staplung

8 ms·

31.
by staplung 6mo ago
Honest question: how do you track stars during daylight? Is it the case that at the operational altitude of the B-52, bright stars are always visible?
32.
by staplung 6mo ago
What if I like magenta? Or brown?
33.
by staplung 6mo ago
You can also play it in the browser in Infinite Mac: https://infinitemac.org/1991/System%207.0 (Worked somewhat better for me than the classicreload version)
34.
by staplung 6mo ago
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (
35.
by staplung 6mo ago
The Tower of London arguably qualifies as a fort built to protect its inhabitants from the city. In its original form, its most impressive and formidable defenses faced London.
36.
by staplung 7mo ago
Cool article but I think the write-up no longer matches the actual code. Snippets in the article use `*p->p` a lot. The *p is a parser struct defined above as struct parser { const char* s; int pos; struct grid* g; };
37.
by staplung 7mo ago
The numbers in the headline seem odd. They imply that each (fake|fraudulent) worker only nets $5000 per year for Kim. I know the system has some inefficiencies where people behind the scenes are helping the "employee" with the wor
38.
by staplung 7mo ago
And the reason they were modeled after the dollar bill size is because there were already many types of systems for storing and organizing them. That came in handy for the census. The old BBC Connections series has a segment with James Burk
39.
by staplung 7mo ago
Of course since the old syntax is merely deprecated and not removed, going forward you now have to know the old, bad form and the new, good form in order to read code. Backwards compatibility is a strength but also a one-way complexity ratc
40.
Why I'm Suing Grammerly(nytimes.com)
13 points by staplung 7mo ago|3 comments
41.
by staplung 7mo ago
Can someone explain why helium is used for these purposes, as opposed to some other noble gas? I think there's more argon (it's about 1% of the atmosphere) than helium so is helium somehow special, or is it just cheaper, despite
42.
by staplung 7mo ago
Cool, but I don't see how it's sorting anything. It just seems to play a randomized arrangement of the slices. You can re-randomize as much as you like but there's no sort option as far as I can see.
43.
by staplung 7mo ago
It uses the built-in one. But as discussed in the article they ran into the problem where even when you try to force using the internal mic, iOS will silently switch to the mic on a pair of AirPods if there's a pair connected.
44.
by staplung 7mo ago
I don't think it would work because the accelerometer updates are at too low a frequency. Apple's developer info says: ``` Before you start the delivery of accelerometer updates, specify an update frequency by assigning a value to
45.
by staplung 7mo ago
Unfortunately, it's not just elected officials that are problematic for prediction markets. The Secretary of War, for instance is not an elected official nor are leaders of the armed forces and there is definitely a prediction market
46.
by staplung 7mo ago
I'm a little surprised Meta is even bothering to fight this. I mean the argument looks farcical to me be IANAL and weirder things have happened. If they do end up losing they'll have to pay however many millions to their law fir
47.
by staplung 7mo ago
Not knocking the article in any way but from the headline I was expecting - perhaps hoping - this would be about some innovation in filesystems research like it was the 90's again. That's not what this is. It's about how file
48.
by staplung 8mo ago
LoRa is short for Long Range. It's basically about providing a physical layer for networks over radio using spread spectrum modulation. It's got long range, even for fairly low-power devices, but also low bandwidth. Think IoT stuf
49.
by staplung 8mo ago
The sling seems like it has a steeper learning curve and colorful failure modes, like breaking a sliding glass door or somesuch. You might have better luck with a fairly low draw-weight bow and some blunt rubber-tipped arrows. My guess is t
50.
by staplung 8mo ago
Ah, okay. Didn't realize that. I used either zlib or gzip long, long ago but never messed with the `zdict` param. Thanks for pointing that out.
51.
by staplung 8mo ago
This has been possible with the zlib module since 1997 [EDIT: zlib is from '97. The zdict param wasn't added until 2012]. You even get similar byte count outputs to the example and on my machine, it's about 10x faster to use
52.
by staplung 8mo ago
This is cool but it seems like it would be liable to drift. I.e. it "knows" the correct time but doesn't have any way to figure out that it's been driving the movement fast or slow by some number of milliseconds. Eventua
53.
by staplung 8mo ago
In The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll recounts an episode from the oral defense of his astrophysics PhD thesis. A bunch of people ask questions but one prof holds back until... """ “I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he say
54.
by staplung 8mo ago
Very cool, thanks for putting this up. Couple of observations: - the page size drop down doesn't display any units (e.g. "6 x 9"). I assume there're all in inches but it would be a little more helpful if it said so and&#
55.
by staplung 9mo ago
I think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long befor
56.
by staplung 9mo ago
Not really. The axis of the earth's rotation is not affected by plate tectonics and the star map is recording where the earth's northern axis is pointing as precession slowly moves it around a circle. The star map could certainly
57.
by staplung 9mo ago
The star map comes up at the end of Joan Didion's essay "At the Dam": """ I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me,
58.
by staplung 10mo ago
I actually did already know that factoid but was struggling (am still) to see how it relates to a wooden trough that merely holds cables. Another interesting factoid about the catenary: Robert Hooke proved that it takes on the shape (thou
59.
by staplung 11mo ago
Sounds like the answer is no. "For trivial relocatability, we found a showstopper bug that the group decided could not be fixed in time for C++26, so the strong consensus was to remove this feature from C++26." [ https:/&#x2F
60.
by staplung 11mo ago
MDL is also from MIT and supposedly stood for More Datatypes than Lisp. According to wikipedia "MDL provides several enhancements to classic Lisp. It supports several built-in data types, including lists, strings and arrays, and user

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