xenadu02

16 ms·

181.
by xenadu02 1y ago
I put "exceptions exist" in my original post because I knew the pedants would jump on me with their individual anecdotes :) The trouble with informal systems (which is how I personally classify English) is that practices and expec
182.
by xenadu02 1y ago
In the USA as a low-level employee address the company CEO as "heya phil, hows it going?". Then address your friend with "Hello Mr. Smith". In most cases you won't get a positive reaction out of either one of those
183.
by xenadu02 1y ago
This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy. You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance. There may not be much pressure to develop resista
184.
by xenadu02 1y ago
No. There's too much of it for that. If this missing mass were in the form of dust the entire night sky (relatively speaking) should be full of dust reflecting light and radiating infrared due to being lit by starlight for billions of
185.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Fun fact: All words and grammar rules are made up. Entirely. As in... invented by humans. The laws of physics don't really care. If lots of people use "octopi" (and they do) and most people understand what it means (which the
186.
by xenadu02 1y ago
You assign blocks of numbers along a road, eg by thousands. So a block becomes the "300 block". Within that block you allocate odds on one side, evens on the other. Then you assign numbers with gaps between them to account for fut
187.
by xenadu02 1y ago
I know but the only benefit of doing that is in the file cabinet in the government office you can easily determine which buildings are the oldest. For every other possible use of addresses that system is much much much worse than the other
188.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Well you are also commanded to pay your taxes (render undo Caesar what is Caesar's) and obey+respect authorities (slaves obey your masters). All part of being "in the world" but not "of the world". You could infer t
189.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Well Japan's physical address system everywhere except Kyoto is complete insanity. Every level get assigned numbers based on build order so block 6 can be across town from block 7 for no apparent reason. Feel free to have any addressin
190.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Biophotons (or ultra weak photon emission) has been known about for decades. Various reactive oxidative molecules release light when coming down from an excited state. Some enzymatic activity is also known to produce light. The big question
191.
by xenadu02 1y ago
No, China imposes rather large tariffs on external goods to force internal consumption. That's beyond a bunch of other measures that prevent foreigners from starting businesses or owning property. Of course as other comments in the thr
192.
by xenadu02 1y ago
> This is no doubt in part because most stuff we run on 240 in the US is higher amperage anyway, You've got the cause/effect backwards I think. The high amp stuff needs 240v to avoid ridiculous amp requirements. The lower pow
193.
by xenadu02 1y ago
We already have plug standards here and they are good enough. Sure they're objectively worse but in practice the cases where it ever mattered are a rounding error. Better to encourage adoption of parts of our own existing standard then
194.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Yes it is. The great irony of the party of small government is how over-reaching and heavily involved they want the Federal Government to be for the things they don't like.
195.
by xenadu02 1y ago
As the sibling comment notes: The US/Canada are already split-phase 240v/120v systems. As near to 100% as makes no difference every single house is already wired for 240v. In fact wired for it and using it: electric ranges, stoves
196.
by xenadu02 1y ago
Indeed and all languages accumulate exceptions and oddities in one form or another. The larger the speaker population the more that is true. None of them are really that much easier than any other, they just slot into patterns your brain al
197.
by xenadu02 1y ago
That was deliberate for propaganda purposes. They rushed many of their programs (and got a number of people killed by doing so) and simply never told anyone about the failures. Besides which Sputnik 1 wasn't very useful, but it was wha
198.
by xenadu02 1y ago
This is why solar requires redundant data links to the operator in CA now. Mine has it. During instability they can command my system to accept larger voltage and frequency excursions than would normally be allowed to prevent a "pile-o
199.
by xenadu02 2y ago
Fun fact: you can be the change you want to see! I fill out all paper forms and typed dates as yyyy-MM-dd wherever possible. No one has ever been confused by it. Some have even copied it. I also give units in metric sometimes and set some o
200.
by xenadu02 2y ago
The Ryobi lithium batteries I got with my first cordless drill bundle at Home Depot in 2006 still work and still hold a useful amount of charge today. And the charger I got back then will charge the newest batteries - not as fast - but they
201.
by xenadu02 2y ago
This is true. A Chinese state bank will loan you a couple million to setup a factory with few questions asked. Loan repayment will be repeatedly deferred until you can find customers. The risk is comparatively low. As you noted here in the
202.
by xenadu02 2y ago
That's true and unfortunate. In the past many more banks were local and there was greater appetite for investments in small and medium businesses, without the expectation that the business had to make the Fortune 1000 or it wasn't
203.
by xenadu02 2y ago
I just bought a lathe to lock in prices before tariffs cause them to rise. Its a hobby I've wanted to get into for a long time. There are no manufacturers of screw cutting lathes (a variant of engine lathes and what most people think o
204.
by xenadu02 2y ago
That touches on a long-running very complicated debate around quantum mechanics, hidden variables, spooky action at a distance, no-communication, etc. For various quantum effects that seem to be paradoxes by classical physics what is happen
205.
by xenadu02 2y ago
I can't claim credit for any of this. As others have noted Einstein (and other much smarter people) are responsible.
206.
by xenadu02 2y ago
I apologize, I meant to reply to the parent! I was refuting the idea that they sat down and wrote the C compiler in B, then rewrote the compiler in C and compiled it with the B-compiled C compiler. You and the parent might not have meant it
207.
by xenadu02 2y ago
c is technically the speed of causality . The speed at which perturbations in the fields that make up the universe propagate. The speed of light is a consequence of this, not the cause. Calling c the "speed of light" is putti
208.
by xenadu02 2y ago
That's not quite correct. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465698 B was bootstrapped in BCPL, then rewritten in B to be self-hosting. But the transition from B to NB (New B) to C was continuo
209.
by xenadu02 2y ago
The first B compiler was written in BCPL on the GE 635 mainframe. Thompson wrote a B compiler in BCPL which they used to cross-compile for PDP-7. Then Thompson rewrote B in B, using the BCPL compiler to bootstrap. AFAIK this is the only cle
210.
by xenadu02 2y ago
"auto" used to mean automatic memory management because if you are coming from assembly or even some other older higher-level languages you can't just declare a local variable and use it as you please. You must declare some

More ›