todd8

19 ms·

121.
by todd8 4y ago
What is AOC? It’s hard to keep up with all the acronyms.
122.
by todd8 4y ago
My story: my first real job after grad school was at Texas Instruments. It was a good job, and I enjoyed working there. A fellow new hire and I were tasked with fixing a machine that ran in a clean room where semiconductor wafers were made.
123.
by todd8 4y ago
What the heck! We were participating in it before? I had heard of the terrible practice and had no idea that the US was doing it too.
124.
by todd8 4y ago
From the article: “None of the animals inside the saltwater aquarium, which contained clownfish, teira batfish and palette surgeonfish, survived.” :(
125.
by todd8 4y ago
I’m not an Economist, but doesn’t such a tax lower a firm’s ability to pay its employees (by hiring more or increasing wages) or decrease the firm’s ability to pay dividends to shareholders or force the firm to raise prices. Generally, it s
126.
by todd8 4y ago
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Detroit. It was a place where a high school diploma could get you a secure job that would support a middle class family. It’s all changed and Detroit is now half the size it once was while cities like Hou
127.
by todd8 4y ago
Only the head of the Prince Rupert drop is tough, due to high levels of stress in the glass (its made by dripping viscous melted glass into water). Interestingly, the whole drop with shatter into glass dust if the filament like tail is brok
128.
by todd8 4y ago
VSCode is impressive, but to keep it in perspective, consider that an editor with a bug might corrupt a file, an OS with a bug might corrupt an entire file system and at worst a bad OS could actually damage hardware. Windows, MacOS, and Lin
129.
by todd8 4y ago
I hesitate to dive into comparing editors, but here goes. I've used editors for a very long time, I believe the first was TECO sometime in the 1970s at the time I stopped punching cards. My preferred editors now are Emacs, Neovim, Jet
130.
by todd8 4y ago
I took typing for one semester in high school, 57 years ago. Despite so many years of touch typing, I’ve never been a fast typist. I haven’t slowed down much, but I type around 45 WPM just as I did over 50 years ago. I’ve tried to type fast
131.
by todd8 4y ago
What I want from full self driving is something at least close to hiring a professional chauffeur. I’ve had to do this a few times in Europe. The driver pulls up in an immaculate Mercedes sedan, he drives precisely and carefully with an exp
132.
by todd8 4y ago
Not really.
133.
by todd8 4y ago
The interview that resulted in my first real job as a programmer was in 1976. In that interview I was asked quite detailed questions about writing an interrupt handler and the rest of a device driver. Despite having a new MS in Computer Sci
134.
by todd8 4y ago
LaTeX and Emacs share a feature, they are both contain a core written in a low level language (For TeX it was Pascal originally, and for Emacs it is C). Anticipating the need for extensions, both systems are open source and include user p
135.
by todd8 4y ago
We grow up hearing “tuned” musical notes. It’s possible we learn these familiar frequencies so that at least some of us can tell the difference as you do. I’m not sure I could. Experiments on the development of the visual system in cats rev
136.
by todd8 4y ago
The description of CL format in the cited Wikipedia entry has its own charm. Here’s a sentence: “The second special character, #, is substituted by the tally of format arguments yet abiding their consumption.”
137.
by todd8 4y ago
I have a friend that wrote a unique iPhone app—related to a hobby of his. The App was a bit expensive for an iPhone app; as I recall it might have been around $100. His friends wanted him to give them the app, because they were his friends.
138.
by todd8 4y ago
I briefly dated a woman from France that regularly took homeopathic “medicine”. It hold her that it didn’t do anything and her counter argument was that it was paid for though the French government health care system so it must be efficacio
139.
by todd8 4y ago
I read these the first time so far back that the extensive section (with the fold out pages) covering sorting on external tape drives was of interest to me. Over the intervening years I've gone back to these books many times to check o
140.
The Birth of Emacs, with Lars Brinkhoff(youtube.com)
2 points by todd8 4y ago|0 comments
141.
by todd8 4y ago
Thank you for the detailed write up. (I hope the author sees this) I'm always impressed with Emacs users that are capable of such discipline. I've use Emacs well over forty years, with only a few years of interruption, but I have
142.
Is this proof that Hans Niemann cheated?(youtube.com)
4 points by todd8 4y ago|1 comments
143.
by todd8 4y ago
This is an interesting article, and I'll probably take a look at the go language profiling capabilities and built-in machine independent assembler. The idea of using bitmaps for retrieval on multiple indexes isn't new. Not surpri
144.
by todd8 4y ago
I understand what you are saying. Back then, I felt that donating money to a research University would indirectly provide benefits to the entire world by accelerating the advancement of science and technology. Like other charitable contribu
145.
by todd8 4y ago
I don't know of any public information at that level. Here's a few tidbits. The system was originally called the IBM RT PC, but it wasn't really a PC, it was a Unix workstation. We were going for the market dominated by compa
146.
by todd8 4y ago
I was at MIT over 50 years ago. I used to give them money, not a huge amount, but enough to create what has become a permanent endowment under my name. However years ago, I had lunch with the then president of MIT and realized that MIT had
147.
by todd8 4y ago
Back in the 1970s, I was very interested in chess. When I should have been doing my topology homework, I'd instead waste time pouring over MCO (Modern Chess Openings) studying the hundreds of variations that worked or didn't worke
148.
by todd8 4y ago
Back in the mid 80's, I was an operating system architect at IBM during the first couple of versions of AIX (IBM's Unix system). This ran on a new RISC architecture that is now called POWER. The idea for RISC came from the realiza
149.
by todd8 4y ago
This is a reassuring article. I had started to feel like I was losing eyesight because some "themes" are so hard to read, especially those dark themes using the annoying shade of blue. This is especially true for Emacs users. The
150.
by todd8 4y ago
I learned Algol 68 by studying the Revised Report on Algol 68 , which was published in 1977 as an edition of ACM SIGPLAN (Special Interest Group on Programming Languages) Notices. The publication can be downloaded for free from the ACM web

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