samatman

42 ms·

541.
by samatman 2y ago
5MB of 1965 disk storage, as the article helpfully points out, stores 5 million (EBCDIC) characters of text. 5MB of 2024 storage, stores 5 million (ASCII) or as little as 1.25 million (UTF-8) characters of text. There's no inflation to
542.
by samatman 2y ago
The difference between Mondragon, the kibbutzim, and other successful examples of collective labor, and the Soviet system, is precisely that the former are not governments, and operate in a capitalist system of property rights and free mark
543.
by samatman 2y ago
Such a bizarre thing to say about an image of an American, taken by another American, used to market American software to American computer users. It's almost like someone rang a bell, and you salivated, right on cue.
544.
by samatman 2y ago
> the oldest languages on the planet, as spoken by the oldest people Begging your pardon, this is a nonsensical thing to say. One people are not older than another, and nor are their languages. As it happens, the Khoisan show greater
545.
by samatman 2y ago
Yes. Not only is there a Wikipedia article on it, there's more than one. Here's the one covering science and engineering, which is the appropriate version for this discussion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Int
546.
by samatman 2y ago
Every time this is mentioned I feel a wild flash of anger that he didn't set it to 2.56cm. That would make the inch precisely (1/10 000)^8 meters. Instead, we're stuck with almost that. Forever.
547.
by samatman 2y ago
When I was a child, we would play a game called "the floor is lava". It's a simple game: you have to get around, but not touch the floor. Jumping on the furniture and such. Fine for a pastime, when you're small, but to
548.
by samatman 2y ago
Let's not forget drug dealers and money launderers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
549.
by samatman 2y ago
> Its actually the center of the button Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point. But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary
550.
by samatman 2y ago
You can get grumpy about it, sure. Or you can just accept that any use of "designed to" in respect to humans can be replaced with "adapted for" without loss of meaning. Most people who say "designed" here aren
551.
by samatman 2y ago
At the time I write this reply, the word "pie" shows up 98 times on this thread. The word CRISP? Will show up once, when I hit "add comment". This has brought out the worst of Hacker News in a very obvious way. I suppose
552.
by samatman 2y ago
I'm very much in favor of that! These should also be referred to using something more specific than "float".
553.
by samatman 2y ago
You got me on that one. I would prefer, given the domain, to amend to "given an R between 0 and infinity, I will return R for all R < 1, or 1/R otherwise". But yes, the proof was flawed.
554.
by samatman 2y ago
Have you ever tried to DM someone on YouTube?
555.
by samatman 2y ago
It remains baffling and sad that Google's first response to this was to murder their best social graph in cold blood. Between giving Reader the axe, and the real names fiasco on Google+, the company has destroyed the necessary trust t
556.
by samatman 2y ago
Allow me to offer a brief proof of the contrary. You may select any real number between zero and infinity. We will call this R. I will give you 1/R, which is between zero and one. QED. I believe you're conflating range, where it i
557.
by samatman 2y ago
I think we've reached the point where saying "float" should mean IEEE754, and the burden of being more specific falls on those working with various legacy formats.
558.
by samatman 2y ago
A stronger argument for storing 'percentages' as [0.0,1.0] can be made, the precision involved is seldom a limiting factor. It has to do with why I put percentage in scare quotes. A percentage is a certain way of writing a fracti
559.
by samatman 2y ago
That stood out to me as well. The collection of reasons given to prefer Rust to C happens to be completely compatible with preferring Julia to C as well. There's a different collection of reasons which wouldn't have that property
560.
by samatman 2y ago
This result is an argument for the conclusion you are reading it as arguing against.
561.
by samatman 2y ago
...the human behind it keeps working.
562.
by samatman 2y ago
I am crushingly disappointed by the middle two words of this headline.
563.
by samatman 2y ago
The word 'gavage' does not have the same effect. Funny what can turn on a phrase.
564.
by samatman 2y ago
That's uh. I dunno how to tell ya this Walter. Coming your way in Unicode 16.0... Allow me to introduce: BOTTOM LEFT JUSTIFIED UPPER RIGHT QUARTER BLACK CIRCLE! https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-16.0&
565.
by samatman 2y ago
I'm sure they're right about a lot of things! Water is wet, for instance. The moon waxes and wanes. That sort of thing. If you want to photograph a wide field of view, you use a fisheye lens. Humanity hasn't spent a lot of
566.
by samatman 2y ago
Not necessarily. I find LLMs very helpful when the task is annoyingly underdefined / understructured, but the result I want is easy to eyeball-audit. This seems like one of those. Boiling down manpages to a consistent structure which
567.
by samatman 2y ago
HTML doesn't do indentation. I typed four spaces between every word in these sentences.
568.
by samatman 2y ago
Personally, it's sending it to GoodReader on a 13" iPad. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say I 'prefer' this, but there are a lot of PDFs out there, this works fine, and it's a nice change of pace gi
569.
by samatman 2y ago
> Though Zig might edge out Rust for this use case once it stabilises. Zig has a meaningful advantage in the context of this discussion: lazy compilation. The compiler won't even semantically analyze a block of code unless the ta
570.
by samatman 2y ago
The butterfly keyboard was a _design_ defect, and these are very different things. Apple went to great lengths (because telling Jony Ive 'no' was not an option) to try and tweak the design to function correctly in the real world,

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