Viewing profile — heads

What I realized after 25 years is that configuration comes in three parts: 1/ the defaults, either built in or read from /etc; 2/ my defaults, included in each file (or with ssh, a…

North America has lots of land and oil. Timber (Canada), plastics, and corn fertilised by nitrates that were made using fossil fuel energy. Corn probably doesn’t ship in containers…

In the sense that violence is coercion they have a lot of purely electronic means of persuasion: update account set balance = 0 where user = ‘steve1977’;

We used to have an ecosystem like this. In our case it reflected an entrenched set of divisions between warring teams. In some ways it may have then enhanced those positions and we…

Put wings on it and go up sideways. It solves the thrust/weight issue the same way a hill climber does: instead of going directly up they zig zag. You need the lateral velocity any…

And at the command line: headers to stderr, body to stdout. Without it you get this behavior: > heights | sort -k2 -nr George 186 Wally 173 NAME HEIGHT But if the headers bypass st…

I’m sure this is real but just for fun I’m entertaining the idea that someone is trolling — either with a fun dialog title or the app name. I worked at a company in the late 2000s …

I feel like my memory (and that article) aren’t very clear on this, but Backbone in spirit felt quite different to the series of high bandwidth towers of which Telecom Tower was on…

Parliament is all the players from all 12 teams including all those on the bench who never even played. Government is the members of the winning team who were on the field when the…

What a fun read! Your “how to get shot in the airport” caption nearly made me spit out my coffee.

I feel like there are metric lurking in here somewhere. Something to do with the following concepts: (1) the number of documented atomic changes to the codebase, be these merges or…

Speechmatics.com in London and Cambridge, UK. We build audio and language models that perform the most accurate speech recognition available. https://www.speechmatics.com/company/c…

So negative! Where I work this tool is called “new-hires”. It uses a restricted read-only API key to our third-party people tool. It was given to me by our People Director . Someti…

Are there any examples of this kind of assertion turning out to be incorrect? I’m happy to be told this kind of libation analysis is (ahem) rock solid but it’s not easy to tell fro…

I’m British with, funnily enough, a Duke’s County cricket ball on my desk. My nephew is Californian and I gave him one for his sixth birthday. Mine felt a bit lighter so we did an …

Wasn’t one of the great puzzles of the 20th century exactly this — will the universe collapse back into a singularity or not?

The numbers are big but they don’t seem “big big” like Sagittarius A* is big or the distance to Andromeda is big.

If you’re doing 2e8 m/s, your ship is long and thin with a 1m3 nose cone, and space has 100 baseballs per m3 then you’re being hit by 2e10 baseballs a second. How do I get an idea …

Configuration languages are an interface to the API presented by the software you are using. There can be a hard boundary between the two — a C codebase for a web server and the XM…

To tack one additional problem onto your excellent list: the commit message is usually only the start of a conversation about why a change should be made. The rest of that discussi…

Thanks, that’s an important detail. I guess it boils down to how much private wealth is too much, and what if anything should we do about it? An argument on Harvard’s side is that,…

On the one hand money in an endowment has presumably already been taxed at least once. Taxing it again is double taxation and that’s bad because once you allow money to be taxed tw…