dantillberg

I mean, it's a game, though. A lot of the things I do when I play games "isn't worth it." But I have a lot of fun, anyway. :)

It depends what you're optimizing for. If you're primarily interested in resilience to power outages, then maybe you are OK with the wasted energy used to freeze/re-freeze the extra water.

You could imagine building a globe-spanning power distribution network. Solar panels on one side of the planet could provide power at night on the other side of the planet.

For giant files, you can at least break the file up into pieces. If nothing else, it's a greater technical challenge to build a caching system that scales to infinite GB. Why would Cloudflare invest in such a system when it's of dubious utility in the first place?

> This is why we can have an election outcome that no one in the media predicted.

I presume you're referring to the 2016 presidential election in the US, and if so that's patently false. FiveThirtyEight estimated a ~28% probability[0] that Trump would win, and other major media outlets had similar outlooks prior to the election. Many willfully interpreted "28% chance" as "with any luck it won't happen," but you can't say that the media didn't think it was possible.

[0]: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

(edit: updated with link to actual prediction by FiveThirtyEight)

"If you've got" may not be formal "correct" English, but everyone understands it and it's used quite commonly in daily speech (and writing). I would wager that "if you've got" may actually be preferable to "if you have," in order to engage the reader at a more comfortable, personal level.

The great work of the vast majority of civil servants is largely divorced from the polarized politics at the top. Their jobs and missions don't change much from one administration to the next.

In a sense, this rings true in this pandemic, right? Many people are relying on video games for entertainment while confined to their homes.

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Edit to reply to the comments below: A lot of good replies, thank you. I've largely been on the "doom and gloom" side of this COVID-19 debate, so I'm surprised by the other angrier replies, but here's my thinking:

- People that download games aren't going to GameStop anyway.

- As some comments pointed out, you can't download consoles. You also can't have anything shipped to you if you don't have a credit card.

- GameStop transactions don't require close personal contact (unlike e.g. tattoos or massages).

- GameStop must discourage congregation of groups in their stores. I imagine very low foot traffic.

- GameStop must provide staff with appropriate cleaning tools. If they can't, then they should not remain open.

- I do really like the idea to transform the store into a local delivery service, or to offer pick up only.

- I have no connection to GameStop nor have I been to one in over a decade.

If tens or hundreds of thousands of people were dying every day from the virus, might we find many volunteers willing to be intentionally exposed to the virus in order to rapidly test the efficacy of a vaccine? I imagine so.

I believe the magnitude of this pandemic will in time push us (rather violently) to think outside the box.

Weird. Is Germany's circle at the centroid of West Germany, maybe?

This isn't really an issue that the vast majority of people face. Sure, it's a hard problem, but only a tiny number of people are affected by it.

The "Newly Infected vs. Newly Recovered" chart on the site I linked above includes cases in China. The virus does in fact look to be somewhat under control in China, but not elsewhere.

The outbreak in China is indeed somewhat (maybe even largely) under control. But if you look at the trend in cases outside China, the growth is still clearly exponential [0].

[0]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/...

How is this a violation of the friend's privacy?

The friend shared with Facebook, and Facebook intends to store the data forever. The friend shared via Facebook with the GP, and GP could go and read/view the data as often as they wished via Facebook.

Yes, GP shouldn't subsequently share this data with other parties, and GP should take care to secure this data. But why shouldn't GP store the data for their own use, though? Is this any different than archiving emails from the friend?

My read of GP's story is that the prepared queries varied by supplying different hard-coded parameters, in addition to some bound variables. For example, the WHERE clause might be "WHERE first=? AND last='Smith'". The 'first' argument is a bound variable, while the 'last' argument is part of the prepared query string.

But to where? Do any banks exist that have reasonable security procedures?

What connection does 'origin' have to 'what'?

They likely are referring to feeding actual literal rats. Rats get into trash left out by the street for pickup.

You can imagine that there were likely many curious people that died pursuing their curiosity.

I ported a fairly complex (thousands of lines of code, in use in production) program from Python to Go.

The Python version is around 1/3-1/2 the size of the Go version, but the clarity with which bugs are visible in the Go version is astonishing.

There's a lot of code in Python version that "looks right" and even "does kind of the right thing a lot of the time." But the Go version lays bare corner and edge cases that were not obvious in the concise Python version.

I agree that Go usage does suffer sometimes from lack of generics. I've sometimes used code generation in its place, and it works, but it's a poor solution. At the same time, the lack of generics has helped me avoid over-abstracting in other places, which is a common bane of mine whenever I work in more "expressive" languages.

In the case described above, the topography is "completely flat", and the internet provider in question already provides electrical service to the premises.

If you can't get municipal fiber where you live in Longmont (I'm a resident; hi!), you should most likely be complaining to your landlord, not the city. If you're not sure, call up Longmont Power & Communications and ask them what's up.

There are a few apartment complexes around Longmont that have resisted integration with the city's fiber network. My understanding is that the city has negotiated with each of them over the installation of fiber on their premises and that some of those negotiations didn't succeed, e.g. the apartment complex owners wanted to own and control the fiber that the city would pay to install.

But if the business spends $100 and the rebate is $2, but I personally pocket the rebate instead of giving the money back to the business, wouldn't that $2 become taxable personal income? (and perhaps also theft, depending on my relationship to the business?)

Yes, but could we maybe get a decent approximation of the windshield temperature from interior temperature, exterior temperature, and speed? Combined with interior/exterior humidity (maybe these gauges might be the expensive/finicky part of this project?), we could calculate a probability of window fogging.

It doesn't have to be perfect -- we can have it just turn on the defrost whenever the probability of window fogging is >10% or something.

Indeed, this is what I was thinking.

I don't use Twitter, yet I still hear what the President says on Twitter.

Once you search for it, then the web page could actually know.

> don't you think that China defends its allies too?

This made me curious: what nations could be considered allies of China? North Korea, possibly maybe?

I don't personally think it's worth it, no. To me, though, that's a different issue than "it can't be done."

"Yes, we can do A. The likely result of this action, however, is X Y Z." I prefer to present the situation like this rather than short-circuiting via "I know we are unwilling to accept X Y Z," and so therefore, "we can't do A."

They could in fact actually open every box to check the contents. 15 million is not some unfathomably large number of boxes per day. It would increase the cost of shipping across the borders that require that additional checking, by whatever amount is necessary to hire and organize staff to do that checking. That increase in cost could be shifted to the senders, and in turn the volume of packages would decrease. Trade would not "shut down," but it would decrease.