Viewing profile — adrianratnapala

Yes, although you don't have to be so perlish as to do the if in that order do: thing() thing() if condition: continue

It is not always economically rational though. The US has a history of using eminent domain to grab neighbourhoods full of small businesses so that they can be turned over to a big…

> Right, that's how you could plausibly have made one or two, as a palace amusement, or a circus act. It's a little surprising this didn't happen (as far as I know). You also need …

> That does not sound like a good argument at all. Metal for vast majority of human history gave you massive edge in weapon technology. Some Mandarin just shut something like that …

That's one part of it. Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.

Fair enough.

Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top official…

That's OK, we nowadays use icons that don't make sense to anyone at all. I mean how would you know that three horizontal lines was a "Hamburger menu", and if you do know that, why …

It sounds like this guys employer has taken first step to inventing QA. There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, bor…

> ... and watch as your page hit Slashdot... And then fall over? I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC fall over. [1] Come to think of it The …

> Your code won't be pretty, Depends on the algorithms that use that code. Two separate arrays is not a bad way to represent a vector-of-tuples. And so if you think of everything a…

I would put it the other way around. wpa_supplicant is actually very good at doing what it does. But rolling it's functionality into ifconfig is probably "good enough". wpa_supplic…

Is it because people or so young, or that the pipeline to become a junior-but-still-responsible person goes through schools rather than something like an apprenticeship.

> Unison https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ is a tool to keep two folder structures in sync - that is its main goal but it can have other uses. And though I tend to be a G…

I think is what people might call "knowledge capital", "intellectual capital" or some such vague term. In my experience IP corresponds specifically to legally recognised property i…

> But a robust and affordable air travel network is a capability the business world needs to operate our economy. Then the business world can pay for it through ticket prices.

How is that a contrary view. That guy seems very happy with the Ubuntu and X1 combo. Though he does spend a long time obsessing about the battery, after his initial take was "yup, …

So that you can SSH into it from your server?

Does OpenBSD have an alternative to wpa_supplicant? I've been using wpa_supplicant under the hood for ages, but only recently learned anything about it... and it's actually very go…

Circular references like that are called "recursive types" in formal type theory. They are one of those big issues that academics like to write papers about. Even if you just want …

Smell is an interesting point As travisjungroth points out, the most obvious mechanism is feed- back where they eat something, it works, and the body is designed to do more of the …

> By building this project [CrossRail], London is just catching up to its peers. Paris has had a similar system, the five-line RER, since the 1970s. Berlin’s S-Bahn predates World …

> Look at how much slower CPUs are without those speculative execution tricks. But do I care? All my computers, except the really ancient phone I use, are snappy. Of course there a…

Does #5 get around my worries about a "stringy-marcro-framework"? I.e. when things get too complicated, you can break out to a Heavy Duty (TM) language (aka Lua).

While mentioning ConTeXt, can anyone give me a sell job on when and why it might be nicer than LaTeX? It's not that I'm super fond of LaTeX, it's just that I assumed its warts were…