seanc

In the old days we'd use tcpdump and wireshark for this, but nowadays everything is encrypted up in the application layer so you need this kind of thing. Or tricky key dumping hacks.

The inspection and debugging features this offers are great additions though. I've stared at VCR yaml enough times to not want to ever do it again.

I used Datomic for a few years at a job.

In addition to the cost and proprietary nature, I'd say there are two reasons;

1) New and different things come with risk, and many folks are risk averse, especially in groups

2) More concretely, it is very easy to write slow queries in Datomic, and it can be a struggle to diagnose why the order of your datalog statements matters so much

Repeated patterns in digital signals can cause errors in several ways such as DC bias (likely the case here), or a buildup of energy on the edges of the signal's fourier spectrum which then gets filtered out and shows up as signal degradation on the oscilloscope.

Nowadays the lower layer transmission protocols all re-code the signal to ensure frequent edge transitions, and after a few layers of that the odds of these patterns causing problems goes way down.

And then compression and encryption (hopefully in that order!) make it go away entirely.

Buuut, 25 years ago network equipment wasn't as layered and sophisticated as it is today, so that sort of thing would crop up now and then.

A report in The Globe and Mail indicated that the buyer was re-imbursed for most of the purchase cost. So very likely Sotheby's insurance provider is ultimately on the hook.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-italian-who...

Michael Lewis' book "The Fifth Risk" has other stories of exceptional public servants, and a very insightful commentary on public service in general.

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

First off, thanks! This does look like a fun way to learn things.

Secondly, FWIW, when I read the the term 'excercises' in the HN title I interpreted that to mean exactly a learning tool and not interview prep. The term "Challenges" in the website title is maybe a little less specific.

For sure, you can if you want to. And if you pull it off there are some advantages, which the article describes.

It's just harder.

And radio! We use lots of radio as well.

I wonder what the longest information carrying electric wire is? They used to cross oceans, but not anymore. There are loads of DSL twisted pairs and co-ax cables in the "last mile" that maybe go 5km max. In rural areas maybe up to 50km with repeaters?

Is there something in between? Some old buried copper trunk cable between two university campuses or something like that?

ly5: The universe is made of two kinds of particles, Bosons and Fermions. Light is a boson. Most of the stuff we touch is made of Fermions. Electricity is fermions also.

Bosons, like light, don't like to interact with things. They just want to go places, as fast as they possibly can. So if you want a particle to carry information from point A to point B, light is great. Point it in the right direction and off it goes, and it won't interact with anything unless it absolutely as to.

Fermions, like electrons, love bumping into each other and changing each other. They like to make atoms and collide and bounce off each other all the time. So if you want to build a switch or a microchip where lots of things connect to each other to do some big complicated task like computing lots of math then electrons work really well.

But if you try to get photons to dance together to do something complicated you'll have a hard time. They only interact with each other and the stuff around them when things are just right, and then only in limited ways.

And if you try to use electrons to move data over any kind of distance that's hard too. They're constantly stopping to chat with atoms they find along the way, turning the energy of your message into heat.

How's that?

A wise person once said "Bosons are for transport and fermions are for switching."

It violates the principle of Least Surprise; if I'm invoking run0 I'm expecting it to run my program with a different UID and return the same stdout I'd have gotten if I had just run the program in my shell. Not inject a whole bunch of color control bytes in there. Which hopefully my terminal will handle. Unless it doesn't.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they only do this if $TERM supports color. But still. That $TERM variable can surprise a poor programmer in all sorts of ways.

Denis Villeneuve is another example of a universally loved director, and he is not often criticized for obvious compromises.

Villeneuve's good friend Christopher Nolan presents as a bit more of a prickly pear, but he has a very long list of long-time collaborators on both sides of the camera so he's probably not that bad.

In fact, more than a few of those behind-the-scenes folks collaborate with both Villeneuve and Nolan. It would be interesting to hear them compare an contrast.

My father was a PhD psychologist and family therapist. He was on the witness stand during a custody case explaining a theory of personality when the cross-examining lawyer said scornfully "I'll bet you got that out of some book." To which my dad replied: "Why yes, in fact. In my profession, in order to learn things, we often read books."

While all those pointing out that 8GB of RAM was mainframe stuff in the 90's are absolutely correct, I would offer that the software bloat between 90's software and modern software does make the _experience_ roughly comparable.

Except for the built-in HDMI video and the seamless plug-n-play networking that is...

Also, water is constantly trying to leak out of whatever you put it in.

I certainly think so. Or at least I find it very helpful to think about interface design that way. It's DLS's all the way down.

Er, git-svn is bi-directional? Targeted at allowing a developer to have a local git workflow that syncs up nicely with a central svn server? Is that the svn-git you're after?

Git-svn is very mature and feature rich. I've used it a couple of times to good effect. Little need for it these days though.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-svn

Same guy did a video about the Sesame Street Pinball Number Count song (one-two-thee-four-five...six-seven-eight-nine-ten...eleven-twelve)

The song is teaching children to count, but the rhythm is very advanced (7/4 time!) so trying to count the beats like a musician is just bananas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMtGImlEmu0

I read somewhere that "in the 40's and 50's they built computers for the computation, but it turned out the storage was almost more important.

Now we built AI for the cognition, but it will turn out that the patience is almost more important."

The pipettes I worked with in school 30 years ago were effectively glass straws with a mark for the designated volume. One dipped it in the solution over the mark, used the thumb to seal it, and then carefully let tiny amounts of air in to drop the bottom of the miniscus down to the line.

It was terrible and nothing ever worked and my thumbs hurt.

Thanks! My daughter works with pipettes all day long, and this is fascinating. One of her favorite aphorisms is "Don't lick the science!" and today I learned that apparently we used to lick the science.

Fun fact, there's a swanky gated community in Florida where you can do just that:

https://www.architecturendesign.net/john-travoltas-house-is-...

Now I have a funny vision in my head of a WWII radio tech standing in a field, wearing an absurdly large RADAR rig, with a big sweeping antenna protruding from a backpack and a massive screen on his chest, turning this way and that, all confused by how the sweep doesn't look quite right...

Your grammar and style are great. This isn't a novel, it's highly technical material about concepts that are difficult, very detailed, and unfamiliar to most readers. It's okay if people have to re-read stuff.

Only to an extent. I can't think of a language environment where each package can have its own version of a dependency. Python certainly isn't one.

So if you want any of the Flask 3.0 features you have to take the new Werkzeug, and see Flask-Login break.

When I explain database indexing to new folks I start with a mini-lecture on card catalogs, complete with images. Even young folks who never saw one can _very_ quickly understand what it's for and how it works. And then when you point out that a database index is pretty much the same thing a light bulb goes off.

"Why does a new index cost disk space?" "It's a whole new wooden cabinet"

"Why is re-indexing expensive?" "Look at all those cards! Each one needs to be regenerated"

And so on.

Every format for 'human readable configuration' is on a slippery slope to becoming a secret programming language.

"You know what would be great? A conditional statement of some kind. That would be super handy."

I think this is the very same job they filmed for the criminally under-appreciated Worlds Toughest Fixes. Interested persons with an extra $2 can watch a detailed-step-by-step documentary of this very job here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7GvfNcY70Q