rwallace

10 ms·

61.
by rwallace 5y ago
I'm curious, why do you think JavaScript wants add with carry?
62.
by rwallace 5y ago
Okay, so what's the catch? If other manufacturers rely on the spyware and ads to finance the business, which is how they are able to sell such a high spec TV for $450, how is that vendor able to sell such a TV for $400 with no spywar
63.
by rwallace 5y ago
I'm curious, having heard of Matlab but never used it, what exactly did MathWorks do to turn everyone away from them?
64.
by rwallace 5y ago
> The IBM and DEC formats were really ugly and writing programs for them included many pitfalls. When I began to use an IBM PC, with its much more foolproof FP format, all problems disappeared. I remember the IBM format was based on hexa
65.
by rwallace 5y ago
Are these actual numbers? If so, you've got me curious! How does it work? Do you really have billions of lines of code? How many of those 580k tables are auto generated?
66.
by rwallace 5y ago
In fairness, there would actually be much merit to this way of writing about an airline trip if the target audience were 19th-century people who had never heard of an airplane except in fanciful speculation . It explains a great deal about
67.
by rwallace 5y ago
Now I'm curious: Sarbanes-Oxley pushed vendors into subscription models? How? What exactly did it change in the cost-benefit picture?
68.
by rwallace 5y ago
I don't interpret Joel as saying 'never do architecture'. I interpret him as saying something more like: - If your goal is to create great new architecture, that's fine, go for it. - But if your goal is to ship a product
69.
by rwallace 5y ago
Yep. During the Cold War, the US actually shared its Permissive Action Link technology with the Soviets for exactly that reason.
70.
by rwallace 5y ago
Could it be that ASP (native to x86) was using x87 floating point in its default 80-bit mode, whereas Java (trying to get results more consistent cross-platform), had switched it to 64-bit mode?
71.
by rwallace 5y ago
Aha! That is one of those things that never crossed my mind, but makes perfect sense once explained.
72.
by rwallace 5y ago
Now I'm curious: why? Not that I don't believe you, but I'm wondering what is the reason? It's not intuitively clear why gloves would make it more dangerous, even knowing that it is.
73.
by rwallace 5y ago
> I suggested that perhaps this is because the famous people are the only ones who are fast enough to actually do everything you're "supposed to do" and still be productive. Conjecture: it is instead or also because famous
74.
by rwallace 5y ago
Traditionally, part of what made it worth paying IBM prices was reliably top-notch service, but perhaps that changed over time. What were your experiences? And which decade?
75.
by rwallace 5y ago
Are the cold viruses impossible to vaccinate against? I always assumed they were the same as flu – possible, but you need new vaccines every year because the strains keep shifting – it's just that the severity of colds is low enough th
76.
by rwallace 5y ago
A lot of people blame Banach-Tarski on the axiom of choice. I disagree. I think it's in essence just a variant of the Hilbert hotel, with the axiom of choice merely serving as part of the machinery for this manifestation. In other word
77.
by rwallace 5y ago
There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is par
78.
by rwallace 5y ago
By way of verification, not only did I double check the path in regedit, but I also tried copy pasting the command line from the Microsoft page, and that gave path not found.
79.
by rwallace 5y ago
That's clear then, have added the relevant path. Thanks!
80.
by rwallace 5y ago
No. Should I? Is it the case that my machine is exposed without them, and creating them is necessary to solve the problem? Or that it's fine the way it is now, and creating them would cause the very problem I would be hoping to solve?
81.
by rwallace 5y ago
So when I try the registry key workaround, it doesn't work, because my registry doesn't have a Printers section. Which is logical, because the last time I owned a printer was long before I bought this machine. Does that mean I don
82.
by rwallace 5y ago
Okay, fair enough, maybe 'very minor inconvenience' is understating it. And granted that the safeguards are not perfect, and some financial crime does get through. I still think the current state of affairs is a big improvement on
83.
by rwallace 5y ago
Yep. It's burdening 99% of legitimate users with a very minor inconvenience, to stop the 1% of bad actors who would otherwise end up doing a lot of really bad things that would harm the 99% in ways that go far outside the scope we thin
84.
by rwallace 5y ago
The point being missed here is that no algorithm can tell you whether a string is a valid email address, because that's not a property of the string in the first place, it's a property of the world. Having a fairly low entropy Gma
85.
by rwallace 5y ago
> I know petty much nothing, but I cannot help but feel that knowing the result, any answer is equally explainable. If Greenland ruled the world we would all be discussing some nonsense about how easily sleds glide over ice. It is true t
86.
by rwallace 5y ago
I would conjecture that it has two components: 1. Ancestral memory of programming in languages like assembly or early Fortran where your code was going to be spaghetti because the language was capable of little else, so it had to be drenche
87.
by rwallace 5y ago
Excellent article! One thing I'm curious about: LLVM uses phi, as was considered best practice at the time. Of late, some people have started using block parameters instead; they are fundamentally equivalent, but make some operations m
88.
by rwallace 5y ago
There is a lot of low hanging fruit in this area being ignored. Here in Ireland, the pandemic is still raging and they are reopening stores – okay, that's a tradeoff on which reasonable people can disagree. But then there's no air
89.
by rwallace 5y ago
It's a purely arbitrary number, arising from the choice of an 80/20 division of CPU cycles between exploring and exploiting. You have to choose some number; pretty much any choice would work more or less equally well here, though
90.
by rwallace 5y ago
Now I'm curious; who exactly told them to back off, and why?

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