retrac

17 ms·

241.
by retrac 2y ago
It is mentioned in the site FAQ that they don't delete accounts. I feel that redacting the account name of someone who regrets some of their posts for privacy reasons, so at least individual comments cannot be linked together into a pr
242.
by retrac 2y ago
What you are describing is sometimes called a shared dictionary and it's a great trick for task-specific compression, where you know what data you're going to be compressing ahead of time. The Brotli algorithm is typical LZ plus a
243.
by retrac 2y ago
The term in linguistics for a category of 3 or 4 things is "paucal". Most languages with a paucal separate 2 from 3 or 4, resulting in four noun categories/forms by number: singular (1), dual (2), paucal (3 - 4? a few?) and
244.
by retrac 2y ago
Yes. Though at least in my market, that used to have delivery fees or minimum orders that made it unlikely you would order a single sandwich for lunch and have it delivered. The food delivery app services really emphasize that model of co
245.
by retrac 2y ago
There are references to the IBM 7090/7094 version under IBSYS online. In this 7094 emulator package on Github: https://github.com/Bertoid1311/B7094 (in the zipped distribution files unfortunately) I think there is
246.
by retrac 2y ago
Glass doesn't need to be poorly insulating. Double and triple paned glass are great at insulation. Some even use vacuum, at which point you're basically building a giant Thermos. Getting a good seal is still tricky. Unwanted s
247.
by retrac 2y ago
Fifty years ago in Ontario, Canada if you were a single adult destitute with no income you would be eligible for general welfare which would pay about $180 a month, when the average rent on 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto was about $150 a mo
248.
by retrac 2y ago
> Obviously way more people migrate nowadays than historically. The peak for population movement globally was probably after WW II. Partition of India alone is like 20 million people migrating in 1947. Europe was almost as bad with ten
249.
by retrac 2y ago
Don't just count your calories. Count your protein, too. The beans aren't optional on this kind of diet. It's relatively common for people trying to stretch a budget to start substituting more grains instead of beans/
250.
by retrac 2y ago
The 8086 and 8088 etc. were relatively popular for embedded devices. For example some early 90s Apple printers used an 80186 as the controller. Such designs were often incompatible with the IBM PC; 8086 doesn't necessarily mean PC co
251.
by retrac 2y ago
Assuming it is initial zero inc eax is a byte shorter than mov al, 1
252.
by retrac 2y ago
Even among vaccines that are effective enough to halt a pathogen on a population level, it doesn't mean it guarantees immunity on an individual level. Some people vaccinated for smallpox or polio or measles caught them anyway back whe
253.
by retrac 2y ago
The popular use of feet, inches, pounds, and a few of the other old units does persist in parallel to SI. As the joke goes, only in Canada can a river be 200 km long and 2 ft wide.
254.
by retrac 2y ago
I was trying to convey a subjective and emotional experience. Obviously I failed. I hope that when you try to express awe it isn't dismissed as weasel words. I give up. Delete my account please dang. This site isn't good for my
255.
by retrac 2y ago
There's a general consensus that entropy is deeply spooky. It pops up in physics in black holes and the heat death of the universe. The physicist Erwin Schrodinger suggested that life itself consumes negative entropy, and others have
256.
by retrac 2y ago
There have even been proposals for a rail tunnel between Finland and Estonia; the Baltics are shallow enough. A power/data tunnel could be done but it would not be cheap. But that won't address all the other cables which can&#x27
257.
by retrac 2y ago
It's unfeasible to heavily armour undersea cables for the whole length. Heavy armour is already used on shallow sections where shipping lanes are known and accidents are anticipated. This is a typical data cable: https://sp
258.
by retrac 2y ago
It's ironically appropriate. Not sure if it's a [bug emoji] or a stylistic choice to not allow emoji on HN, but it does illustrate how variable handling of emoji can be.
259.
by retrac 2y ago
It seems that on HN " ".length == 1 as the emoji has been replaced with a space.
260.
by retrac 2y ago
The genetics for both are recessive in complex ways that aren't fully understood. But like the article says recessive does not mean diluted. For example the genes for red hair are quite widely distributed across central Asia. Every
261.
by retrac 2y ago
The largest nuclear power plant in North America, Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, a bit east of Toronto, uses robots for handling the fuel rods. The plant was designed in the late 70s and the control software is apparent
262.
by retrac 2y ago
Canadian federalism relies on an interworking of government levels. To use an example, criminal law is written federally, the prosecutors are funded and run provincially, the superior courts are run provincially but the federal government
263.
by retrac 2y ago
I don't see housing as something that really needs innovation. We historically solved the problem; in the 1980s rough sleeping in Canada was at levels you see in like Finland today -- estimates for Toronto were a couple hundred indivi
264.
by retrac 2y ago
> explain why creating a file takes a page of options? z/OS dates to an era of bewildering diversity in storage hardware - from punch cards to mag tape to disks with variable length sectors and built-in hardware search mechanisms.
265.
by retrac 2y ago
> record a real telephone in the US and accurately capture the feeling of a long-distance call Aside from the signalling, it would be tricky to mimic the tinny hollow sound that came on a long-distance analog connection. Sideband modula
266.
by retrac 2y ago
Access to main memory can be many many cycles; a short routine already in cache may be able to recompute a value more quickly than pulling it from main memory.
267.
by retrac 2y ago
DEC was always finnicky about naming; the PDP series originally wasn't supposed to be called a computer because computers were thought of as much bigger than the products DEC sold, and customers in the 50s and 60s might be put off by a
268.
by retrac 2y ago
Modula-2 is interesting. It is basically the C many wished had been around in the 80s and 90s. Modula-2 has about the same expressiveness of C with pointers, structs, unions, and all that, but it has a stronger type system (tagged unions,
269.
by retrac 2y ago
As a rule, interpreted code has a smaller memory footprint than natively compiled programs. Even interpreted on a several hundred MHz classic RISC microcontroller, Lisp will chew through a million cons cells a second or more - an order of m
270.
by retrac 2y ago
Is an early 20th century mechanical desk calculator a computer? There is no consensus on definition but for me, a computer follows a program. Maybe even only one fixed program. But a program. If there is no stepping through a program i

More ›