rwallace

29 ms·

271.
by rwallace 8y ago
Is it? The quoted proposition is really two rolled into one: 1. Progress is inevitable. 2. Conditional on progress occurring at all, it has to take something reasonably close to a specific path. The first view seems to be quite widely held.
272.
by rwallace 8y ago
A society that never invests in research into anything that in hindsight was obviously silly, is also going to miss out on a bunch of things that looked unpromising but actually paid off in a big way. I'm glad NASA investigated the rea
273.
by rwallace 8y ago
Okay, but anyone making that argument should also consider that the existence of VCs and their money may well have been part of the reasoning that led the founders to create the service in the first place. Look at the almost total absence o
274.
by rwallace 8y ago
So security is the highest priority, the overriding concern that justifies taking away your right to control the equipment you bought? Okay. Then stop messing with the operating system. Stop changing anything except as needed for security p
275.
by rwallace 8y ago
How did Adacore kill Ada?
276.
by rwallace 8y ago
Ah! I guess the difference when you're a programmer is, both could be described as spending all day sitting, but if you're at a keyboard, you can get up and walk around now and then; sounds like that matters a lot, extended over t
277.
by rwallace 8y ago
Damn, that sounds bad :( What exactly is the back pain from? Outsider's perspective would expect that since it's mostly sitting, at least your back should be okay. What am I missing?
278.
by rwallace 8y ago
This is true, but not unusual. Any time you ask for the simplest/earliest/minimal X, you quickly get bogged down in the gray area of what exactly counts as an X. So the above doesn't count, okay, make it a bit stricter and it
279.
by rwallace 8y ago
But generally speaking, you could do better still by continuing with both product lines - that's pretty much what 'profitable' means. Situations I know of where this is not the case: 1. The product line is not actually prof
280.
by rwallace 8y ago
Setting aside the geopolitics and looking purely at the economics, there are several mentions in the article of the sole supplier of some vitally important widget or chemical announcing that it will be exiting the business. WTF? That makes
281.
by rwallace 8y ago
It seems to be discussing, not the usual variety of quantum computation mentioned in the yellow text, but quantum computation plus a couple of hypothetical enhancements.
282.
by rwallace 8y ago
This is unfortunately the case, but an audience still tends to exacerbate the problem. In other words, OP is correct if we change 'almost guaranteed' to something like 'considerably more likely'.
283.
by rwallace 9y ago
> address bar at the bottom of the screen What's the advantage of this?
284.
by rwallace 9y ago
https://riscv.org/
285.
by rwallace 9y ago
Most accounts claim that thanks to dark matter, stars orbit at the same speed regardless of distance from the galactic center. They don't say whether this is linear or angular velocity, but even if we assume it's linear velocity,
286.
by rwallace 9y ago
Well that's true, and if you're going to argue that the lack of equally or more concise syntactic support is an omission, I agree. I think 1.23 should denote a decimal floating point constant, and a special suffix should be requir
287.
by rwallace 9y ago
Java and Python, for a start, have decimal number types in their standard distributions.
288.
by rwallace 9y ago
'Bring in the heavy hitters' strikes me as an odd way to phrase 'the investors have decided to take your company away from you and put someone else in charge who may or may not understand the business'. Surely the correc
289.
by rwallace 9y ago
As I understand it (disclaimer: not a physicist), that's the open question: does there exist a stable configuration of atoms that will create conditions such that the threshold theory applies in full, errors are adequately corrected, a
290.
by rwallace 9y ago
Be careful: there's an important distinction. There is a consensus that quantum computers can, for certain problems, perform computation exponential in the number of qubits. But the often unspoken assumption is that the difficulty of g
291.
by rwallace 9y ago
Could you? Sure, we can all think of cases where someone said something was impossible and then eventually it was achieved. But are there any cases where the expert consensus on the physical possibility of something wasn't establishe
292.
by rwallace 9y ago
I remember looking for such a thing and not finding it. Maybe it was added later? I tried an early version of Wave, briefly. If it was indeed added later, this is an example of something Joel Spolsky cautioned against: don't do a huge
293.
by rwallace 9y ago
That sounds like attempts to supply logical order instead of chronological, which is indeed a disaster; it needs to be as well as . (i.e. at any given time you can ignore it and just look at things in chronological order.)
294.
by rwallace 9y ago
Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were t
295.
by rwallace 9y ago
I read a story a while ago about a guy on an airline flight, looked out the window and happened to see smoke coming from a factory; on landing, he made a phone call from the airport to sell his shares in the company that owned the factory,
296.
by rwallace 9y ago
The author mentioned repurposing old computers for non-frontline work. Can't you do that with old tablets? Load a bunch of PDFs, pictures or whatever into internal storage, take the tablet offline, use it like a bookshelf in the form f
297.
by rwallace 9y ago
Clickbait title but an interesting point. Summary: it's a good thing we have computers, because they ameliorate what would otherwise be irresistible economic pressure, in the name of the last couple of percentage points of efficiency,
298.
by rwallace 9y ago
So if this is a macOS bug, you forget about it and get on with your life. If it's something else for which a bounty would be payable - what are the terms and conditions, exclusivity? -then you go ahead and agree to that and hopefully g
299.
by rwallace 9y ago
I'm not clear about what the problem is. I was under the impression several large IT companies have bug bounty programs; is this not the case?
300.
by rwallace 9y ago
Not quite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

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