rwallace

56 ms·

571.
by rwallace 10y ago
Even if that's your thesis, it's still a bad term because it doesn't say anything about why . If you're going to use an atypical term in a debate, it should convey some information about why you hold your beliefs.
572.
by rwallace 10y ago
I'm surprised nobody is mentioning the elephant at the dining table here. A 15k bill for saving your house is arguably fair. But in this case, there was a 15k bill for not saving the man's house. What form of corruption has brou
573.
by rwallace 10y ago
To quote Douglas Adams: "No, not really."
574.
by rwallace 10y ago
Okay, so const was available as a feature - but not used because it wasn't the default? Some of the discussion on this seems to be saying Solidity supports exceptions and transactions, which should provide a lot of safety here (on erro
575.
by rwallace 10y ago
From what I've seen of the discussion on this, you're right about uncontrolled reentrancy being a big source of problems. One thing that occurs to me: would the command-query distinction be a useful notion here? I have no truck wi
576.
by rwallace 10y ago
Is it too late now? It seems to me that it should be possible to implement a better language on top of the existing system, there are plenty of languages that compile to JavaScript after all, so it's still worth discussing what a bette
577.
by rwallace 10y ago
The problem with Turing completeness is that if it's not there from the start, people inevitably end up needing features that aren't present in the restricted language, and then a Turing complete language is added to either the or
578.
by rwallace 10y ago
If 'you' includes us non-Americans who are liable to be affected by US government policies: my suggestion would be to vote Libertarian. Sure, the Libertarian candidate won't win this election, but that's not the point. I
579.
by rwallace 10y ago
Is it still doing well? There are still jobs, yes, but everything I hear about the working conditions for doctors entering the field today is that their quality of life is not substantially better than that of a homeless drug addict.
580.
by rwallace 10y ago
I think you're responding to someone other than OP? Certainly, demanding a CS degree is BS. Demanding you memorize the exact sequence of operations for rebalancing a red-black tree is BS. But OP isn't talking about that, just abou
581.
by rwallace 10y ago
When you're up against a strong incumbent, don't attack your opponent where he is strongest, or at least don't do that in the opening game. Look for where he is weak instead. Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any
582.
by rwallace 10y ago
I failed to exercise free will in this case. Free will is in play as and to the extent that my future is determined by my decisions, rather than by other factors beyond my control. For example, if I'm walking down the street, I have fr
583.
by rwallace 10y ago
This is a good example of an important general point: human social instincts are a really huge security vulnerability . The price we pay for adaptability is that we can't have a hardwired instinct of what's normal, so the solutio
584.
by rwallace 10y ago
Not really. The existence of a large market doesn't suffice to classify something as a commodity. The acid test is this: Two companies that each go out to the market and try to buy a thousand tons of wheat or a thousand barrels of crud
585.
by rwallace 10y ago
> I haven't read any of the documents that she leaked, but there is a certain danger in ignoring vigilantism even in cases where it is the right thing to do But surely there is a pattern here that carries an even greater danger? Pat
586.
by rwallace 10y ago
My sympathies for the guy, and I'm not blaming the victim, but there is a basic safety rule that every aspiring hacker needs to understand, right now, right up there with 'fasten your seatbelt' and 'don't feed the b
587.
by rwallace 10y ago
It's an enchanting, well-written essay on the history of an area of science few people ever think about, a window into the past, containing quite a few things I didn't know before, and along the way a showcase of some pretty neat
588.
by rwallace 10y ago
Sure, but if I had heard several news reports of people finding and returning wallets being falsely accused of theft and subjected to serious legal threats, at that point if I saw someone's wallet lying around, I would just ignore it a
589.
by rwallace 10y ago
I'm going to go as far as saying that having to manually add error checking and propagation code to every function in your program is so bad (in several ways) as to be flat-out unacceptable. In my experience, the main kind of situation
590.
by rwallace 10y ago
In my experience (desktop and server, haven't tried it on a microcontroller) exceptions have for all practical purposes zero cost until you actually throw one, at which point the cost is ten thousand clock cycles. That figure has staye
591.
by rwallace 10y ago
Can't you get the same result with off-the-shelf hardware by turning down the brightness? Like, change the background color in your editor from (255,255,255) to something dimmer?
592.
by rwallace 10y ago
Where are you looking? OP's idea of talking to people in coffee shops obviously only works in certain cities. If you're not in such a location, you need to look online.
593.
by rwallace 10y ago
> you'll only find out for sure if you'll lose when you try. if you don't try, you definitely lose. If you're going to follow that philosophy, you're better off buying a lottery ticket. They're a lot cheaper
594.
by rwallace 10y ago
My remarks were certainly addressed also, by the same logic, to people trying to become Olympic athletes. Founding a startup isn't quite the same, because there isn't so much a fixed quota of startups. It is possible to win withou
595.
by rwallace 10y ago
The same thing 99% of the human race does and always has done, and the 1% who are wasting their lives trying to become astronauts or movie stars should also do: accept that the job you ideally want is not available, and learn to enjoy a job
596.
by rwallace 10y ago
I'm not convinced that freedom and security are quite as opposed as some claim; centralized control has repeatedly been shown to create its own security problems. But supposing and to the extent that they are, I'll bite that bulle
597.
by rwallace 10y ago
In a startup context, the trick is to make sure the technical debt comes due after the point at which you find out whether you've got a product people actually want in the first place.
598.
by rwallace 10y ago
> The low-level coding is far more skilled work than the high level coding. Instead of most of the work being "how do these plug in to each other?", it's how exactly does my code function with respect to all of the potenti
599.
by rwallace 10y ago
Don't underestimate the value of money that's guaranteed instead of a hypothetical possibility, now instead of maybe sometime, yours free and clear instead of legally dodgy, that you can boast to friends and future potential emplo
600.
by rwallace 10y ago
Compassion comes from the person, not the station. I've seen it come from all sorts of surprising places - but it's rare enough to be worth treasuring, no matter where it comes from.

More ›