billforsternz

You are really excelling in this thread. Thank you for your insights and wisdom, I'm really enjoying everything you are contributing.

You can just break them into two roughly equal halves and use your teeth to scoop out the flesh. No need for either a knife, a spoon or any kind of preprocessing. I've been eating them that way for decades.

I see 10 9s so I suppose the claim is 9,999,999,999 people out of 10,000,000,000 won't notice so with 8,000,000,000 people on Earth I think it's 0.8 people not 80.

Understood. No doubt I would be similarly inclined if I'd gone down that path in life. My beef is that I feel this is a trope that gets rolled out without question, and it doesn't even bother paying lip service to the diversity of human experience.

I feel similarly whenever I hear about someone expressing empathy with someone, but apparently only after realizing they are someone's daughter/brother/sister/mother whatever type of relative. What's that about? I feel empathy for any innocent victim, they're human, they're living a life, maybe a very enjoyable life even if they don't have a single relative.

Good post but the whole "buy time to see your child graduate, get married or give birth" trope is quite frankly very annoying.

Older people have more going on, and more reasons to live, than whatever the next generations are up to. Even if we have children.

I had curative (hopefully, presumably) kidney cancer surgery 11 years ago. So far I've enjoyed travelling, socializing, working, coding, chess and other hobbies in the extra time I've been granted and I hope for decades more time to enjoy life. I don't have children. never aspired to it.

Sorry for the rant!

I like to program in a C++ subset that's basically C plus a sprinkling of ergonomic quality of life C++ features eg references and generic containers. I think of it as C+.

(Edit: No disrespect meant. I just thought such completely different language concepts potentially sharing the same name was kind of amusing)

What is it about a country that makes it "irrelevant" in your opinion?

Lots of people call it that. The Australian national team are called the Socceroos. The best, most authoritative magazine about the sport is called "World Soccer", published in the UK, where the name soccer originated. Even if the name soccer was used only in the USA, it would be a legitimate name. Different cultures use different names for things.

Soccer is a legitimate name for the sport. Football is properly the name of a whole group of sports OR in a local context the locally most popular type of football.

It's very weird for one type of football to try to claim the name all for itself globally.

BTW I am not American.

My problem is I don't want to be first to recline, if the person behind me reclines, fine.

(Not the person you're asking, but...) I don't want to adversely affect the person behind me, but I also accept the right of the person in front of me to recline if they want to. It's not easy being me.

Stuck it out to the end against my better judgement. Got 89/100 due to difficulties at the "Grandmaster" stage (12/20).

I thought it was going to be tougher because the very first word on my run was "Yield" and none of the options seemed convincing to me. I went with something that was at least fairly adjacent to the "something produced by" (as opposed to "submit to") meaning and this did successfully yield (he he) my first point.

The Z80 does have a DAA (decimal adjust arithmetic) instruction to facilitate BCD arithmetic. I don't think I ever used it in my Z80 years and I'm not familiar with the details. Sadly I have much less experience with the 6502, I didn't even know it had a BCD mode.

The wording is very unambiguous, it means something very specific in chess. In every legal chess position either White is checkmated or Black is checkmated or (by far the most common except in film and TV!) neither side is checkmated. So the wording is crystal clear, you should be able to freely place the White king on any of the unoccupied 59 squares and the position will be one of those in which White is checkmated.

A real shame, this totally ruined the puzzle for me as it seemed so unlikely that all five Black pieces would be mutually protected. I should have forced myself to ignore the faulty clause and try to solve without it. The bad clause is also completely unnecessary - one of those cases where deleting text (or code!) is an improvement with no downside!

I is tab ('\x09' or '\t') and J is new line ('\x0a' or '\n'). These Ctrl combinations follow a predictable linear mapping to the control character section of the ASCII table. Basically Ctrl subtracts 0x40, so I is 0x49, Ctrl I is 0x09.

Thanks for clarifying. I think this is an ARM and a break from a history of Z80 and Z80 adjacent CPUs. I do get the impression TI have done a good (financial) job milking these products whilst under investing in real product innovation.

Surprisingly high or surprisingly low?

Yes. And in the second one he has return c; when he meant return b;

Homer nods.

We're both seeing rudeness. We both dislike rudeness. I think it's rude to rain on someone's parade. You think it's rude to assume someone hadn't thought through their comment (I basically agree) and to address the person rather than the points (I also basically agree).

You might note my original comment included softening elements ("perhaps", "not saying you're wrong"). In general if you look at all my comments you'll see I'm not a rude person, I'm pretty agreeable in general.

I was (trying to) make a meta point rather than a point about the specific technical issue. I agree (again!) that the last word has not been said on this issue or on any other issue where tradeoffs need to be weighed.

I read Walter's comment and thought "Wow, that's a surprising, clever and innovative idea, I'm impressed". And I just didn't enjoy someone bluntly saying, in effect. "No you're wrong, you shouldn't do it like that". It's as simple as that really. I know blunt exchanges of views are normal for programmers and engineers, I don't have to like it every time.

Finally, I know Walter Bright is no shrinking violet and he definitely doesn't need me to defend him!

I wasn't really appealing to authority. I was just suspecting a familiar pattern that I always find a little distasteful. Person A describes a brilliant idea they're obviously proud of. Person B casually dismisses it and just claims without evidence that the obvious way of doing it is better. I find that pattern to be not only rude, but to suck some of the joy out of life. The fact that person A on this occasion is widely acknowledged as a brilliant practitioner I thought added weight to me pushing back. But I'd be inclined to feel the same way if person A was an enthusiastic wide eyed student (say) with a fresh perspective.

How long did you think about this before making this declaration? How long did Walter Bright think about this before making his decision when designing his language? Not saying you're wrong, just something to think about perhaps.

Sir Edmund Hillary and his team drove early Massey-Fergussons to the South Pole in 1958 (much to the annoyance of Sir Vivian Fuchs who Hillary beat to the pole even though Hillary was supposed to be a support player only :). The tractors weren't really suited to the job but they were tough enough to make it anyway.

Back in the early 1980s I leveled up my self taught Z80 assembly skills by reading a book that attempted to disassemble and explain the Sinclair Spectrum ROM.

I remember the very first ROM instruction was XOR A and this was already a revelation to me as I'd never considered doing anything other than LD A,0 to clear the accumulator.

I would prefer avoiding the infinite loop and printing a message to help the user understand what went wrong. I'm sure you could do that with an extra 100 bytes or so. Just my opinion of course.

I remember Joel of Joel on Software publicly working through the process of creating a remote desktop for normals type product called Copilot back in the day. If I remember correctly he had to pay quite a pretty penny to acquire copilot.com.

I wonder if MS Copilot meant he made money on that investment?

We should probably be grateful Microsoft didn't name it .NET

By convention if it was 13.600 they would present it as 13.600 not 13.6. If I remember correctly Everest was first surveyed as 29000 feet tall and they changed it arbitrarily to 29002 to avoid the apparent imprecision!

386 grams, the extra 0.2 grams is not only irrelevant it's non existent because the process of converting from one measurement standard to another never increases the precision of the measurement.

Using 3 digits of precision also avoids being temped to use the rather niche ,2 convention when claiming to embrace a region as large as the rest of the world.

C dev wasn't a problem with MSDOS and 640K either. With CP/M and 64K it was a challenge I think. Struggling to remember the details on that and too lazy to research it right now.

The almost regretful "I'm not Norwegian" clarification here is charming.