rst

23 ms·

211.
by rst 5y ago
Rust isn't the only community that's at risk of getting coopted by corporate sponsors. The PostgreSQL core team now has an explicit policy that no single company employs more than half its members -- but to follow it, last year,
212.
by rst 5y ago
So, what this seems to prove is that "pizza" really is Italian for "pie", and the particular Neapolitan kind that goes by that name in English is just one of many.
213.
by rst 5y ago
The change is scheduled to ship with an OS update (iOS 15): https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/05/apple-new-child-safety-... Nothing technical prevents them from putting something in ring zero which does silen
214.
by rst 5y ago
NASA tends to be extremely conservative regarding booster technology -- allowing reused boosters only after commercial customers had thoroughly proved them out, for example. Which is justifiable -- most commercial launches are communicatio
215.
by rst 5y ago
It also matters a bit that the blue channel is only 2% of all color-sensitive cones in the retina. That has a lot more to do with poor spatial resolution int the blue channel than the optics. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu
216.
by rst 5y ago
You're describing what the algorithm tends to promote -- turning it off (the "latest tweets" feed) may give you a bit more variety.
217.
by rst 5y ago
So we agree that natural selection is not necessarily trying to increase lifespans, for the reason given or any other?
218.
by rst 5y ago
The assumption that "natural selection has been trying to maximize lifespan, because the longer an individual lives, the more opportunity it has to reproduce" has an easier refutation: it clearly doesn't apply to a species wh
219.
by rst 5y ago
Wasn't, really. DEC founder Ken Olsen had been MIT's liason to IBM during the SAGE project (a massive air defense warning system that had been prototyped by MIT's Whirlwind project), but I don't think he ever worked for
220.
by rst 5y ago
Except that Microsoft didn't write DOS 1.0; they bought it. It was a relabeled version of a CP/M clone originally called QDOS (quick and dirty OS) that was written by Tim Paterson, for a company called Seattle Computer Products, r
221.
by rst 5y ago
"long-term profit" is the long-term financial returns to shareholders -- and corporate philanthropy is generally held to be justified in B-school circles only in so far as it builds up marketable goodwill (again, adding sharehol
222.
by rst 5y ago
IBM in its heyday (1930s through the '70s) wasn't primarily a service company either -- its core products were always data processing equipment (computers, and the plugboard-programmed punched card tabulators and other gear that p
223.
by rst 5y ago
The decision was in the hands of a board whose sole legal goal, these days, is securing maximal financial return for shareholders (and the shareholders agreed -- there was an explicit vote). A soul is a luxury that companies don't usu
224.
by rst 5y ago
The *Lisp language wasn't CM-lisp -- it was a different thing, somewhat lower level, originally written by Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Lisp
225.
by rst 5y ago
Which things in particular? Rails supported both Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 simultaneously from Rails 2.3 through Rails 3.2, without it apparently being a huge struggle for the developers, dropping 1.8 only at about the same time that support for it
226.
by rst 5y ago
Ruby made a similar change in character encoding starting at roughly the same time; it's (barely) remembered now as a non-event because they didn't take the "opportunity" to bundle in a bunch of other breaking changes
227.
by rst 5y ago
What's anticompetitive behavior is for URLs associated with competitors to be banned. They were. Whether a customer support drone was able to identify them as URLs associated with competitors is immaterial.
228.
by rst 5y ago
Depends who had rights to the proprietary code. If it was someone else's (for example, if the internal version had used both GPLed code and some proprietary third-party library), open sourcing the whole thing just might not be possibl
229.
by rst 5y ago
There are a bunch of partially completed stations (or expansion provisions for future stations) which were intended for the "IND Second System" -- a massive set of projects that got killed off by the Great Depression. (The beginni
230.
by rst 5y ago
New York also has a few abandoned stations, most often (as in a lot of these Parisian stations) because they were so close to other stations that there wasn't much point in operating both -- doubly so after platforms on the stations st
231.
by rst 5y ago
Integer types in current versions of Ruby and Python both have arbitrary precision (as is also true for lots of other languages these days). That's not enough to make either intrinsically bug-free...
232.
by rst 5y ago
I'm not sure the context of the Singer's remarks matters much -- they were clearly against the newly announced policy that the meeting itself was about. And as a senior employee and member of the company's leadership, it was
233.
by rst 5y ago
Sun used open standards when they suited their purpose, but they also tried for proprietary lock-in. Their alternatives to X Windows, for instance, had licenses that weren't open in any real sense. And sometimes they tried to have it b
234.
by rst 5y ago
Former member of the Rails core team, in fact, from which he has also resigned. https://twitter.com/georgeclaghorn/status/138813101023207424...
235.
by rst 5y ago
... which does put both cars and bicycles in the same queue, but doesn't eliminate the copy-paste for each new type completely; 'car' and 'bicycle' still wind up with separate 'get_speed' impls, which are
236.
by rst 5y ago
There are test frameworks which automate this behavior -- both Django and Rails provide test-case libraries which run each test in a transaction, and roll back to reset. (NB they also have to provide ways to disable this -- in order to, e.g
237.
by rst 5y ago
US and EU citizens could visit most places on a whim, but leaving and staying permanently elsewhere could be a lot more difficult -- even if you were an American who didn't want to go farther than Canada. (After Trump's election,
238.
by rst 5y ago
The pitch on their home page is "puts academic language features to work". But one of those academic languages, Haskell, has a GHC-based compiler to Webassembly (asterius), and it's not clear why someone would prefer Grain i
239.
by rst 5y ago
There are vaccines against bacterial infections (tuberculosis, for example).
240.
by rst 5y ago
Not sure that's the sum total of Purism's case here. The hardware kill switches on the mic and network aren't something that everyone needs or wants, but people who do don't have a whole lot of ready-built options.

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