devnulloverflow

6 ms·

61.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
How do you get feedback about what works?
62.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
As much as I am an old-school Unix zealot, I think it is time to move towards a well standardised binary config format with non-trivial types (i.e a schema). There still has to be a standard text format, but only for the source from which
63.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
But the Night Manager novel really is a story about a stylish British tough-guy who seduces various beautiful women in different countries as he works his way towards the bad guys. The only reason you can read it without it seeming Bondis
64.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
It looks good. I'm going to print it. But does every page have a different retro theme, or is there a unifying pattern to it all that I am not genius enough to detect?
65.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Ever since mouses and GUIs were invented it was common knowledge that "ordinary" users don't bother to learn keyboard shortcuts. That common knowledge is wrong, but it comes from an important truth: brand new users who are no
66.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces I am no expert on this, but from talking to people in the aviation industry I noticed slow a trend away from the cockpit-with-2,000 controls and towards using comp
67.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Yes. In fact the tax law as the authorities apply it probably is code in the sense that they probably shove some inputs into some Excel spreadsheet to calculate your tax return. (I'm exaggerating, they probably have bespoke software
68.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> No. The law is not a virtual machine and legal documents are not programming. This is true, but I'd think the opposite point is more important. Much of the grunge work I see the lawyers around me do really is about parsing out and
69.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
It's out of date, but that's OK when talking historically. And it was no more colonial than saying "Germany" instead of "Deutschland". Personally I prefer the term "Iran" even for historical usage b
70.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
But is it really a convenience, or is it just a way of ratifying our own ignorance after it has been caught out. "Iranian" mathematicians would be just as convenient, and less in inaccurate. " Arabic Mathematicians" ha
71.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Absolutely. Einstein is a bit famous for punching well above his weight compared to his own mathematical background. Most of his great work involves beautiful arguments that requiring only maths that a good-but-not-genius high school stude
72.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
I only just found out about borg and restic, but the sites I looked at both mention "backup" prominently. And that makes sense. If I ever sign up for rsync.net, it will be so I can store long term backups of my stuff, which I mi
73.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
The word "corporation", even in the legal sense includes things like towns. In a slightly broader sense, it includes things like provinces and countries. So why could it not include something like the community of people who live
74.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed I don't object to the condensed part so much. When I was a physicist, people had a similarly dim view of Nature. But P
75.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Yah, sorry about that. I replied before checking my memory of what I had written. I thought I caught the error and deleted the erroneous response in time. But I didn't.
76.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
You don't have to drill tunnels. The North Shore line isn't on tunnels for the most part, but it also never goes anywhere near the shore. I guess it's true that now you might need tunnels (especially for the eastern suburb
77.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The author instead seems to think they are approximately the same because the lower order terms are small compared to the highest one. In fairness, this is actually why we care in practice about asymptotic issues. The fact that ther
78.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
While I generally thing that looking for practical applications of research is nonsense, this one seems to be in an obviously useful area. It's all about different ways of measuring how good a function is at scrambling the input data.
79.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
You are amused that the Web has worse typography than TeX???
80.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Well, maybe the aliens will keep returning to earth and at unpredictable intervals demanding money in exchange for keeping the hostage alive.
81.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> Buses can also have dedicated lanes with right-of-way. Yes, the busways in parts of Brisbane are really excellent, better than any tram line I have seen. But they are also huge pieces of infrastructure that take up even more space (an
82.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
It's hard to get to some Sydney suburbs for the same reason. Though interestingly this includes rich areas like the Eastern Suburbs and Northern Beaches. I suspect fat-cat NIMBYs have been keeping the trains out for generations now.
83.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
I meant that UEFI doesn't have a BASIC interpreter (though probably someone has written one). I did not know that bootOS had one, but it does not surprise me given everything else I read on this thread.
84.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
Yes, BootOS very much in the same space as MS-DOS, although leaning even further on the "less-is-more" axis. It does the same basic things (though I suppose it doesn't do the BASIC thing). Interestingly, there is modern OS i
85.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
But a lot of the web is in fact serving documents, and using complicated apps to do it. It's not surprising, as the two categories do really merge into one another. A web store is certainly an app -- but it's also the modern equi
86.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, .... I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.
87.
by devnulloverflow 7y ago
> “I was forced to take risks with my money because treasury bonds barely pay anything!” ... is the system working as intended, because the policy rationale behind issuing lots of government bonds is precisely to make investors seek high