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I recall encountering compilers that required this - there was no linker essentially. Sometimes that was all you had available.

Most of the manufacturers eventually just wrote gcc backends for their architectures, but the era of crappy proprietary compilers went on far too long in many cases.

A relative started getting pulled over a lot for speeding right after he bought a red car. Solution: he’s an ex-Marine so he bought a USMC number plate surround (not even one of the custom plates that require proof that you’re a veteran!). Problem stops just as quickly as it started.

Let’s be clear here that the fault is not with Python but with Windows.

Python uses text mode by default to avoid surprising beginners on Windows. If you only use Unix-like OSs you will never have this problem.

They’re not ‘sitting on’ a pile of stock; it gets bought back and cancelled. A company can issue more stock any time it likes, so in that sense every company is ‘sitting on’ an infinite pile of its own stock all the time.

It’s not often I dare to disagree with Ross Anderson, but most of these objections don’t make a lot of sense to me. There’s nothing to stop the app from phoning home once a contact is identified, so all of the human-in-the-loop stuff is still possible.

The only difference between a centralised and decentralised solution so far as I can tell is whether or not we end up with massive centralised databases of every social contact between people who are not infected. Collecting that data seems completely unjustifiable to me, given that it is by definition unnecessary.

Babies don't have (ossified) kneecaps - their knees are already padded. And, as 100% of parents will agree, babies will definitely, definitely tell you when they hurt.

Instead of raising StopIteration you have to return from the function, otherwise you'll just get a RuntimeError starting with Python 3.7.

You also get them when someone who is baking commercial quantities of bread in a batch has to scale their recipe down for a home baker who can't physically bake, let alone eat, that much. Bread recipes are designed to scale up and down, so at some point having 25% more of some ingredient could definitely make a difference.

The New Yorker has a famously idiosyncratic style guide that calls for diaresis to be explicitly marked (in words like e.g. coöperate). This is pretty interesting though because it seems to indicate that the pronunciation has shifted - nobody would pronounce "aero" with a diaresis today.

The underwriter guarantees that the company will raise a certain amount of capital, by agreeing to take up the shares themselves if nobody else does, in exchange for a cut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwriting#Securities_underw...

I expect it was meant to say "lower-latency throughput".

I'd be very interested to know what experts think of Peter Naur's Turing Award lecture (entitled "Computing Versus Human Thinking"), which has a thesis along similar lines to the article. It certainly has plenty of the hallmarks of a crank - a guy working in a field other than the one he's a recognised expert in, can't get anything published, uses his award lecture for the field he is a recognised expert in to sneak his ideas into the CACM, &c.

And yet despite that it seems quite enticing as an idea. I remember being particularly struck by the concept that emotions consist of a closed feedback loop between the nervous system's control over and sensing of the body. Think about this next time you are at the dentist and I think you'll agree that it feels like it could explain a lot.

Higher than you'd think, apparently.

All things aren't equal because the company doesn't have the money it used to buy back and cancel the shares any more. If the shares were appropriately priced before then each outstanding share is worth about the same after.

I believe the first version of the iPhone OS did this. It was terrible (often it was literally impossible to type the thing you wanted) and they quickly replaced it with autocorrect instead.

If I recall correctly, the first crew encountered the issue during cruise, at which point which you have both (a) time, and (b) sufficient altitude that you can afford to push the stick forward in order to reduce the aerodynamic force on the horizontal stabiliser to the point where it will be physically possible to correct the trim without powered assistance.

Pilots encountering the issue during takeoff have neither of those things, with results that we've already observed.

It is universally acknowledged that the strategy prior to 2.7/3.3 was wrong, and that this delayed the transition by several years.

Zuul (https://zuul-ci.org/) is an open source CI/CD system that does speculative execution of CI on changes across multiple repos. So if you have a change in one repo that depends on a change in another, you can test both together before merging either (and it enforces merging in the correct order).

IME it solves the same problem that monorepos are intended to solve, but without any of the downsides.

Not exactly for free, but there are free tools that handle this job for you very nicely:

https://zuul-ci.org/

And also Arlington didn't become a cemetery until the 1860s, during the Civil War.

Possibly due to federal vs. state jurisdiction?

It's interesting to me how views are so polarised. I once asked a professional cook where the best restaurant in town was and she said she mostly just ate at WaHo. I had seen the Bourdain clip. So when I finally went there the first time I was predisposed to like it. And it was just disappointing.

The syrup, for example, is basically high-fructose corn syrup with added flavouring. So is the ketchup. I didn't sample the entire menu but the overwhelming impression was of it being composed of the cheapest edible food-like substances known to science. It didn't feel to me like a time machine back to an era of cheap-and-cheerful diners that served real honest food, but rather depressingly contemporary.

And yet there must be something there. Something that prompts folks like you to genuinely see it as not just a chemical amalgamation, even though by any objective standard it really is. Something that I missed. (The place was deserted at the time when I went, so maybe that was it.) Something that makes me still wonder if I should go back and search for it, even though I don't know what I'm looking for.

Matt Levine is actually a lawyer.

For those who are interested, there is a much more thorough technical treatment of this experiment in Richard Gabriel's article "Design Beyond Human Abilities":

http://richardgabriel.org/Files/DesignBeyondHumanAbilitiesSi...

If you're an expat, you really need one of those insurance polices in addition to regular US insurance, as you'll discover when you try to claim.

My colleague spent weeks on the phone arguing with the insurance company while debt collectors from the hospital hounded him after a simple ER visit. In the end someone at the insurance company paid his bill with their corporate credit card because they couldn't figure out a way to get it paid through the system. This despite the fact that the insurance company claimed to have a 'network'-type relationship with the hospital (which the hospital denied any knowledge of). They stopped offering coverage for the US altogether after that because it was too expensive.

My parents are still trying to get their travel insurance to reimburse them after an ER visit while on holiday.

Basically everyone is being had.

A less glib way of putting this is that in structural engineering construction costs dwarf design costs, while in software engineering the reverse is true.

If your construction phase consists of "type 'make' and grab a coffee" and the most expensive part is the coffee, then any efficiencies you can find in the design process will make a big difference to your bottom line.

If your construction phase costs tens of millions of dollars, you'll want to invest in designing more efficient construction methods rather than worry about tweaking the design process.

> this seems clearer and reasonably painless

but gives the wrong answer, as you'll see if you try to sort [('a', 2), ('a', 1)]

It's the same for classes that define it like:

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

which is a common pattern (used by open()), but there's no requirement that __enter__() return the same object.

In cases where __enter__() does something different, the assignment expression and the 'as' variable would have different values (the object of the 'with' statement, x, and the result of calling x.__enter__(), respectively).

It's not like there was no inflation in the gold standard era. It's just that inflation wasn't under anybody's political control - I guess if there was a gold rush you had a lot of inflation and if there wasn't you didn't.

The free silver movement was a political attempt to redistribute money from one group (lenders) to another group (borrowers, but specifically farmers) by deliberately causing a one-off burst of inflation. The original goldbugs opposed it (correctly, as the author points out) for that reason. Bryan supported it because he knew it would win him the votes of those who would benefit.

The same is not true of modern fiat currencies, which are for the most part managed quasi-independently with the goal of a relatively constant low, but non-zero, rate of inflation. This is better than either the gold standard or the free silver situation (both of which involved large bursts of inflation at unpredictable times), since the inflation rate can be priced in to interest rates.

It is possible to maintain a principled objection to this on the grounds that the political consensus could break down and we could start manipulating inflation for political reasons again. I'm glad we have people who worry about that, but I don't feel the need to join them.

I have a feeling that the ratio of 'principled objection' to 'economically illiterate' is, uh, not that high though.

elm stands for ELectronic Mail, if I'm not mistaken.