skissane

76 ms·

961.
by skissane 2y ago
I guess the difference is: if you see a social security check for a 150 year old being deposited, that would make you suspect fraud, and so you would investigate to determine if it is fraud, or some obscure case where it is actually legitim
962.
by skissane 2y ago
> or if the system is still cutting checks because their death wasn't ever recorded. My speculation: there are a small handful of long dead people, for whom the SSA has never received proof of death, and they fall through some bur
963.
by skissane 2y ago
In fact, if you read that document, it mentions there are exceptions in which the automated process doesn't terminate someone for being >115, and the termination has to be done manually for: > Beneficiaries with other claimants a
964.
by skissane 2y ago
> The COBOL days since 1601 epoch makes sense. Now that I think about it, if those functions don't work with negative numbers, then I imagine even the YYYY strings couldn't have years before 1601. IBM mainframe COBOL has two op
965.
by skissane 2y ago
> Because I couldn't name any programming language people in use today that has no built-in date type. But this isn’t true. COBOL 85 has builtin functions for representing dates as an integer from 1601 epoch. IBM mainframe COBOL sup
966.
by skissane 2y ago
The solution to Musk’s misinformation isn’t anti-Musk misinformation Furthermore, while I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk’s claims turn out to be a exaggeration or distortion, they are an exaggeration or distortion of genuine internal governm
967.
by skissane 2y ago
> What has followed is people coming out of the woodwork to explain how this may have been reflected in the system since the system was written in COBOL There’s zero evidence these “people coming out of the woodwork” have any idea what t
968.
by skissane 2y ago
> That there may have been people in the system that were 150 years old, due to the COBOL language. Yes, but this is the whole aspect that is misinformation: there is no evidence that (alleged) “150 year old social security recipients” h
969.
by skissane 2y ago
> The implementors* of the SS system chose 1875 as the epoch date for reasons The problem is we have no solid evidence that is actually true. The claim appears to originate in an anonymous DailyKos comment which contains so many factual
970.
by skissane 2y ago
> I'm not sure how a date in the format YYYYMMDD can have an epoch of 1601. IBM mainframe Cobol contains builtin functions which convert between YYYYMMDD strings and integers - and 1601 is the epoch they use for that integer represe
971.
by skissane 2y ago
> I'm not sure admins of old mainframes from the 80s would be interested in getting latest vim running on their hosts! I doubt many 1980s mainframes were ever capable of running vim. People on 80s mainframes generally used mainframe
972.
by skissane 2y ago
I think a lot of this “DOGE scenario” couldn’t happen in most of Europe, or Canada, or Australia/New Zealand - due to the US having a presidential instead of parliamentary system of government. In a parliamentary system, if the Prime M
973.
by skissane 2y ago
I would not be surprised if the same kind of scenario is happening somewhere in the US, but I doubt it is common enough to make any difference to land use statistics. There’s always going to be edge cases where you can debate whether they s
974.
by skissane 2y ago
One source [0] says Texas is 4.2% public lands. Although that's near the bottom of the list, it is equal with Ohio, and ahead of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Rhode Island. (These are 1991 figures though, so maybe things have chang
975.
by skissane 2y ago
You cite two COBOL implementations which use 1582 or 1600/1601 as epoch dates – that's not evidence that any COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as an epoch date. Then you cite an pseudonymous Reddit comment which claims they've seen a COB
976.
by skissane 2y ago
> Unfortunately, Eshell does not have job control. I wonder why, after all these years, nobody has added it? If someone (not me) made a patch that did, would the GNU Emacs maintainers accept it?
977.
by skissane 2y ago
> I am bothered by how improbable it is that even simple life forms have not been discovered anywhere else in the universe. The obvious reason is that our ability to look is extremely limited. Could there be subterranean life surviving d
978.
by skissane 2y ago
Senior engineers sometimes jump to conclusions too, especially if they are tired or overworked or stressed out. No doubt, less frequently than junior engineers do, but I don't think from the mere fact that someone has "jumped to c
979.
by skissane 2y ago
My father used to work with someone who was originally from some Pacific Island country (forget which, might have been Fiji). And the story was, in that country, at least back then, you didn't get a birth certificate at birth; to regis
980.
by skissane 2y ago
> 2) Assume this timestamp starts on May 20, 1875 which was once a COBOL epoch standard. Was it? I've never heard of that date in connection with COBOL before. I've heard some people try to connect it to ISO 8601, but I think t
981.
by skissane 2y ago
> It seems like any language other than C has poor interoperability with anything other than C Interop between C and classic 3rd generation languages such as Fortran, Pascal, Basic, COBOL, Algol, PL/I, tends to not be that hard [0]
982.
by skissane 2y ago
> The .org was quite important to them in the name. Apparently because, in some country in which Sun did business, someone else had already trademarked “OpenOffice”, but Sun’s lawyers believed the addition of “.org” was enough to sideste
983.
by skissane 2y ago
I don’t think your problem has anything to do with Ada itself. You’d have the same issues using Rust or Go or Swift or Zig or whatever - if you make heavy use of C++’s features, it can make interop with other languages harder
984.
Texas county approves holding election to make SpaceX's Starbase its own city(abcnews.go.com)
2 points by skissane 2y ago|0 comments
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by skissane 2y ago
Pascal, farad, joule aren't base units, they are derived units. Ideally, the base units should be prefixless. Except for kilogram, they all are. Imagine a system exactly the same as SI, except instead of the kilogram, it had the kram,
986.
by skissane 2y ago
> The kilogram is the base unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) Arguably, an ugly wart, but one we are stuck with for historical reasons. The base units of the original metric system (metre and gram) were poorly proport
987.
by skissane 2y ago
I use both VS Code and PyCharm for Python development. I spend the majority of the time in VS Code, but I’ll jump over to PyCharm when I need to do certain refactorings or code navigation (e.g. implement the methods of an abstract base clas
988.
by skissane 2y ago
> Formerly sys admin Formerly systems programmer, or sysprog for short "Config files? What are those? To change the system configuration, use these assembler macros, reassemble this module, relink the operating system and then reIPL
989.
by skissane 2y ago
> How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity? I believe it is almost all equity, not debt. There is such a huge demand to invest in them, they are able to attract all the investment they need through equity. Given the choice betwe
990.
by skissane 2y ago
> Somewhat irrelevant to this discussion given Windows lacks exec (starting a new executable requires a new process which gets a new PID), Well, you can do exec() on Windows if you implement it yourself in user space, see e.g. https:&#x

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