zb

12 ms·

61.
by zb 8y ago
It's the same for classes that define it like: def __enter__(self): return self which is a common pattern (used by open()), but there's no requirement that __enter__() return the same object. In cases where __ente
62.
by zb 8y ago
It's not like there was no inflation in the gold standard era. It's just that inflation wasn't under anybody's political control - I guess if there was a gold rush you had a lot of inflation and if there wasn't you
63.
by zb 8y ago
elm stands for ELectronic Mail, if I'm not mistaken.
64.
by zb 8y ago
NumPy is designed to work with SciPy, which is a wrapper for literally the same 4 decade old Fortran libraries (LAPACK &c.) that you're referring to here.
65.
The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming(medium.com)
2 points by zb 8y ago|0 comments
66.
by zb 9y ago
Calculating a position (and time) from the GPS data is basically a case of throwing it in a matrix and calculating the fix with the least squared error, and many receivers do just just. However, many (most?) actually use a Kalman filter, wh
67.
by zb 9y ago
Or we could just stop massively subsidising sugar (in the form of HFCS). Crazy, I know. Why does everyone think that politicians are clueless numpties when they're deciding what to tax, but omniscient geniuses whenever they're dec
68.
by zb 9y ago
You must be one of those people who writes stuff like #define TWO 2
69.
Outdated tech trove keeps digital archives alive(radionz.co.nz)
2 points by zb 9y ago|0 comments
70.
by zb 9y ago
That is a genuine issue with fork(), but if you do fork() followed immediately by exec() then you won't ever encounter it. (The new process's memory space completely replaces the copied pages of the child.) So it's a real pro
71.
by zb 9y ago
Apart from being doomed to failure, this seems like a stupid thing to legislate for. The one thing everybody in this debate should be able to agree upon is that Title II is not an especially good regulatory mechanism for enforcing net neutr
72.
by zb 9y ago
I used to regularly do ad-hoc text processing, typically on a 24 hour log of GPS data (on an early-2000s-era computer). Surprisingly enough, awk is many times faster than cut for any data set big enough for you to notice time passing.
73.
by zb 9y ago
As of last year, Waymo were saying it will take up to 30 years, and they're widely considered to be in the lead: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...
74.
by zb 9y ago
The part they share is literally called "Coarse/Acquisition" and the part they don't share is called "Precise". (This has nothing to do with Selective Availability; they're broadcast in two completely diff
75.
by zb 9y ago
Yep, in the southeastern US it's routinely so cold inside that were it to get that cold in the winter, they would turn up the heat. Except that instead of wearing three layers of clothing you're in shorts and a T-shirt because it&
76.
by zb 9y ago
In New Zealand we used 'piggie'. None of us were aware that this was not the original. Mercifully.
77.
by zb 9y ago
"One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means." — Alan Perlis
78.
by zb 9y ago
Using the name 'blame' for that subcommand is at least as old as CVS, and probably older.
79.
by zb 9y ago
Electric motors, unlike internal combustion engines, produce very high torque at low/zero RPMs, and therefore can accelerate very quickly. Electrical engineers have known this literally since the 19th Century. Electric motors in indust
80.
by zb 9y ago
This does feel a lot faster, but hasn't fixed my pet peeve (on bbc.com): clicking on a link to a news article and getting taken to the wrong one because the ads loaded and everything moved just as I clicked. This often happens to me 3
81.
by zb 9y ago
The process hasn't really changed much (I applied for a port allocation 5 years or so ago). There's a little questionnaire you fill out, and there might be some back-and-forth over email to clarify the answers but basically it&#x2
82.
by zb 9y ago
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is issued by the Nobel Foundation and chosen by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like the Physics and Chemistry prizes. The difference is that it was not endo
83.
by zb 10y ago
There's actually a potentially good article in here, about how the software development community is failing to uphold its obligations to the public interest. Unfortunately it's struggling to escape from yet another entry in the t
84.
by zb 10y ago
The other really remarkable thing about that time for me (I was working for a TomTom competitor) was that Nokia also paid a whopping US$8.1 billion (€5.7 billion) for NavTeq. This was right before Google ate both companies' lunch by
85.
by zb 10y ago
As far as I can tell this group was essentially the world's last human-powered compiler. Their job was to translate what was effectively high-level code[1] into assembly language. That's cool and all, but your compiler probably
86.
by zb 10y ago
Yes, this is a giant issue for MongoDB. For example here's Yahoo explaining (in 2014) why they will never use it: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Marc... For the record, I personally t
87.
by zb 10y ago
The thing to remember is that the CRs are never really gone, they're just silently inserted for you by the tty. Dealing with raw vs cooked (where LF is automatically translated to CRLF) ttys in UNIX is also a giant pain when you have t
88.
by zb 10y ago
Note that, unlike anything the guy in the article did, what you're suggesting actually is illegal. He at least got his money back eventually because he was demonstrably 100% above-board. If you get caught structuring transactions to
89.
by zb 10y ago
> There are kinds of making other than engineering. True enough. But the piece argues (I am the author) that software engineering is not making, it's designing. > Carpentry is not engineering. Cooking is not engineering. Carpentr
90.
by zb 10y ago
(Author here) > Do you really get mechanical or civil engineers saying "yeah, we expect there are a few fatal flaws in the design, that's just how it goes, we'll build it anyway and ship a fix if customers complain"?

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