Viewing profile — demallien

The problem with testing algorithms is that it in no way tests intelligence. I would think that 9 out of 10 programmers that know an algorithm would not be able to derive the algor…

Regardless, Enigma was pretty low-value intelligence. It would give you things like the daily position of u-boat packs, but generally speaking there isn't much you can do with this…

10ms is the absolute maximum difference in time, if the source was located on a line running through the two detectors. If the source was located on a perpendicular bisector of the…

Because Falcon9 is a big launcher taking a serious payload into orbit. This means that the first stage has to have very large engines - so large that they can't be throttled down t…

"The markets thought Lehman had big exposure to the US residential and commercial mortgages, hence they couldn't borrow, hence they went bust." This is the sort of thing I mean whe…

If this was true, Lehman Brothers would still be in operation today. Derivatives, by their very nature, are harder to truly evaluate in terms of value, and the chance of them going…

It's not so much the problem being simple, but more about it being a problem you have already solved. If you give me a blitter API and ask me to write a composited then yes, I can …

I think you'll find that andreyf codes on SarcasmOS..

Firstly, you assert that everyone wants their own big car. This is not true. I don't want one, and I'm not alone in that amongst people living in cities with good public transport.…

Cars are still bloody expensive. Many many people make the decision not to buy a car when they live in a city with good public transport. It's only in places like Australia and mos…

I'm not convinced that people linking immigrants and terrorism are particularly worried about the actual immigrants turning out to be terrorists in disguise. It's more a worry that…

Well, because the comments being made are laced with gender, so the gender of the comments is surely relevant, no? I mean, I understand where you are coming from - the title can be…

Maybe I'm being obtuse, but wouldn't that be an argument for prohibition? As in, drugs that aren't prohibited cause much more harm than those that are?

The tube line is a custom one-off system. The components aren't though.

I'm a regular Autolib user in Paris, and I have to say Autolib is just pure awesome. It's the piece of the puzzle that has been missing in public transport, because sometimes you j…

Orbits are not intuitive. To head "downwards", you have to slow down your orbital velocity, which reduces the radius of the orbit. In other words you have to decelerate. When you d…

Just don't call it Rapture

All maintenance on aircraft is closely tracked. They can probably find evidence of maintenance operations that were conducted on the found piece and confirm that it matches the mai…

I also use Siri to send text messages if I'm driving or riding my bike, or to find the answer to a piece of trivia, or to launch applications, rather than having to hunt for them. …

Many members of my female-only netball club use 'guys' to refer to ourselves...

Noooooo, that's the whole point! The question that is being asked is not "how to make gun owners less likely to shoot people" but rather "how to make it less likely that people get…

This accurately catches the reasoning behind my approach to testing though. When you fix a bug, write a test that reproduces the bug first. That way, when someone tries to refactor…

I was just going to down vote you, that's all trolling deserves on HN, but on the off chance that you're just ignorant, and not actually trolling: 1) there are 5 OSes with more tha…

Stick with the pricing. The application is niche, and as such should have a higher price. It has been noted many times over that software has a bimodal pricing scheme - very cheap …

Wouldn't you just use Siri for that? I have enough apps that it's mostly too hard remembering where all but the most commonly used live, so I just tell Siri to open the app. Works …