watersb

66 ms·

661.
by watersb 5y ago
> It's stirring up antibodies among all the investigators who ever over-engineered an approach that was subsequently junked! (shuffles feet awkwardly) Me! And I was supposed to be a CS major, a programmer. But I came along right w
662.
by watersb 5y ago
> Scientific code is often write-once, run-once, done. If only it were so! Lots and lots of "scientific" code turned out to be re-formatting data. There were some things I wrote in Perl, then re-wrote in Java (which was the s
663.
by watersb 5y ago
I never had a Spectrum, but it's easy to understand the magic of such a device. It's tiny, it's relatively cheap, it's simple enough to take apart (disassembled ROM, or dis-assembled hardware I suppose). Sure, it was und
664.
by watersb 5y ago
> BTW, if you like the Energia rocket and heavy metal, you might like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVWfqOSdzs4 I will never be the same, now that I have experienced this. I am going to go lie down for a bit.
665.
by watersb 5y ago
Oh boy, I've felt this way a lot in my career. The key mistake that I would make was to curl up instead of reach out. When you are worried or afraid, it can be hard to reach out. But I always got far better feedback whenever I presente
666.
by watersb 5y ago
I have yet to read the whole PEP, and I haven't written any serious Python, either, but I find this to be very well written. It uses a simple example of a "Circle" class, a subclass of "Shape": class Shape:
667.
by watersb 5y ago
Yeah, fly-back transformer hell. I used to manage a network of about 400 computers. People would turn off their computer but the monitor would stay on, and if there were any loose components in there, I could hear the noise. I would wander
668.
by watersb 5y ago
I kept that issue of Wired. Later I heard somewhere that this issue was the single most expensive magazine issue in history. The article is dated December 1996. I have yet to look through the previous HN submissions, does anyone know if the
669.
by watersb 5y ago
Ausgezeichnet!
670.
by watersb 5y ago
I've worked on a huge space science project that was scattered across multiple countries in order to get the funding scale that the proposal seemed to require. We got the impression that in order to get the thing built, if we had relie
671.
by watersb 5y ago
The intro text should be kept in German regardless of target audience, it sounds so much more badass that way. Alas, none of the Demos seem to work for me on my iPad. It's an old iPad. That would like to Bang.
672.
by watersb 5y ago
I, for one, lament the new ecological direction of MacBook packing materials; there's damn little bisphenyl to get high on these days. More seriously: I found the examples in the article quite interesting. "Which of these is easie
673.
by watersb 5y ago
Well, yes, that was the point of the round rects in Macintosh 1984 design: change the perception of what a "computer" feels like. The rich, Corinthian leather in later Mac design... sigh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F
674.
by watersb 5y ago
Why oh why do people never practice restoring things? We all treat backups like open loop: billion-dollar project? Meh, just throw it over the wall and hope it lands somewhere. I harp on this every time it comes up. Ugh.
675.
by watersb 5y ago
Wild. I was first introduced to heuristic search in drug discovery at a biotech company in 1993. Support vector networks were searching for good shapes by 1997, maybe before then, but the vocabulary we used to describe the search technique
676.
by watersb 5y ago
I vaguely recall a hook that added TextMate to macOS input fields, but it would open a document in the usual TextMate app. That is to say, you'd be switching between apps, banging between the input field and TextMate. Still, it saved a
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by watersb 5y ago
This story is well written and simply devastating.
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by watersb 5y ago
I love Affinity Photo Design Publish. Have the apps on iOS, Windows, MacOS. I am very much a hobbyist, but I'm missing things I got used to in Photoshop. If there's that one way to get a look that you've developed, it's
679.
by watersb 5y ago
-- Just an update, too late to edit my reply -- I responded to the assertion "Every student debtor is 7.5% less in debt in real terms than they were last year." because I found it intriguing. It's a cool writing prompt. I
680.
by watersb 5y ago
I've never had COVID, as far as I know, but my health was wrecked after getting sick with influenza. My wife and baby got better. I got better, then got worse, then got better, then worse for longer... It wasn't as bad as the orig
681.
by watersb 5y ago
> Every student debtor is 7.5% less in debt in real terms than they were last year. Because Federal Student Loan payments were deferred last year, interest free. Such loans can also be forgiven -- canceled and considered paid in full -
682.
by watersb 5y ago
Windows CE was really interesting, but irritating to use. The Start Menu on such a small screen was a very weird thing. It was clear that Microsoft was uncomfortable with anything that pointed away from their mainline desktop experience, th
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by watersb 5y ago
Although the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean is very deep indeed, north of Purto Rico. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Deep
684.
by watersb 5y ago
MPW is the Macintosh Programmer's Workbench. I had forgotten about these. I think my first real push with MPW was using it as an environment to host the AT&T C++ compiler, which at that time was still a bunch of preprocessor macros
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by watersb 5y ago
Delight. I enjoy living in the future. It's hilarious to me that my favorite tech - NextStep, Linux, Mac - ate the world. I chuckle when I dream of time-traveling to 1997 - me, to reveal that Apple is the most wealthy company in the wo
686.
by watersb 5y ago
This article is worth reading. "Banjo pizza" (!) and a reminder of the phrase for Edwardian prosperity between the [first] two World Wars. Wow. The hero image of this post is an interior shot of a Shakey's Pizza in Seattle. I
687.
by watersb 5y ago
I'm surprised (and pleased) to see further updates from Tiny Core. The base choices are glibc/busybox, versus the musl/busybox of Alpine. Are there places where the base Tiny Core would be useful in containers or other deploy
688.
by watersb 5y ago
> VLBI requires multiple telescopes significantly separated from each other in physical space (think thousands of km) to track the same object on the sky during an observation. Thus VLBI is hard/impossible for giant immovable dishe
689.
by watersb 5y ago
Bumped into a chemtrails evangelist at the local office supply store. Rural US, people believe everything out here. The more sparse the population, the stranger it gets. I don't think this is a new phenomenon; cultists were quite the
690.
by watersb 5y ago
Another tricky thing about pulsar observations is that the integration times are very short. Obviously. You want the thousands to millions of beats per second. With short exposure time, not many photons to grab. You need a bigger aperture.

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