Viewing profile — dpratt71

Believe it or not, it gets worse. The authors of this paper are the same folks who came up with this particular dating technique. And I can't find any evidence the technique has be…

I don't think you can "debunk" something merely with strong evidence. Besides that, I wasn't aware of this codex, so I'm glad you shared it. Has anyone suggested that (assuming the…

If you have a goal of being able to confidently reason about your code, such as to be confident it won't go "wrong", then making it more math like would seem to make a lot of sense…

The word "suspected" does not appear on the report you linked. Rather it says it is a "possible" carcinogenic. Moreover > The committee therefore reaffirmed that it is safe for a p…

It sounds like we'd be better off not knowing about this law. Thanks.

Turkeys can fly, though. Just not the domestic ones :)

Rust is more restrictive than it needs to be, in this case. What matters is whether it's possible to have a situation where the value of a variable or parameter is not concordant w…

In your example, '3 | "foo" | false' is the type of the variable. What is the argument for this being a bad idea in general? You imply it's unsafe. How?

Stupid question: Why isn't such logic incorporated into the call itself?

Some ideas that I suspect are true do indeed scare me. But I'm more scared of ideas that I strongly suspect are false, but I think other people may not agree.

Fyi, "Alcohol distributes into water spaces, not fat" https://sites.duke.edu/apep/module-1-gender-matters/content/...

Whether it's a single company (or product) or multiple is beside the point. If a technology is only available to (say) 1% of the population, I don't think that qualifies as being w…

Penicillin, maybe? But I wonder how quickly it became readily available outside of the Western world. And I see that Nintendo has apparently sold an extremely impressive number of …

Is it not the case that having access to a machine capable of running either Minecraft or Linux in the early days of each (if not now) means you are (or were) fairly affluent?

What is an example of important technology that did not start as something only available to the affluent/connected?

I don't understand why Haskell gets brought up in the middle of an otherwise interesting and useful article. This sort of thing cannot happen in Haskell. And while Haskell is not u…

It's really too bad that the only way we can be sure rich folk pay their fair share is to charge them twice for private education. Otherwise, my mother may not have felt it necessa…

It's an abstraction to facilitate writing do blocks. Mostly tongue in cheek.

There are no guarantees in life, but the reason we don't have global pandemics constantly is that mutations that make a virus as dangerous as SARS-Cov-2 are quite rare.

I'm fairly out of my depth here, but it's somewhat relevant to my personal situation: When this came up for discussion on HN a few days ago, I was initially confused, as some of wh…

Small nitpick: some statically typed programming languages have optional type annotations.

Yeah, you're right, I muddied the waters a bit with that example. I was just trying to think of examples of persistent data structures being used in a concurrent context, but you h…

Oh goodness :) OP has conceded the point, but you're still down to argue on the basis of what a person may or may not believe is the main strategy to handle serialization. I give u…

Whether the "merge" implementation is costly or complicated very much depends on exactly what it has to do. The git example is pretty much a worst case example in this regard. An e…

You could , as per your example, use locking as part of a resolution/merge strategy to combine the results of two separate computations running on two separate threads. Or you coul…