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zb

HN member
Joined
Mon, Aug 27, 2007, 8:08 PM UTC
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1,803
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468 items

About zb

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Recent public activity

  1. story
  2. comment
    Comment #48331207

    In 1812 he was the Earl of Wellington. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_titles_and_honours_of_...

  3. comment
    Comment #48271425

    CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.

  4. comment
    Comment #46021964

    Commit messages are immutable. Linking them to a bug ticket gives you a mutable place to record any new information about the bug that you discover in the future. (For example, tha…

  5. comment
    Comment #45706441

    It’s a lot better than the reverse.

  6. comment
    Comment #45706399

    Another way to look at it is that you’re getting to do all of the fulfilling parts of management roles (helping your team(s) to grow and develop) without the less fulfilling parts …

  7. comment
    Comment #44341271

    The ink ribbon contains a record of every word you type, and I believe hoovering them up was a common espionage tactic back in the day.

  8. comment
    Comment #44309374

    Debuggers allow you inspect stuff forward in time, while print statements allow you to debug backwards. (There was a lot of academic work on reversible debuggers at one point; to b…

  9. comment
    Comment #43924497

    A city is not a tree: https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html Even trees are not trees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastomosis Evolution is most definitely n…

  10. comment
    Comment #43148437

    I’m reminded of an infamous occasion when this technique was used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_243#Preparation

  11. comment
    Comment #42070821

    The one that sprang to mind for me was The Name of the Rose . Oddly it doesn’t show up as a title drop in the data.

  12. comment
    Comment #41835963

    > This in turn is why air traffic still use AM where you can hear both overlapping transmissions at once (possibly garbled if carrier wave was off), and react accordingly rather th…

  13. comment
    Comment #41388694

    You must be American. In Australia there are exactly zero heat pumps on the market that you can use an ecobee with. It just isn’t an option. There are no off-the-shelf options. You…

  14. comment
    Comment #39248858

    The arrow has a white outline around it, so the hotspot is at the tip of the black arrow, at (1,1).

  15. comment
    Comment #39214158

    > this can’t possibly be how you write tests in Golang?! Only for very simple functions like in the example. Most of the time it’s much worse.

  16. comment
    Comment #35548269

    AIUI the Hybrid Synergy Drive combines aspects of a series and parallel hybrid, for efficiency at both high and low speeds. I think this is the main reason that pure series hybrids…

  17. comment
    Comment #35537768

    This is called a series hybrid and there are lots of them on the market.

  18. comment
    Comment #34155199

    It’s a quote from Newton, so that’s obviously why we say it. The reason he said ‘giants’ is supposedly that it was a dig at Robert Hooke, who was famously short. Impressively, if t…

  19. comment
    Comment #33861301

    I’m currently reading The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly and it’s really good (so far). It’s a great thing to read at the point it sounds like you have reached, where progra…

  20. comment
    Comment #32826813

    Exactly, but also that it's quite often experience you had this morning , not e.g. over the last 5 years, that makes the difference.

  21. comment
    Comment #32546811

    Lawyers make a distinction between "illegal" (crimes) and "unlawful" (torts) that is mostly lost on the general public.

  22. comment
    Comment #31134396

    Any thread about this is incomplete without mentioning the article about a note change in this performance by John Darnielle (of the band the Mountain Goats, who is also a novelist…

  23. comment
    Comment #30301030

    No, because he’s clearly describing an engineering problem, not a physics problem.

  24. comment
    Comment #30004046

    Cloud infrastructure - so basically I have gone right from one end of the scale spectrum (tiny GPS receivers) to the very opposite extreme :D

  25. comment
    Comment #29992801

    Yes, I was working for a company making standalone car navigation devices (remember those?), amongst other GPS-related things - I also worked on a lot of OEM GPS receivers. There w…