, BMP is not actually all that simple, a
200.
by raddan 9mo ago
I do indeed get a lot of snow. In January and February it snows roughly once every two days, although usually in small amounts. Fortunately I have a ground mount. The bottom row is roughly at waist height. I can (and have been) sweeping the
201.
by raddan 9mo ago
I installed a 16.5kWp ground-mount array a month ago. I live in the US Northeast, in a mountainous location that means we get late sunrises and early sunsets. Nevertheless, based on my one month of data, it looks like we can generate all th
202.
by raddan 10mo ago
I assume you’re joking, but I have a Cuban acquaintance who actually did something like this. He did everything on paper and even won a national coding competition without ever having actually used a computer. Of course, as soon as he had t
203.
by raddan 10mo ago
Or shellfish. [1] [1] https://secureshellfish.app/
204.
by raddan 10mo ago
I agree. This was evidently a new experience for this person, and maybe the reason is that they’re… a new adult? Anyway, even old people have new experiences all the time. At least this person is putting themselves out there and doing somet
205.
by raddan 10mo ago
Citation still required.
206.
by raddan 10mo ago
Citation required.
207.
by raddan 10mo ago
I keep having this nagging suspicion that the biggest AI boosters just aren’t very good programmers. Maybe they cannot see all the subtle bugs. I’m not an amazing coder but I frequently have “wait, stop!” moments when generating code with a
208.
by raddan 10mo ago
WINE has been reimplementing the Win32 ABI (not API) for decades. It already works pretty well; development has been driven by both volunteers and commercial developers (CodeWeavers) for a long time.
209.
by raddan 10mo ago
Yes, you need two hard drives. If you’re really paranoid, use three.
210.
by raddan 10mo ago
I am a professor of CS and we found, post-pandemic, that very few students had any exposure to real computers. It was all smartphones and tablets. So the things you mention—not knowing what a file is—really is the state of things. We now ex

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