gordaco

6 ms·

1.
by gordaco 4y ago
"But security!" has been the "won't somebody please think of the children" of the technology world for a long time. The end goal, intentional or not, is the same: restricting freedoms (or, on a shorter term, ignore
2.
by gordaco 4y ago
Yes, for a few years we had what was popularly called "Sun tax" in order to disincentivise people from installing solar panels in their homes. It was removed in 2018, though. Although corruption was probably present, I would say t
3.
by gordaco 4y ago
In most of Spain they sound exactly the same. I have met a total of one single person who pronounced them differently. Maybe it depends on the region. I'm from Málaga, by the way.
4.
by gordaco 4y ago
This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v , o
5.
by gordaco 4y ago
This is already deployed. My current employer (at least, my local branch) has some not-mandatory-but-actually-yes-mandatory "training" followed by tests where they do track your eyeball and you are penalised if you look away (they
6.
by gordaco 4y ago
> I fully support anyone doing whatever they like with their body, but we should be able to at least acknowledge that any alcohol in any amount is self destructive. Yes. There is a related issue, which is that a lot of people just can&#x
7.
by gordaco 4y ago
Induction is also a very good way to prove these formulas. In fact, these are just perfect textbook exercises for someone learning induction: try to find formulas for the sum of the first k -th powers (for some not so big integer k ), the
8.
by gordaco 4y ago
The thing about RSS is that big tech companies are not very fond of it because it gives too much control to the user and it's not so easy to flood you with ads when you use it. So, many of those companies either don't offer RSS, o
9.
by gordaco 4y ago
It's weird seeing Pell's equation discussed as something intractable or unsolved. We have deterministic ways of solving them (you can use convergents, which can be calculated using continuous fractions [0]). But then again, Diopha
10.
by gordaco 4y ago
I'm not sure that twenty times the yearly price would look like a reasonable price, but if it's software I actually want, I might agree. I would weigh that price against the functionality of the software, ignoring whether there is
11.
by gordaco 4y ago
I'm a very, very firm believer on not paying for "subscription" to software. New content, I can understand (I spend about 40€ monthly on several Patreons, mostly comic artists; and I have a couple news subscriptions as well),
12.
by gordaco 4y ago
As a simple example, one can look at f(x)=1/x in R+. The derivative is f'(x)=-1/x^2 and the second derivative is f''(x)=2/x^3. In general, every function of the form f(x)=1/x^n with odd n will have this
13.
by gordaco 4y ago
Fenwick Trees (which, despite the name, are implemented using an array) allow counting prefix sums AND updating prefix sums in O(log n) time. Very useful when n is in the order of millions. I have used them a few times in Project Euler pr
14.
by gordaco 4y ago
I'm using 102.0.1 and I couldn't reproduce it either.
15.
by gordaco 4y ago
I miss GWT. Glad to see I'm not the only one. Then again I don't like web programming at all and I'd rather write a desktop UI, which explains it, I guess. I miss the times when UI didn't necessarily mean web. I guess I&
16.
by gordaco 4y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2169/ . I'm afraid that we are going to see these kinds of issues proliferate rapidly. It's a consequence of the usage of machine learning with extensive amounts of data comi
17.
by gordaco 4y ago
This used to be common in parts of Europe as well. There is a book called From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats , from the food journalist Bee Wilson [1], which tells (among many other things) a lot o
18.
by gordaco 4y ago
I hate smartphones mostly because of this (although there are more reasons), and I wish I could stop using them altogether, but there are too many people out there who only communicate using text applications (WhatsApp and Telegram, mostly.
19.
by gordaco 4y ago
This happened to me last week as well. I assume that this shit came with any of the recent updates. It really infuriated me, especially the usage of the word "need" and the fact that the dialog doesn't offer an option like &q
20.
by gordaco 4y ago
> the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it). While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there
21.
by gordaco 5y ago
I'm going to be that guy and point out that clover wasn't considered a weed until a chemical that killed clover, but not grass, was developed by Dow Chemical and the company wanted to sell it as a weed killer, so they ran a campai
22.
by gordaco 5y ago
The ability to switch LookAndFeels is one of my favourite features of Swing. Lately I've found myself using the Motif one a lot for my tiny personal projects, although copy&paste doesn't seem to work on its text boxes and that
23.
by gordaco 5y ago
The thing is that in other occasions I believe I have bought DRM-free music from Amazon Spain. But those particular albums weren't available in Spain, and although I found them in the german Amazon, I wasn't able to purchase them.
24.
by gordaco 5y ago
What I miss the most about this "peak warez" period (and most of the mid to late 00s, basically) is the huge amount of blogs uploading rare old music. During this sweet period I was able to get a lot of very rare music from all ov
25.
by gordaco 5y ago
You could also do this with RAR. I always used the same command (which I could still recite up to the last character) to create compressed files of the size of a floppy, which I believed to be exactly 1423.5 kilobytes. Then again, I'm
26.
by gordaco 5y ago
I still use my 20 years old hotmail address (OK, I don't really use it anymore... but I still get some mail from newsletters I'm subscribed to), but I read it from thunderbird so I never need to use the ad-ridden web interface.
27.
by gordaco 5y ago
Yeah. Autocomplete is about the least useful function of an IDE. The real killer features IMHO are the automatic refactoring tools (method renaming, addition of function arguments, etc) and, in languages that support it, the continuous buil
28.
by gordaco 5y ago
It's a real pity. They are awesome beginner languages, and even when you are not a beginner any more, they go a long way. I also like their syntax a lot. I haven't touched Ada in like 20 years and now that it seems to be having a
29.
by gordaco 5y ago
Same here. I'm usually a "single task" person (I like to focus. I know well that I don't function well when trying to do many things at once), so a single maximised window is always the optimal approach for me. This is a
30.
by gordaco 5y ago
That's funny. I have a degree in maths, which I guess qualifies me as a mathematician, although I've always worked as a software developer. So, the thing is that I'm not a good mathematician, but I happen to be good at arithm

More ›