sjy

50 ms·

511.
by sjy 7y ago
It’s implied in the first paragraph – “In double-entry bookkeeping, a transaction always affects at least two accounts , always includes at least one debit and one credit, and always has total debits and total credits that are equal.”
512.
by sjy 7y ago
You acknowledge that there are many factors which may have contributed to improved road safety, “but causation / correlation etc.” It’s hard to find good evidence when there are so many confounding factors. So what is the basis of your
513.
by sjy 7y ago
Total revenue from speed and red light cameras in NSW during the last financial year was $65 million: https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/help-centre/resources-library... Total revenue for the NSW government in that year wa
514.
by sjy 7y ago
I’m not too sure if you’re talking Australian or US dollars there, but the starting salary of a NSW probationary constable is A$73,609 [1]. I’d say that means the total marginal cost of an additional police officer is around double what y
515.
by sjy 7y ago
Smooth-scrolling back through a command that unexpectedly dumped 500 lines of output, using Alacritty and a big scrolling trackball with acceleration, is pretty glorious.
516.
by sjy 7y ago
You're getting downvoted, but you have a point. Word processors are for writing documents; if you really care about typography in the final product, at some point you need to use a real typesetting tool. From what I can tell, most larg
517.
by sjy 7y ago
During the few months I spent as a C# developer, I found that Visual Studio was indeed essential but not excellent. It was a slow and incredibly complicated build-time dependency that I'm glad to be free of.
518.
by sjy 7y ago
To add another anecdote, I've noticed that many educational institutions (including government departments with tens of thousands of staff and hundreds of thousands of students) use G Suite. I'm sure some corporate staff in these
519.
by sjy 7y ago
Absolutely. 150 USD is a trivial amount of money in most bureaucracies, but the time cost of getting that expense approved and accounted for could be weeks.
520.
by sjy 7y ago
What kind of software do you develop in VBA? I've used it a fair bit over the past few years to build spreadsheets and Access databases for people in locked-down enterprise environments who can't run arbitrary .exes. I wish I had
521.
by sjy 7y ago
From the parent: > At home I run Linux... where there is no Excel You can run it in a VM, but at that point you're already settling for a sub-optimal experience, so why not try a alternative that's free and packaged for your OS
522.
by sjy 7y ago
You’re right about Office being sticky, but that is changing. Heaps of people are using Google Sheets for basic spreadsheets these days. Advanced users will stick to the tools they know, but I’ve reached the same conclusion as the author of
523.
by sjy 7y ago
For what it's worth, I've also noticed that right-click problem and some glitchiness with dragging and dropping.
524.
by sjy 7y ago
Summary: yes, unless you use video conferencing and screen sharing software, which is likely to be totally broken (but see Hello71's comment). The author needs to use Zoom, so he reverted to X11.
525.
by sjy 7y ago
In what jurisdiction is “I forgot” not a valid defence? If you’ve forgotten the password, you can’t comply with a disclosure order any more than if you were unconscious. The law doesn’t normally need to expressly state that it’s not a crime
526.
by sjy 7y ago
We are already components of something brainless that dominates the ecosystem. :-)
527.
by sjy 7y ago
I’d like to know more about the developments in the last two years as well. I briefly explored some Python NLP tooling more than two years ago, but it seemed like there would be too much work involved to get useful results in my white colla
528.
by sjy 7y ago
Are computers meaningfully different to brains in that “deterministic” respect? Both are apparently based on deterministic interactions at the nanometre scale and exhibit simple behaviour that can be explained from first principles (eg. sim
529.
by sjy 7y ago
That makes it sound pretty sinister. Personally I like systemd and the fact that it’s widely deployed. Time spent learning it feels productive in a way that learning about the internals of specific distros doesn’t.
530.
by sjy 7y ago
Has anyone actually tried and failed to hold Amazon accountable for a dangerous product? I don't think it would be obvious to the average person that they're not transacting with Amazon when they use the Amazon website, and if Ama
531.
by sjy 7y ago
Perhaps it's not fair to point to a 97-page article as "something specific," but "the thing that changed" was thoroughly explained in Amazon's Antitrust Paradox (2017) [1]. Specifically: > In some ways, th
532.
by sjy 7y ago
I’m pleased to see this as I have been working on some shell scripts for managing a collection of research PDFs myself. But I think the headline’s a little misleading. The scripts don’t do much more to help you avoid journal webpages than f
533.
by sjy 7y ago
Good point. It is not technically an ‘assignment’ of the whole copyright, but it does involve the creator conferring contractual rights on YouTube which would otherwise belong exclusively to the creator.
534.
by sjy 7y ago
This is the result of a several decades worth of normalising the process of clicking through unread shrink-wrap agreements: confusion about the nature of copyright, which is the author’s exclusive right to ‘monetise’ their work. Creators
535.
by sjy 7y ago
I’m not so sure about that. Adult humans can learn new things with a remarkably small number of additional data points, but they’re drawing on a lifetime of human experience which is also data. Children tend to need more help.
536.
by sjy 7y ago
Has running a curl-to-bash command found during normal user-initiated web browsing ever resulted in a malware infection? Even anecdotal evidence would be valuable at this point.
537.
by sjy 7y ago
“I want everything for $9 that used to cost $99” is perfectly reasonable in markets where technology has dramatically lowered costs. It’s certainly what I expect when buying computer hardware, but it should also apply to the market for dist
538.
by sjy 7y ago
The entitlement idea comes from the fact that bundling undermines market mechanisms and is sometimes illegal. Consumers are not entitled to free products, but nor are vendors entitled to unlimited discretion in the way they sell their prod
539.
by sjy 7y ago
Shouldn’t it be the way that media is served up though? The status quo serves the interests of copyright conglomerates, not consumers. Surely there must be a more efficient way to channel money from consumers to producers, without forcing t
540.
by sjy 7y ago
I suppose that addresses the grandparent’s concerns about ease of use, but it makes the problem of running opaque proprietary software controlled by the platform operator even worse.

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