hyperman1

That's a really interesting read. I felt myself being closer to John about the small method part, but closer to UB for the TDD part, even if in both cases I was somewhere inbetween.

At the very least, you convinced me to add John's book to my ever-growing reading list.

I assume physical still works. LIDL closed their shop in our neighborhood, so we stopped going unless their paper ads were interesting. Then they decided with a lot of fanfare to go all-in on digital, and as they decided we should want their ads we should install their app. Well, naughty us, we didn't. We simply stopped shopping there completely. A few months later, the paper ads are back (with a lot less fanfare), and no other shop followed their lead, so I assume LIDL was hurting hard.

You scare me. After life dishing out one of its lessens, I decided to get some fundamentals in order, and for me that includes 3 meals a day, with the family. Things have to get really disastrous to not get breakfast, and I don't think my kid skipped breakfast ever. Each his own, of course, but I wonder what happens in your life that this is semi normal?

I can't agree with this interpretation. A human, somewhere in the bigco, decided laid you off. That specific person decided to take advantage of you, and is responsible for that action. Bigco may have an incentive structure that pushes for this behaviour, but a human looked at incentives and morals and decided. Don't let them off the hook by pointing at the bigco.

I started reading books with a Hugo Award, most recent first. I would recommend it. They're very readable but still slightly non-standard enough to be interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

I'd rather not, because it would damage the power dynamic of the EU.

The USA is an all-powerfull political entity that can dictate terms on its own. A bit like a monopoly. Europe is a large group of players, condemned to each other, making parallel but not identical choices (e.g are you in/out/half part of the EU).

This changes the way you talk to others, as you'll need to talk to them again, and the power dynamic will have shifted.

So the USA knows it's the best at everything, and will loudly declare it. Most inhabitants only have second hand impressions from other cultures.

European countries each know they individually are the best, but there are tons of neighbours with near status, so it's impolite to say it loud. If differences get big, you can't help but notice next time you enter a neighbour.

The neverending wars, culminating in WWI and WWII, tought everyone what happened when you stop communicating and start ordering. A lot of our politics is trying not to restart that and working together with others who we don't like very much. The EU is but one such project, and if we're honest, the USA pushing for stability was one helper in the past.

One way to look at Trump is: Can we Europeans deal with each others as adults when the big USA stick has disappeared. And can we talk to a partner who seems to have gone mad temporarily but might come back ?

I wish I had more upvotes for you. While the swiss cheese model is well known on HN by now,your post goes a little bit deeper. And reveals a whole new framework for reading incident responses. Thanks for making me smarter.

Postgres allows you to choose a different page size (at initdb time? At compile time?). The default is 8K. I've always wondered if 32K wouldn't be a better value, and this article points in the same direction.

BB is a mod-97 checksum. The first A of AAA encodes your gender in an even/odd fashion, I forgot if its the first or last A doing that. MM or DD can be 00 if unknown. Also MM has +20 or +40 in some cases.

If you know someones birth date and gender, the INSZ is almost certainly 1 in 500 numbers, with a heavy skew to the lower AAA. Luckily, you can't do much damage with someones number,unlike an USA SSN (but I'd still treat it confidential).

I've tried them once, and my experience with Flixbus was a disaster. They optimize for cheapness above everything else.

Their drivers can't do anything except scan your ticket and deny entrance if the computer says no. They don't speak any local language or English. Any minor problem cascades in delays of half a day. Their bus stops were druggie/thief zones where I felt really unsafe. After their train was 2 hours late, I was a minute late for my connection. The bus driver saw us running to his bus, smiled, waved at us, closed his door and drove away, showing his middle finger out of the window.

I didn't expect the microcode to be at the center of the chip. I'd expect it on the side and only talking to the microcode engine, making more room for data traffic between chip halves. Also, the microcode is huge.

Reversing the numbers as required here is one of the few algorithms thats nicer in assembly than in a high level language:

When you get a digit from the divide, push it on the stack and increment a counter. At the end, do a loop, popping each digit and sending it to the output.

I don't think the problem is the money. Neither of them provides a long term stable API, let alone ABI. So progress gets reset on a regular base.

Gnome is further hampered by no respect for user choice. They provide an appleish UI, with an Enterprise, one size fits all experience.

KDE is better, but they are not the official GNU/Red Hat choice. They will choose practical above esthetica.

A big part of the Linux success is POSIX, a standard to provide direction. The UI world never had anything line it, so it is very fragmented. A real solution could be a complete enough UI standard, used by OSX, Windows, Gnome and KDE.

Im not sure how ar does it, but tar has no centralised directory. The only way to get file 100 is to walk trough the 99 files before. This kills random access speed.

A father I know took was sitting in the bar of a swimming pool, his daughter swimming. He saw something wrong in the pool, grumbled, and took a picture to request repairs. He now, as a side effect, had a picture of zillions of 12 year old boys and girls in swimsuits. Some mother saw this happen and called him out, then the rumors started, and he ended up critiqued everywhere.

The good news: He still has a job. This took several weeks of negotiating, and he got the biggest possible warning the job could give him. The police is not prosecuting anymore.

Consensus of fathers here is: He's not a pervert, just someone who did not think things trough for a moment. But everyone agreed in him taking an extremely dumb risk. This is Western Europe, BTW.

When my son was born, he was early and had a bit of a rough start, so his left hand got a bunch of oxygen and hearth sensors attached. To make sure they stayed there, the nurses taped his left hand to his breast.

After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting.

That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.

In my country, the elderly used to ride for free on busses and trams. 15 years ago I was involved in this problem where some decided to get on a bus or tram in the morning, go back and forth all day, bring a lunchbox, and go home just in time for the favorite soap series. They got free heating and some social contact.

It turned out, in my region, about 1/3 of public transport capacity was lost on them on peak hours. Also, some decided a specific seat was 'theirs' and started verbally abusing 'seat thiefs', throwing their stuff around, or even hitting them with canes. They also drove everyone bonkers by begging drivers to speed up or change routes so they would be home in time for their favorite soap series.

At the time, not much was done about it. The busses and trams forced everyone off at the terminus, made a round, enforced being empty while pausing a bit, and then the elderly were allowed back on, but at least places got shuffled and others got a chance for a seat. There was great gnashing of teeth about this decision.

I still feel double about it. It is very sad how this was a great life quality improvement for these people, but public transport is not the right medium for fixing this.

There are 2 interesting articles here. Not only does Ken treat us with a great text, but hidden in footnote 1 is a second gem. Thanks for the early christmas gift!

Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:

  I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.

My son has his own linux account. He made an absolute mess of everything he could drag around on the desktop, just for fun. Every time I'm in there, the KDE start menu pops out of some other weird place, not even at the border of a screen anymore. Plus, we seem to have some kind of mass xeyes invasion going on there. It makes troubleshooting anything interesting, at least.

He recently learned there are other computers running Windows, which he hates because of the ads.

I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery.

I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp.

Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.

Oracle the database is the Apple of Enterprise. They have some best in class aspects, but also a lot of you're holding it wrong. They cost a lot and have a really arrogant culture. They both have a rabid reality-denying fanbase. The support is either fantastic if you ask a known question, or a hellscape of inconsistent answers and denials if you dont.

Funny, actually.

I've noticed there is a point in dual booting where you do enough in Linux that you can't get back to windows without it updating. This pushes you to stay longer and longer in Linux, to avoid the dreaded update.

I've already seen a few people accidentally pestering themselves out of windows this way.

This war of mine.

I have a script/alias,named p, that allows me to task switch. It takes an issue and maybe an argument, and does a bunch of things if they make sense in context. It has grown over the years.

So 'p ISSUE-123' :

* creates a folder issues/ISSUE-123 for work files, containing links to a backed up folder and the project repository . The shell is cd'd to it

* The repo might get a new branch with the issue name.

* An IDE might start containing the project.

* The browsers home button brings you to a page with all kinds of relevant links:. The issue tracker, the CI, all kinds of test pages, etc...

* The open/save dialogs for every program gets a shortcut named'issue'

* A note is made in a log that allows me to do time tracking at the end if the week.

* A commit message template with the issue is created.

We use 55% more energy than in 1997? Where is all that going? I've seen graphs with plastic production with even higher numbers.

I have no problem going back to my 1997 lifestyle and cant point to much explaining this growth. Is it more people getting access to western luxury or are we just that much more wastefull?

Let me tell you about Belgium in 1830. It got attached to the Netherlands, and their king would not listen to the locals. Things got completely out of hand until we got huge protests. All the while, the idea at the Belgian side was things would calm down once their king would stop being so bloody minded and make some concessions. Well, the Dutch king didn't, the revolution succeeded, and we more or less accidentally liberated ourselves. France couldn't invade yet, and there was a general air of: whoops,we created a country, now what? Belgium is a country to this day, for no real reason.

You can start an armed revolt, but you have no idea what's going to happen afterwards.

I wish the blocked page made it clear who is doing the blocking, e.g 'This page is blocked by La Liga. Contact their helpdesk at (phone number).' Maybe add the number of their lawyers and CxOs while at it.

I've spent a lot of time not seeing how xor is just the 'not equals' operator for booleans.

I see a lot of elder people age very suddenly. It's like the capacity to recuperate from a problem is gone. With some luck no such problems appear and you can become old without much troubles. But once a problem appears, it hits in full force.