rgmerk

17 ms·

241.
by rgmerk 3y ago
It’s been discussed before on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715111 Unlikely to work for groceries given the costs of RFID tags, I imagine.
242.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Yeah. I haven’t used it for some time but autoconf always seemed like a horrible hack that was impossible to debug if it didn’t work properly. That was bad enough back in the days where one was mostly concerned with accidents, but in more m
243.
by rgmerk 3y ago
If you're fighting a war, automatic weapons are a pretty much essential tool for doing so effectively. Yeah, war is bad. Sometimes the alternatives are worse.
244.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Not saying this ban is a great idea... ...but there are plenty of useful things that we ban the general public from having access to. Opium poppies. Automatic weapons. Gas centrifuges. In fact, if you start publishing detailed designs for
245.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I’m in the very fortunate position of not having to keep track of the most recent Crohn’s therapies. However I have been prescribed prednisolone for brief periods in the past when I’ve had active disease, which has a lot of known risks with
246.
by rgmerk 3y ago
No idea. Taken mesalazine as directed by my doctor for nearly 30 years, and been extremely lucky. (I’ve had to take predisone three times for flare ups, but not for more than 20 years. As I said, extremely lucky).
247.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I have Crohn’s but am one of the lucky 20% who is in long-term remission without surgery and without the more problematic drug therapies - thus far! But if this works as well as hoped it will bring a lot of peace of mind that if I do ever n
248.
by rgmerk 3y ago
And chew through fuel at truly extraordinary rates. This one, for example, weighs 450 grams, but can consume its own mass in fuel every three minutes! https://www.kingtechturbinesaustralia.com.au/product-page/k4...
249.
by rgmerk 3y ago
There is a demand for more luxurious aircraft travel, but at the moment it's too costly to provide. If BWBs become a thing, maybe the value of cabin space will decrease to the point where paying for a business class - or even premium e
250.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Yes. There’s certainly XML. There’s also some very strange hand-rolled formats that are a right pain to parse.
251.
by rgmerk 3y ago
The inertia around CSV in the finance industry is incredibly strong, and let’s just say some of the biggest industry players aren’t exactly reknowned for their cutting-edge practices when it comes to data interchange formats.
252.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I read this and my overwhelming reaction is nostalgia for an era when you could expose a server to the internet without having to build 20 layers of defence against the worst people in the world trying to misuse it for all sorts of awful cr
253.
by rgmerk 3y ago
But at least drag racing is a spectacle. Not my thing, but it is a spectacle. This? You push a button and a number comes up.
254.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Heh. If I were a startup I wouldn't be relying on Williams International to build me a novel engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_500
255.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Hmmm. I don't know exactly what your personal financial circumstances are...but from what I understand salaries and benefits to be at Google, you're getting paid plenty, and it should be possible to save at least some of that. D
256.
by rgmerk 3y ago
You're overestimating the importance of talent and underestimating the importance of luck. Not saying Larry Page and Sergey page aren't talented - clearly they were/are very talented people. But they were also extraordinaril
257.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Most of these systems are likely software ships of Theseus. Very few lines of code will be unmodified from their original state, but at any given point in time the changes required will only have been small. Hence it’s always been a pragmat
258.
by rgmerk 3y ago
It may have been that they used a PRNG and gave it the same initial seed each time. There were all sorts of odd bits of programming in a lot of these early BASIC games; they were often done by self-taught programmers.
259.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I think I'd prefer to wear out my keyboard typing XML tags than deal with this.
260.
by rgmerk 3y ago
The F-35 first flew in late 2006, and they've debugged it enough to get it into full production...17 years later. In the private sector, you'd no longer be able to buy the components it's built out of. Ridiculous.
261.
by rgmerk 3y ago
The problem is that that by being "that guy" you're probably giving them 10 bits or more of identification. If they can just scrape a few more bits from somewhere they'll have you uniquely identified. But, yeah, these g
262.
by rgmerk 3y ago
If I’m understand you correctly, yes, that would count as manual control - and I’d be impressed to see you fly it!
263.
by rgmerk 3y ago
It’s very common for researchers to be convinced of things they can’t currently prove. Why else are you going to spend years of your life bashing your head against a brick wall trying to prove it? Sometimes that belief pays off spectacular
264.
by rgmerk 3y ago
In the sense of “controlling each engine individually, in real time, such that a quadcopter maintains stable level flight”
265.
by rgmerk 3y ago
That was also the experience of going out to bars and nightclubs in my youth. People have forgotten just how unpleasant the stink of tobacco smoke was.
266.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I could be wrong but I’d be surprised if any human has the the reflexes to keep a quadcopter in level flight manually!
267.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Hmmm. No expert here but wouldn’t that thing be target practice for a MANPAD in war?
268.
by rgmerk 3y ago
Home batteries haven’t come down in price much for years. It seems that most of the cost is in everything that’s not a cell, and that stuff is specific to home batteries and hasn’t had economies of scale really kick in yet.
269.
by rgmerk 3y ago
A thought experiment: Rather than an LLM, you can send your request for an SQL query directly to Donald D. Chamberlin, one of the original designers of SQL. Furthermore, he gets an ERD for your database. What odds you get back a query that
270.
by rgmerk 3y ago
I think the history of art, particularly after the invention of photography, suggests that the context is all-important. I suspect context is also more important to pornography than some here are prepared to give credit for.

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