smitherfield

14 ms·

91.
by smitherfield 9y ago
I'm already adjusting upwards for that; life expectancies didn't reach 50 (in the US) until the 1920's[1], and the posts I'm responding to are talking about the Medieval period or earlier, when life expectancy at birth w
92.
by smitherfield 9y ago
No, people from out of state complain about MA drivers too (who are known as "Massholes" in the rest of New England). If you want data, take the interstate through MA and some other states and count the number of lane changes with
93.
by smitherfield 9y ago
I'm not sure I really buy that; Massachusetts is bigger than just Boston (which has plenty of "fast" roads, e.g. Storrow Drive) and has roads of all shapes, speeds and sizes, including a great deal of "sprawl" in th
94.
by smitherfield 9y ago
People treated their children well enough for us to exist! If we had a time machine and brought an ordinary American from the 1950's to the present, or asked ~40% of Americans nowadays, chances are they'd be horrified by what they
95.
by smitherfield 9y ago
But those are examples of acts which we consider immoral and criminal today, but were acceptable and legal (or even moral and mandatory) in the past. People didn't think it was okay to commit crimes targeting child victims, they just d
96.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Wow. As a Massachusetts driver, I would not have expected that. I've traveled pretty extensively within the US and Europe and I (and many, many others) consider Massachusetts, or at least the Boston metro area, to have the worst driver
97.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. When has this ever not been true? People instinctively (and reasonably[1]) consider crimes to be more s
98.
by smitherfield 9y ago
The above example compiled with optimizations and with `indirect_jump` altered so the compiler actually emits a jump table instead of an array lookup: https://godbolt.org/g/MPs43x
99.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Thanks for pointing that out, there have been major issues with drawing overly-broad conclusions based on studies pertaining to a specific demographic, before studying the general population. For example, omega-3 fish oil became one of the
100.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Actually, Republicans usually favor more NASA spending than Democrats do (e.g. Bush started funding manned Moon/Mars missions while Obama cut that program and the Space Shuttle), because most of it goes to red areas (Texas, Alabama, Mi
101.
by smitherfield 9y ago
The Netherlands is approximately the same land area and population density as the NYC metropolitan area[1], so it is (as you say) a very different environment from the entire US or even Spain. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org&#x2
102.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>I'm also not sure on your argument for how "young men" cause crime. Criminals skew young and overwhelmingly male.[1] >Do we have numbers that show a higher population of males in the US than in Canada over that time
103.
by smitherfield 9y ago
1998, but in practice from the early 90's because leaded gasoline is incompatible with catalytic converters. Leaded gas was banned in 1996 in the US, but in practice disappeared by the early 80's (catalytic converters were mandato
104.
by smitherfield 9y ago
I'll echo bckygldstn's criticisms[1] and add a few of my own. The "lead-crime hypothesis" is a very obvious example of correlation not implying causation. For example, rock music causes crime. Rock music grew in populari
105.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>We could provide the world's total energy needs by covering a small portion of the Sahara desert with solar. The Sahara desert is extremely sandy, and extremely windy, which makes it a pretty terrible, or at least prohibitively-e
106.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Now, I don't want to seem anti-science or anything, but this seems like a massive disaster just waiting to happen, in light of the incidents that led to this ban and also, even more to the point, the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1] Couldn&#x2
107.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>One thing Rust's vector guarantees that C++ doesn't is that Rust's vector will not store elements inline; anything (with nonzero size) you push into it will be heap allocated. I believe this is incorrect and small-vecto
108.
by smitherfield 9y ago
I'm not saying that Crystal or any language shouldn't support multithreading or parallelism, but that web applications (that is, almost all existing commercial Ruby applications) don't employ and wouldn't be able to be
109.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Any web application is going to be almost entirely network and database-bound, not CPU-bound. CPU-bound tasks are stuff like scientific computing, video encoding, the Ruby interpreter and Crystal compiler themselves, etc. The advantage of m
110.
by smitherfield 9y ago
I've only written a bit of Rust, but from what I've seen Rust makes the first 90% of optimizing for space-efficiency easy, but the next 90% (stuff like allocating from static buffers instead of on the heap, reusing/type-punni
111.
by smitherfield 9y ago
Or maybe it's a draft document? It's obviously a side project in any case.
112.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>seems kind of esoteric Which is a bit unfortunate, because (APL-like) array languages, of which Q appears to be one of the more approachable/popular, have a lot of very interesting ideas that I think mainstream languages could be
113.
by smitherfield 9y ago
It's no different from pricing your product at $9.99/month instead of $10/month, or $9.99/month instead of $119.88/year. Or more pertinent, marketing Java 1.8 as Java 8, selling products with random alphanumeric nam
114.
by smitherfield 9y ago
As the other guy says, it's hard to prove in court which noise came from which plane, but besides that, they may have used weight as a proxy for distinguishing between military and civilian aircraft ("tiny noisy planes" tendi
115.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>There was no Oralce v1, as Ellison, "knew no one would want to buy version 1" Of the "bad Larry Ellison" anecdotes ITT, most of which do paint him in a very bad light, this one doesn't offend me at all; more l
116.
Shortt-Synchronome clock (1921)(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by smitherfield 9y ago|0 comments
117.
by smitherfield 9y ago
It's long enough ago I can't remember exactly what I was trying to do except that it was trivially correct, but yeah I think that was it. Anyway, I'm glad that's been solved; looks like I've got some new weekend pla
118.
by smitherfield 9y ago
RAII really is a brilliant design, it both (mostly) solves the problem of manual memory management and is easier (for my brain at least) to reason about than deterministic (shared_ptr, Obj-C/Swift) or nondeterministic (managed langs) g
119.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>Isn't this what a `unique_ptr` is (a RAII class that manages Heap allocation)? See my reply to kllrnohj above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15872509 >Why not [write sink functions that] take by value?
120.
by smitherfield 9y ago
>I'd argue that classes with a single field are a worse code smell. A using or typedef would be better Sometimes, but not in this case, because - Smart pointers are nullable, which should be opt-in and not opt-out behavior. - Smar

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