tlb

25 ms·

331.
by tlb 3y ago
It's easier to evolve code with a real OS where you can update software with rsync instead of a USB cable, write log files, ssh in and run the code under a debugger, run the same code in a test mode on your laptop, etc.
332.
by tlb 3y ago
Sam went through the garage startup stage in 2005-2007, and again in 2015-2017 with OpenAI. He was good at it -- I saw both firsthand. At OpenAI he was scrounging GPUs when that's what we needed most, and wangled a prototype DGX-1 long
333.
by tlb 3y ago
It seems rare to make use of the distinction between null and undefined in real Javascript code. It mainly seems useful in debugging: seeing a crash with an undefined value tells you something different than a null value.
334.
by tlb 3y ago
Most virtues aren't really suitable for self-experimentation, because the effects take a lifetime to accumulate. Consider loyalty, a key virtue in Tolkien's books. You can't just A/B test different levels of loyalty so s
335.
by tlb 3y ago
Extensively discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185
336.
by tlb 3y ago
I was told that as a young man, and I almost followed the advice and started a career in metallurgy instead of my actual love, programming. Fortunately I became a programmer, and I've loved doing it for 30+ years, made a pile of money,
337.
by tlb 3y ago
Some C++ libraries do pretty well. In the Eigen math library you can call most functions on dense or sparse matrices, and some template magic makes it work efficiently for all combinations. It's a shame it's so hard to write that
338.
by tlb 3y ago
A limitation is that you can only have one such graph in the program. So any graph algorithm that returns a graph, or uses another graph during the computation, doesn't fit.
339.
by tlb 3y ago
Good point. Some mutations cause the sperm, egg, or fetus to be unviable, so those are definitely underrepresented in the population. Perhaps it's still a useful heuristic for the purposes of rejecting a claim like "Some single mu
340.
by tlb 3y ago
Human DNA has ~3 billion base pairs, and each base pair could be switched to one of the other 3, so there are 9 billion possible single-change mutations. With 8 billion people, most having multiple mutations, most mutations exist. So it&#x2
341.
by tlb 3y ago
The OED approves of the GP's usage. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/anecdata_n?tl=true
342.
by tlb 3y ago
I never use it for getting answers, for the reasons you mention. A Wikipedia article has a lot more depth than any of the chatbot answers, and is more trustworthy. Github copilot is slightly useful for creating boilerplate code. But I try t
343.
by tlb 3y ago
This looks pretty small, so I guess it means 1.5 kWh per day, or 60 watts continuous.
344.
by tlb 3y ago
You don't need to do any of that for hosting a content website. The content & config are pushed by rsync/ssh from a git repo, so there's no need for backups. I can recreate a server in half an hour. I guess I lose the web
345.
by tlb 3y ago
Lift scales with the square of speed.
346.
by tlb 3y ago
This could be because they've negotiated an exclusive distribution deal, where the new distributor gets to monetize all the old content too.
347.
by tlb 3y ago
Please clearly label the posts as being from your bot. Some bot posts are useful, like when someone asks what product solves X. If yours are clearly labeled, people will upvote posts that are actually contributing to the discussion and yo
348.
by tlb 3y ago
_According to my measurements, [policy I don't like] doesn't improve [thing that isn't actually measured by the metrics I used]_ is an evergreen source of clickbait academic papers.
349.
by tlb 3y ago
You need some software to make a paper wallet. It’s pretty hard to write it yourself from scratch, so you ultimately still have to trust a software distribution. Scammy paper wallet generators could make semi-predictable private keys that t
350.
by tlb 3y ago
Caffeine elimination, like all metabolic processes, isn't quite linear. At low levels the elimination rate is proportional to the caffeine concentration, so you get the "half life" exponential decay curve. But at high levels,
351.
by tlb 3y ago
No 'r's or '3's on Safari/Mac. It's a custom font 'Cantarell', evidently a bit broken.
352.
by tlb 3y ago
It’s crazy that carrier-grade routers don’t auto-detect packet data corruption. They could do it by injecting test packets on ingress ports and sniffing on egress. Something like this would be detected quickly. It’s better to shut down a ro
353.
by tlb 3y ago
There are absolutely workable business models. They're just not publicly visible yet. That's fairly common: Facebook or Google didn't monetize for years and pundits wondered if they'd ever make money. In a winner-take-mo
354.
by tlb 3y ago
Although the article compares it to sticks of dynamite, 3 MJ of energy is worth about $0.08 at wholesale electricity rates. So indeed, even if they increase output a couple orders of magnitude, precision gold-plated capsules don't seem
355.
by tlb 3y ago
Or you might want to have redundant cooling. Cooling system prices seem to scale fairly linearly with the cooling power above a few kW, so instead of one 100 kW system you could buy four 25 kW systems so a single failure won't be a dis
356.
by tlb 3y ago
Watch-hours obviously matter, but so do other things like "are the best up & coming creators using us?" The danger is the tendency to focus on boosting measurable things at the expense of nonmeasurables. Often the nonmeasurabl
357.
by tlb 3y ago
For coffee shop computing, I’d like a computer than is clearly only for programming/creative work. When you saw Hemingway with a typewriter in a cafe, or Feynman with pages of squiggles in a bar, it was obvious at a glance they were cr
358.
by tlb 3y ago
It is, however, sharing the memory bandwidth and L3 cache. Which is often a big factor for things like inserting millions of table rows. Benchmarks should be run on an idle bare-metal machine, or you can't really compare results.
359.
by tlb 3y ago
No, C++ header files contain definitions too, which are emitted into every object file where they're used. If it's something allowed to be multiply defined it's emitted as a "weak" symbol, and the linker eliminates
360.
by tlb 3y ago
Function definitions in headers are compiled and included in the object file, then all but one copy is discarded during linking. Reading and discarding all this stuff adds some time to the linking process, which is a noticeable fraction of

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