Viewing profile — gchpaco

The main difference is that engineers have a code of ethics they're expected to uphold, with the threat of taking away your certification if you don't.

If you read the article, they discuss it there.

And said notation causes the generic type system to be Turing complete, as in the Java case.

There are only two "natural" problem classes known that are not either definitely in P or definitely in NP, and this article concerns one of them. (The other is integer factorizati…

In general his complaints regarding logic are incoherent. A function is not a messy weird object in mathematics; it's a possibly infinite set of ordered pairs where there are no du…

The C and I presume C++ standard has been very carefully avoiding the idea of a preprocessor being separate at all . The standard was very carefully worded to prevent that being ne…

There's a number of fisheyes that produce circular images on rectangular film (obviously, not using the entirety of the film surface).

No, but it is the one name that people remember, and saves much explanation. The Rolleicord, the Mamiya C series, and the YashicaMats, one of which is my TLR, were more consumer or…

The #2 Brownie came out in 1901 and shot 6cm x 9cm, and all of the surviving Brownies I've seen shot rectangular formats. There was the Brownie 127 which shot square, but I only le…

Too small, slide mounts were already standardized on 24x36, and the square was never all that popular among the general photographer. The reason why the square shape in 120 was ori…

I damn near released a (private) message protocol without a version field a couple months ago, and I know better. Fortunately stopped myself and added it before any actual data got…

A formal language is basically just a mathematical set of acceptable strings made up of symbols in a (typically finite) alphabet; thus the smallest is probably the empty set, or if…

Depends on the database, but Cassandra, for example, has quorum mode for writes, which requires a majority of the cluster members ack the write. This can be enabled on a per-query …

The printing is the fun part, anyway.

I love my X-Pro, and I loved Fuji film before it, but remember Fuji has never been under the anti-trust concerns Kodak has, and that forced them to divest the film processing and p…

I'm not competent to explain why Tacoma Narrows failed, but it obviously wasn't up to design load. The existence of large sheets of glass falling off buildings and endangering peop…

There are two major issues that crop up in my experience. * Node as a runtime is deeply mediocre, in my experience. You can usually solve this by throwing more (usually virtualized…

I do not, myself, know why this is the case. I can come up with several plausible reasons; for example, you're basically coming up with an alternate input device for your computer …

It is ... difficult for me to describe just how dangerous it is to try to use 3 dimensional intuitions in a higher dimensional space. As the number of dimensions increases the amou…

Part of the problem is that most accessibility software has a hell of a learning curve, that the blind have implicitly overcome already to use the thing at all. (e.g. emacspeak) It…

As a counterpoint it's routine in topological mathematics to work with 8 or 12 or 11 dimensional objects.

In addition to what pbsd said, Carmichael numbers are incredibly rare. Your odds of stumbling across one by chance are lower than the odds of a cosmic ray flipping the bit of memor…

Bit braces (the C shaped tools) are also the finest Phillips screwdrivers available, I've found. The design makes it easy to exert a lot of force to prevent the bit from camming ou…

When you set a large beam of wood on fire, what typically happens is the outside chars but the fire never reaches the core, which stays intact. This won't happen so much with typic…

There are almost no 100 year old brick buildings in San Francisco. Why? Because there was a big goddamn earthquake in 1906, and unreinforced masonry (which is to say, functionally …