vikingerik

6 ms·

31.
by vikingerik 5mo ago
One other thing to compare is business and health regulations. Compliance with that is certainly more involved and costly today than in 1940 and would account for part of the price.
32.
by vikingerik 5mo ago
The Zocchi d100 isn't face-symmetric and thus isn't a fair die. It's as close as he could get. It's really effectively a golf ball with 100 dimples, but they aren't and can't be arranged perfectly symmetrical
33.
by vikingerik 5mo ago
Of course this is comparing to one data point that is an outlier. If people are choosing to pay $3 in today's dollars for it, that means that in 2010 McDonald's was underpricing that item relative to its market value. Presumably
34.
by vikingerik 5mo ago
This ticker's current speed is faster than that, though. It's going about 1e-9 dollar per second. That comes to about $0.03 per year, which as a fraction of the current base of $0.50, comes to 6% inflation per year. I don't
35.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
I have the Twin Galaxies world record on the Dreamcast version, at $114k total score, so yes :)
36.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but rea
37.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
Yes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get fro
38.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
I don't remember the source but I also like this quote: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.
39.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
Not just you: the Tom Swift novels reboot in the 1990s had Tom once bragging about "the latest seven-eighty-six processor."
40.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
That was heuristics. It looked for the text "more" or "next" or "->" within an anchor tag. Sometimes it would be fooled if a forum thread or other link had a title containing one of those words.
41.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
PNG can be lossy before the lossless step. You can take areas of near-matching pixel values and make them actually match, to work better with PNG's near neighbor compression. There are a few encoders that can do that.
42.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
Right, but that's not something a linter could know.
43.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
Zero shouldn't be an exception there. If f had been set from something like f = a - b, then you're in the same situation where f might be almost but not exactly zero. The linter wouldn't know where f came from, so it should
44.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
The cost effectiveness is the intimidation and chilling effects on a wider population, when that can be achieved with a small number of actual goons.
45.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
If you're complaining about the prices, remember how capitalism works. The price is set by buyers, not sellers. That's the invisible hand, the seller will set the price to what buyers show they will pay. If you're unhappy
46.
by vikingerik 6mo ago
One workaround is to buy a computer monitor and use that instead. Most of those are still pretty dumb HDMI or USB terminals that you can plug any signal source into. They don't come in huge sizes like TVs (although search "digit
47.
by vikingerik 7mo ago
Regarding Excel's weird warts... Microsoft knows all about them but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. The business world has a billion Excel scripts and macros done by barely technical users that all inadvertentl
48.
by vikingerik 7mo ago
This is almost exactly what I do. Keep my wrists in line with the forearms, such that they're angled relative to the keyboard. So the home keys aren't ASDF, it's more like QWEF and HUIO. (Although it's more like the h
49.
by vikingerik 7mo ago
As others are saying, the * is meant as a wildcard, not as censorship. It's meant to also cover the likes of Linux or Xenix etc, although there isn't actually any other name that would strictly fit the pattern of "UN*X"
50.
by vikingerik 7mo ago
For the "14 days ago" one - post timestamps get updated when a post gets re-submitted or boosted by the moderators. It would have actually been there from 44 days ago even if it's now saying it was more recent.
51.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Right, cubing scales up much more readily than juggling. Although I've found the bigger cubes aren't quite so impressive because you can't do them as fast. I take 10-15 minutes for the 5x5x5, and by then any observer has lo
52.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Rubik's cubing is another. Most people here with enough logical aptitude to be programmers could probably learn a beginner method in a day or two. I'll pick up a cube anywhere I see one scrambled, solve it in a couple minutes, a
53.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Likely the office was getting a kickback from the supplier for writing that prescription. This is shockingly common in the US. A straight cash payment is prohibited, but it's easy to work around that legally and provide equipment or
54.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
The competitive market would take care of that. The employer that most wants your services will offer the X+Y, and competition will induce others to do the same. (No, the job market isn't perfectly liquid, but in principle that'
55.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Taxes paid by your employer are indeed paid by you. If your salary is X and the company is paying Y worth of payroll tax, then they're really paying X+Y for your services, which would all be salary going to you if not for the payroll
56.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs a certain width for its reflection range to span across the viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagon
57.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Self checkout is fine, if the happy path works. If everything scans once and doesn't accidentally scan a second time, if everything scans at the price you thought it was posted for, if you don't have any controlled substances r
58.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Parsec still rocks hard. I got good enough to roll over the score on it: http://dos486.com/misc/parsec.jpg
59.
by vikingerik 8mo ago
Clarification: only Magic Kingdom has that extra step of train/ferry/bus transportation from the parking lot. For all the other parks at Disney World, you can drive in and walk to the entrance. (There are trams if you're fa
60.
by vikingerik 9mo ago
I did too with Money Sunset for quite a while, but mostly gave up in the last couple years. Several of the online accounts stopped supporting exporting to QIF/OFX, and it's not worth the effort to type in everything manually or f

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