Viewing profile — hcayless

The Greek font is terrible—it’s using the Modern Greek “acute” accent which looks weird, and commas aren’t supposed to have spaced before them. It’s cool that Perseus did the work …

On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the con…

Many mid size to large companies are hilariously inefficient and the executives have no idea how work actually gets done. This means you can (in theory) fire a decent percentage of…

If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure th…

You might enjoy Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction by Fred Ahl ( https://a.co/d/ditCwg5 ). It explores this idea, concluding that Oedipus’ investigation is flawed, bu…

This sounds fantastic! Thank you for your work. Now I gotta go learn Rust :-).

I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to s…

I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.

Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deep…

Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not …

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then jus…

But QI still exists, and Uvalde happened. It wasn’t fear of reprisal, but fear of being shot. So your argument doesn’t work.

More to the point 2/4 countries in the UK voted remain and got dragged out of the EU anyway.

My favorite thing about Hibernate is that it’s sophisticated enough that it has its own query language, which is very, very similar but not identical to SQL. Makes me want to take …

That’s good. It really did feel like they were fighting each other sometimes.

This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpow…

It’s interesting to me how comparatively impoverished Anglish seems. Here’s to promiscuity!

I had an interesting experience as a child. I grew up in Barbados, where circumcision is not a common practice. In Biology class on day, the teacher talked about the practice, and …

I was you until a couple of years ago. Could have rolled naked in the stuff. Then it got me. And Lord, it was horrible. Weeks of agony. I’m super careful with it now.

Yes, but: a programmer who has made it to age 25 without learning how to ssh into a server where their code will end up running is to me demonstrating that they are remarkably incu…

I thought the expansion of YAML was YAML Ain’t Markup Language?

Title needs correction: that’s a Greek letter mu, μ, not a u. Addendum: though it is clearly a u in the URL. Someone may be confused...

No need to be salty about it.

They really had no choice about that part. The spike (beyond their control) in energy prices was set to bankrupt hundreds or even thousands of small businesses and put many people …

Christ Jesus, yes. I mean, there can be reasons why not, but why use an RDBMS at all if you’re not going to take advantage of its features?