todd8

80 ms·

631.
by todd8 7y ago
My dad grew up in rural Iowa almost 100 years ago. He didn't have electricity or running water and no air conditioning or refrigeration. Ice cream was a rare treat that could be bought on a trip into town or perhaps made in the winter.
632.
by todd8 7y ago
When reading a man page, especially a classic man page like the ps man page or maybe a system call man page like sigaction , I try to keep in mind that the information is there but may require careful study. Good man pages are a often qu
633.
by todd8 7y ago
As an oftentimes Emacs user and a sometimes Vim user, I need more keys not less. I especially want more modifiers in consistent locations. Laptops frequently move these around, put a fn key where ctrl normally goes, or don’t even provide a
634.
by todd8 7y ago
A fourth distinct Lisp is Emacs Lisp.
635.
by todd8 7y ago
Does this mean all those lock picking videos have to go too?
636.
by todd8 7y ago
Yes. Signal handlers allow C programs to respond to events outside of the normal control flow (see signal.h, etc.). This means that once a function, say fnc1, has returned, the memory on the stack that was used by fnc1 can end up being reus
637.
by todd8 7y ago
About now, stars over 60 light-years away are receiving our I Love Lucy episodes. I wonder what they make of [1]. Will they have a sense of humor, or will they thinks it's some kind of documentary? [1] https://www.youtube.co
638.
by todd8 7y ago
> knowing what bugs exist or other issues that effect security is hard I agree. For example, according to [1]: "In the autumn of 2004, [Dan] Bernstein taught a [University of Chicago graduate level] course about computer software se
639.
by todd8 7y ago
Oh no. Nextera Energy, according to [1] is "... one of the largest wind and solar energy developers in North America". According to the article, 800 metric tons of concrete go into building a wind turbine. Replacing all of the f
640.
by todd8 7y ago
I found the BMW i3 "teardown" by a reverse engineering company Munro & Associates very interesting. The BMW EV i3 is described by them as "without a question of a doubt the most advanced vehicle on the planet ... as revol
641.
by todd8 7y ago
This definitely makes Teslas more attractive to me. About half the homes on my (short) street have Teslas. I didn't know how little hot weather affected the battery usage. I had mistakenly assumed that A/C would have a greater neg
642.
by todd8 7y ago
How is a handful of people eschewing flights and 5-day work weeks going to have any impact on our future temperatures? We can work on renewables, but the main source our renewable power today is hydroelectric and I have read that very lit
643.
by todd8 7y ago
This seems kind of inevitable with macros. They help the macro creator write code with new, "better" abstractions, but readers of the code have to learn the semantics of the macro before they can understand what's happening.
644.
by todd8 7y ago
How true!
645.
by todd8 7y ago
I knew someone who told me his wife stopped at their mailbox to pick up mail and neglected to put their Mercedes in park when she opened the door. The car, while idling ran over (some part of) her! I'm not sure how hurt she was, but I&
646.
by todd8 7y ago
The Vigenère is the classic example of an historically important cipher. This cipher is a substitution cipher: each letter of the plaintext is replaced by a different letter in the ciphertext. In simple substitution a fixed mapping from t
647.
by todd8 7y ago
I donated land to Nature Conservancy.
648.
by todd8 7y ago
Sounds like the same person, it came up in a class taught by Boyer and Moore.
649.
by todd8 7y ago
This is great. I’ve been thinking about doing this very thing in a different problem domain.
650.
by todd8 7y ago
Perhaps, but just as conditions in Europe might have inevitably led to war given the right spark, couldn’t the discovery of the chemical engineering to develop fertilizer have been just around the corner and if not Frank Haber, one of his s
651.
by todd8 7y ago
Interesting observations. I’ve thought about twins and brain structure too, but I am a computer scientist not a neuro-scientist so I might be completely wrong. Serious mental illness seems to be of higher incidence in the population than I
652.
by todd8 7y ago
It’s amazing how many engineering problems had to be solved in the space program. I heard of one that involves software from programmers that worked for NASA. (I don’t remember the space craft but I think it was Apollo). After separation fr
653.
by todd8 7y ago
It’s hard to walk on a straight heading for most people. A simple trick helps. Pick a landmark on the horizon, walk toward it checking for it periodically, and once you reach it pick a new distant land mark in the direction you’d like to tr
654.
by todd8 7y ago
Well, it’s turtles all the way down. [1] Even the assembly language programmer is running on top of the OS. The OS is deep magic: runtime interrupts happening to make the floating point hardware handle certain edge cases correctly. Fork sys
655.
by todd8 7y ago
Yeah, I thought that point might be confusing because I wasn't clear. You're right limiting the scope could reduce dev time and it might often be a welcome suggestion. It doesn't always go that way though and some proposals f
656.
by todd8 7y ago
I'm not sure that ethanol mandates are a good idea. It's not clear that the entire life-cycle costs (in terms of CO2 emissions) of adding ethanol is better than the gasoline that it displaces, see [1]. This would mean that the man
657.
by todd8 7y ago
In addition to the difficulty in making a meaningful estimate, I'm frustrated by how often management really wants to hear a particular answer and won't settle for anything but that answer. It can go like this: 1. Developers size
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by todd8 7y ago
Nice!
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by todd8 7y ago
I've programmed for many years and taught programming; my trajectory through the various programming languages and paradigms seems to have worked for me. But things have changed in big ways since I learned to program. My first job afte
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by todd8 7y ago
Data on spending per pupil in the US largest school districts [1] reveals that San Francisco spends $13,718 per pupil. San Francisco spends more per pupil than the US average. OECD Data [2] indicates that overall the US spends on average $1

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