tonysdg

This goes to the article's point about caching; a chat app -- of all programs -- should cache conversations for a fast boot up. Sure, _updating_ the conversations -- the "cloning" stage -- may take some time, but why should you have to wait for the network requests to complete before seeing your past conversations?

The git equivalent would be if you had to wait for git to do a fetch/pull every time you ran "ls" on a git-controlled folder. It would be insane, and no one would use git (or any other version control).

If there's a particular paper you're interested in, you can usually email the lead author(s) and just ask for a copy. I've never heard of someone saying no, especially since it's as easy as emailing a PDF.

As for the why -- just DuckDuckGo "why is science behind a paywall" and you'll get a million hits, each author giving a slightly tweaked definition of "it's a holdover from the days of publishing in print journals".

Reminds me of an Iranian friend I had. We were talking once about weddings in different cultures, and I asked her about Iranian weddings. She laughed and told me that despite the ban on alcohol, every man at an Iranian wedding ended up drunk "somehow".

Firmware. From Resolution section:

> HP has provided firmware updates for impacted printers as set forth in the table below.

On the flip side, that means there's nothing to stop the pole owner from delaying, as (if I understand correctly) Google argued was happening here. Sure, you could try to fine uncooperative owners, but the delay will kill small ISPs who can't afford to wait; the potential fine would have to massive to deter such behavior, and between lobbying and general antipathy toward regulation, that size of fine would likely never occur.

I don't disagree though that there should be some form of middle ground (which it seems Pai was trying to find) -- I'm just unsure what it would be.

The problem as I understand it is that deregulation helps a lot in situations where a compelling business case exists for companies to expand/compete, and it hurts a lot where said business case does not exist.

As it so happens, crowded urban centers, where a single cell tower or fiber-optic network can serve thousands of paying customers, benefit a great deal from deregulation. Sparsely populated rural areas, however, where "last mile" really means "last 30 miles", get screwed over by deregulation since companies have minimal incentive to expand if it only means 10 new paying members.

I'm not saying either extreme is perfect -- indeed, deregulation likely helps more than it hurts given increasing population density in U.S. cities -- but it seems to me that there are advantages to both sides of the equation.

Out of curiosity, how would you say you "learned how to learn", so to speak? Did it just come naturally to you? Was it a parent who taught you?

Andrew Carnegie, the 20th century industrialist, is perhaps the poster child for wealth accumulation and subsequent philanthropy. I remember reading somewhere that he once said something to the effect of, "A man should spend the first third of his life learning as much as he can; the second third amassing as much money as he can using his acquired knowledge; and the last third giving away both the knowledge and the money."

Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean, but isn't this the exact opposite of an appeal to authority? The claim is that she's not qualified because she's not a credentialed economist.

(I'm not familiar enough with Ms. Warren's background to have a substantiated opinion either way, though I certainly don't doubt her intelligence.)

Growing up in Upstate NY, I always assumed part of it was also due to the fact that breaks during the winter basically translate to hours spent cooped-up inside, watching TV or playing on the computer.

I know that the 3-month summer break stems from historical harvest/planting schedules... but when there's 20 inches of snow outside and the wind chill is -10 F, I'll take 3 months of summer vacay over 6 weeks of summer and 6 weeks of winter breaks any day.

The ramifications of this trend -- and the likely political responses, considering the current responses -- will be interesting (to say the least). My rough prognostication (tuned for the U.S.):

* Western leaders (the U.S. in particular) will see this as a threat to their technological/economic dominance.

* In response, the number of educational visas will be severely limited at some point.

* Universities dependent on foreign students paying full tuition, especially smaller ones, will find themselves suddenly (or not-so-suddenly) strapped for cash.

* These colleges will lobby against visa restrictions, prompting further criticism from nationalist/populist entities/organizations, who will seek additional restrictions on loans/funding for such universities.

* Within 10-30 years, the capital crunch will eventually force smaller universities to merge (if possible) or close altogether.

* The wave of closures further damages technological innovation, harming overall economic output.

* The economic downturn results in even further cuts to university/college funding, creating a vicious cycle that ends only when most small universities are gone, leaving only massive state universities and a few small niche/boutique universities catering to elites.

I'm sure it won't turn out exactly like that -- and besides, closing some of the more expensive universities may help bring tuitions down in general -- but given the current political climate, I see the situation only getting worse before it gets better.

Good luck -- straight from their Terms of Service:

> You are expected to read these Terms of Use because your use of our Site and Service constitutes your agreement to the Arbitration Agreement and Class Action waiver described in Sections 17 and 18 below to resolve any disputes with us.

Another damn arbitration clause. I'm so conflicted about these things -- on the one hand, I'm sure they defer many frivolous lawsuits. On the other, they seem to tilt the balance of power overwhelmingly toward the company/business/service. Do any lawyers out there know if there are situations in which these arbitration clauses wouldn't be legal & binding?

Couldn't you at least port your COBOL to C? It's also statically typed, compiled, there are high-performance libraries that support arbitrary levels of numeric precision (GNU GMP), and every engineer trained in the last 20 years at least has some C experience.

Out of curiosity, what prevents you from using Firefox? It allows you to specify a default search engine -- which you can set directly to DDG.

Or -- perhaps more intriguingly -- given that the date in question will never occur, is it valid until the end of time?

Philosophically it's a rather fun question, but practically they'll probably just honor it until the corresponding date of the new era.

*not a scammer's

I don't mean to be rude, but is there any way to verify that this is actually his and a scammer's?

I'm pretty sure this is a well-known problem in general on Linux -- file locking is almost never a good solution. It sucks, since there are definitely times where it would be useful.

In any event, this is probably a low priority for glibc/kernel devs -- the fact that syncing doesn't actually behave as expected is much more important (https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/).

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google

All I can think of is this fun story from a few years back: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/developer_oursource...

Isn't Andrea (Remzi's wife) a co-author of OSTEP?

Made me laugh (thanks for that!), but in fairness, MINIX 3 was designed for actual usage and not just education. From Wikipedia [1]:

> Although it still serves as an example for the new edition of Tanenbaum and Woodhull's textbook, it is comprehensively redesigned to be "usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX_3#History

I'd like to see any comparison extended to include Pintos as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintos

That's true -- I guess I hadn't been thinking of it from that perspective. There'd still be the problem of asking consumers to "opt out/in" of these features, of course. It's hard enough asking consumers to make informed decisions when it comes to "can we use your photos/track you online" -- now you'd be asking "do you want to run virtual machines/access encrypted content/etc.".

But I guess I'd appreciate the ability to turn more stuff on/off in the BIOS -- makes me think of the whole "dark silicon" notion (if I don't use my laptop for Netflix, can I disable the streaming encryption stuff to save battery life?).

Unless I'm mistaken, the low-level acess to memory is one of the defining features of C. It's basically designed to be human-readable assembly (which is just human-readable machine code).

If anything, I'd blame compilers here -- IMO, they should automatically throw at least a warning any time they need to pad/rearrange a struct to make it explicitly clear to developers what's happening.

It'd be damn tricky to implement, probably impossibly so. I can think of a few reasons:

- Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled.

- From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For n features, you'd need (2^n)-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on.

- And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard?

I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.

Such an awesome show -- thanks!!

So glad to see Simone back on her feet. The shy robot nation needs its queen!

As for that bill -- I'm curious: is there any resource I can look up to see how much of that the average Medicare/Medicaid/private insurance plan pays?

I ask because I just had two teeth repaired after a bike accident and it'll cost me ~$100 after insurance covers the other ~$500. By that ratio, she'd be looking at ~$38,000 bill.

Off-topic, but I have to thank you for your amazing blog posts and Stack Overflow answers regarding LLVM internals. As a grad student in systems software, I can't even begin to account for how much time, energy, and loss-of-consciousness-due-to-head-trauma-from-repeatedly-banging-my-head-against-a-wall you've saved me from. Thank you so much!!

I didn't need a BBC article to tell me that coffee reduces mortality -- the odds of coworkers dying drops significantly after one has their first (or third) cup ;-)