rwallace

14 ms·

151.
by rwallace 7y ago
> even though humans are basically black boxes we can ask them questions in order to find out how they came to a particular conclusion. (How reliable the answers to these questions are is of course a different matter.) You punctuate the
152.
by rwallace 7y ago
I imagine it would take the CEO, with the backing of the Board of Directors, deciding the cloud services business is important enough to push through a massive overhaul of corporate culture, with the potential risk of disturbing their exist
153.
by rwallace 7y ago
As I understand it (usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; if you want to be sure, ask someone who is): - If you sell or give the CDs to someone else, you are legally obliged to delete the rips. - But if you toss them in a landfill, you a
154.
by rwallace 7y ago
I think he's charted three separate lineages, with no cross-lineage relationships implied.
155.
by rwallace 7y ago
As an outsider taking a quick look, this reminds me of the Apple Newton. - Hard problem, immature technology that barely works as yet. - Correct strategy would be vertical markets that have a particular need of the product, would pay enough
156.
by rwallace 7y ago
> Would something like Intel or MOS technology get vc money today? Yes, because when they were founded, it was already established that you could make money making semiconductors. The more concerning question is whether the invention of
157.
by rwallace 7y ago
In most cases like this, the affiliation is that of former user with fond memories.
158.
by rwallace 7y ago
Good point. If you are going to try to stick it out in that environment, focus less on the tech and more on the politics. If your geek instincts rebel at the P-word, think of it as Defense Against the Dark Arts.
159.
by rwallace 7y ago
He did play ball. He played ball for month after month, even as the cost of playing ball kept ramping up and up and up. Eventually it became higher than he could stand, and he started showing symptoms of mental health problems. At that poin
160.
by rwallace 7y ago
The article claims if you incinerate plastic with scrubbers, that prevents air pollution. I've seen it elsewhere claimed incinerating plastic still produces a lot of really nasty air pollution. Which is correct?
161.
by rwallace 7y ago
It works if you just supply it to the compiler.
162.
by rwallace 7y ago
TIL: Microsoft C++ does reproducible builds! I tried it just now and the /Brepro flag works with the command line compiler.
163.
by rwallace 7y ago
What if it's a support contract that entitles you to a response to support requests on the basis of 'in less than twenty-four hours' as opposed to the usual 'I might respond on a best effort basis if I have time, but no
164.
by rwallace 7y ago
> Now I wonder: what should the central planners give as metrics? Is there anything that works? No. You can't set a metric and let the metric do your governing for you. There needs to be a human in the loop. In other words, the syst
165.
by rwallace 7y ago
> SpaceX isn't tech, it is a defense contractor. When you get to the point of saying space rockets are not technology, it's time to acknowledge that somewhere in the construction of your ontology, something has gone wrong.
166.
by rwallace 7y ago
Because they mean different things. A robust system is one that can tolerate stress without suffering much harm. An antifragile system is one that actually benefits from stress.
167.
by rwallace 7y ago
I didn't downvote you, but I'm quite surprised by that remark. Say what you will about HN, but it seems to me it's damn near the only medium in the world that mostly doesn't use censorship to control the Overton window
168.
by rwallace 7y ago
> The only question is how they managed to fall so low that they weren't a competitive superpower. Because for pretty much their entire history, anytime they tried to achieve anything, they were either conquered by an aggressive imp
169.
by rwallace 7y ago
> the Italian system could not support a world-class tech player. What exactly made it unable to do so?
170.
by rwallace 7y ago
For me, Windows (7, 64 bit) behaves exactly as you report for Linux. I would love to be able to get Windows to behave like it does for you. What version were you using? Did you tweak any settings?
171.
by rwallace 7y ago
No, the above is with the default swap settings. I have tried Windows with swap disabled, but on an 8GB machine, it for whatever reason ran out of memory with only about 4GB of stuff loaded, so I decided it was better to put up with the def
172.
by rwallace 7y ago
How are all the people talking about Windows here getting it to behave better? In my experience, when you run out of memory on Windows, the whole machine locks up hard for ten or fifteen minutes while it thrashes the disk before finally kil
173.
by rwallace 7y ago
> Access to RAM on a MOS 6502 is about 2-6 cycles, isn't it? One cycle. Of course, the cycles are a lot slower. > It would be interesting if you could just program with an L1 exposed and structured as a main memory rather than a
174.
by rwallace 7y ago
Metaphysical determinism still works in relativity. It also still works in quantum mechanics if you accept the many-worlds interpretation. That's quite orthogonal to the question of practical predictability . What chaos theory shows i
175.
by rwallace 7y ago
> Windows 98, ME, Vista etc famously struggled with BSODs all the time. Windows 98 and ME struggled with BSODs because they were still built on something designed as a GUI layer on top of a CP/M clone. Vista mostly fixed all that. I
176.
by rwallace 7y ago
Interesting! I didn't know olivine was that plentiful. There is said to be a problem with shortage of construction sand leading to beaches being stripped for sand. So this would solve a secondary problem at the same time.
177.
by rwallace 7y ago
Everyone talks about the tourists, because they're what's visible, but it seems that the actual reason for the city being abandoned has nothing to do with the tourists, and everything to do with local law prohibiting people from l
178.
by rwallace 7y ago
> It's always a great place to live while the resources are being extracted. Intuitively you would expect that. The thing that's so difficult for us to wrap our heads around about the resource curse is that intuition is comple
179.
by rwallace 7y ago
Apparently when Norway found oil, they were blessed with a government that was both honest and farsighted, noted the effect of the resource curse in other countries, called in a consultant from the Middle East who had seen it firsthand, and
180.
by rwallace 7y ago
> The associated tidal torque is about 2 orders of magnitude below the present day Venusian atmospheric torque That never occurred to me before this moment, but of course the dense atmosphere would tend to exert some tidal drag. The abov

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