retrac

52 ms·

721.
by retrac 3y ago
Bongiorno is a regional (Venetian?) or historical spelling; it may be less common in Italy than outside of Italy these days. Wikipedia lists most of the prominent living people with the name as being in Australia, the USA, or Argentina, th
722.
by retrac 3y ago
China's time zone is interesting, mostly a reflection of the fact that like 80% of the population lives in a north-south strip along the coast, largely within one "natural" time zone. The further you are from the east coast,
723.
by retrac 3y ago
Probably because we like round numbers. But there are half-hour aligned time-zones. Newfoundland is -3.5. It's currently 11:20 am here in Toronto and 12:50 pm in St. John's. Then there's the Chatham Islands of New Zealan
724.
by retrac 3y ago
> none of that works in the physical world Are you sure? The most common way to specify hardware these days is with a hardware description language, and the usual programming language tools like diff work for that. I'd personally
725.
by retrac 3y ago
Maybe your slice of Twitter isn't. My take is that we can't actually say whether Twitter is, or isn't, a Nazi hellscape, because of the darn algorithm. It's in the way. Since everyone gets a personalized view, there&#
726.
by retrac 3y ago
I've likewise read arguments that AC is linked to the substantial economic growth in the second half of the 20th century, in regions like southern France, southern Japan, and the southern United States. All regions that historically l
727.
by retrac 3y ago
> What if every buffer in my text-editor registered "I am a source of text, and I am a target of text".. When I open a file, I can chose a file-system plugin to provide the text to the buffer, but I could also use the HTTPS pro
728.
by retrac 3y ago
Even more so with the Mac's predecessor, the Lisa. Lisa didn't really have the concept of "applications" or "user programs". The "document" was a central feature, a core OS concept. Programs provi
729.
by retrac 3y ago
> But the Unix "worse is better" approach won out. Did it? In my opinion, modern Unix systems are much more like VMS than they're like traditional "worse is better" Unix. One of the classic "worse is bette
730.
by retrac 3y ago
> “The problem is that it’s not a treaty; that’s an American law,” Sai said. “The United States could no more annex a foreign country by passing a law than it could pass the law today for the Congress to annex Canada. It has no effect be
731.
by retrac 3y ago
A local store or library decorated with a mural of some idyllic park scene is almost cliche here in Canada. Typical is a giant yellow sun and, yes, the obligatory detached smiling heads. I've seen abstract geometric patterns more oft
732.
by retrac 3y ago
I can't remember his name now, but many years ago, I read the autobiography/memoir of a Japanese-Canadian internee transported and held by the Canadian government. One thing I do remember is his offence at the inability to bathe,
733.
by retrac 3y ago
Github is likely to be actively cooperating. They normally seek to remove such content; it's against the terms of service.
734.
by retrac 3y ago
As an educational project, I wrote a PDP-8 emulator in Haskell that was structured essentially like that. It was a function from a Machine to a Machine, where Machine was a datatype representing the entire RAM, registers, and other associa
735.
by retrac 3y ago
Well, Musk is an interesting example. I don't see him strapping himself to one of his rockets until he is darn sure it's not going to blow up.
736.
by retrac 3y ago
The comments in the code are wonderful documentation. I like the applicative mutex, I may borrow the idea! https://github.com/cbiffle/lilos/blob/main/os/src/mutex.rs
737.
by retrac 3y ago
Applications tend to stay open on Mac even with no windows open. As a KDE on Linux user, I tend to open and close apps as I use them. Very few applications take more than a second to load on a modern machine with an SSD, anyway. I find th
738.
by retrac 3y ago
Electron apps may be mocked, but they're not avoided by most. VS Code is probably the #1 programmer's editor these days.
739.
Cleaner accidentally ruins decades of research by turning off freezer(theguardian.com)
7 points by retrac 3y ago|6 comments
740.
by retrac 3y ago
I am not American. I am not a driver. I detest car-centric urban design. It's fascinating how many of the replies require you or other commenters to rely heavily on straw men and false assumptions (like assuming American nationality)
741.
by retrac 3y ago
Pedestrian deaths have been increasing in many countries. It is not a US-specific phenomenon.
742.
by retrac 3y ago
Someone who has been hit by a car twice. That's who thinks like that. I do not step into traffic without carefully looking every direction, to the horizon, for any vehicle that might move in my direction. Should I have to live like
743.
by retrac 3y ago
It takes two to not get run over. I'm deaf. So I really do not have the luxury of just hoping others see me. I have to be real careful in traffic. Is it fair? Not really. I care more about not being run over than whether it's
744.
by retrac 3y ago
Walking and on their phones, too. In recent years I've seen people step into intersections while on their phone without even looking up. Edit: anyone who disagrees and has downvoted me care to explain why? I wrote the comment from t
745.
by retrac 3y ago
If you plot human height by sex, it's roughly a normal distribution for each sex, and the women are a few inches shorter than the men. Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is
746.
by retrac 3y ago
Serious answer? Pests and drafts. We raise beds off floors for good reasons. I only recently learned that even headboards have a reason to exist: drafts flow down to the floor rather than over the sleeper. Sort of like my friend who feel
747.
by retrac 3y ago
We can move food around. Famines historically tended to be regional; bad climate, or natural or man-made disaster, devastating food production in an area. Before the 19th century moving enough food from another region, or even from another
748.
by retrac 3y ago
It was greatly worsened by Mao's policies. But a famine would have happened anyway. There's no alternate history where different government policy in China could have completely averted the famine of 1960. It was a very poor ye
749.
by retrac 3y ago
In contrast to the current zeitgeist, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, the BBC held a Wagnerfest: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/rjbnc8/by/date/1939/09/04 If anything, German compos
750.
by retrac 3y ago
There's a related idea in Haskell, usually considered a memory safe language. You can write a program in Haskell that directly mutates memory, or does IO operations, freely, anywhere in the code. This violates functional purity a

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