331–340 of 441 posts
Getting well with a genetic disorder while the world harangues me and accuses me of making that up. Next up: Figuring out how to talk to the world about it effectively. I'm not sure that's solvable. "Curing CF" seems easier.
I don't understand. People try to tell you that cystic fibrosis isn't real?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to steal that idea next time someone talks about time delays and says "it's not a big deal!" Awesome!
This is 50ms. This is 200ms. doesn't quite work as well. Depending on the situation there has to be some theshhold of diminishing returns.
If it gets executed 100s of times in a day per person, you can say this is 50 ms * 100 = 5s, 200 ms * 100 = 20s. And that's just per user.
When I was a CS prof, many, many years ago, our undergraduate lab had Macs with floppy disks. I asked the University to pay for installing 10MB Hard Drives in the Macs. I was asked to present my case to the deans council. At the meeting, I said that the students used the floppy to load their development environment. I said that, with a hard drive, it took 10 secs to load and be ready. With the floppy, I said it took…
I guess that trick would be harder to reproduce for my problem - bringing down compile times from 4 hours to 1 :)
Probably not hardest, but one that sticks in my mind was that I downloaded an old copy of Jedi Knight II onto my computer and was excited to play it again... but it crashed on launch. Or rather it would throw a modal dialog (complaining about graphics something-or-other) and go into a loop of system beeps. So I attached to it with gdb... and started going down a rabbit hole of stack traces and assembly code. I don't…
A simplified universal parsing format (AST) that equally describes all languages. It needs to allow seamless switching between different languages in the same file and also allow recursively nesting of different languages within each other without resulting in a deviating from the simplified parse format. The solution is written and it appears correct and viable. As in all things related to parsers the devil's in the…
How do the switching happen? You just allow a node in one language to be some root of another, or is it more complicated?
When I was 14 or so, my mom installed one of those "telephone locks" that blocked outgoing calls and only allowed incoming calls, she did this to limit my dial-up internet. I wanted to see if I could bypass it without my mom noticing. I noticed that the case for the lock could be pried open easily because it was just a plastic cover with 2 tabs. I examined the circuit and saw that if I could bridge the cables around…
Convincing a department to graduate me with an ABET accredited degree without finishing all coursework. It was significantly easier than deriving the time-dependent wave equation for hydrogen, writing a Java-to-MIPS compiler with two implementations, one in C++ and one in Java, and making an UNIX FORTRAN reactor simulator compile on Windows 95 (lol!)... all with crushingly, untreated depression. Also, survived the Lo…
Dont know if this is the hardest, but it is one of the most impactful. During the 2010 recession I had a client that had about 700K in receivables past due and we were doing about 120K/month in additional work. I started reading their 10Q and 10K and decided that they were at risk for bankruptcy as their cash position was not great. I told my sales guy that we had to collect our money somehow. He was like they are a…
1. Many, many big companies require vendors to agree to codes of conduct that explicitly prohibit such gifts.
2. If the customer were to file for bankruptcy protection, the trustee (or debtor-in-possession) likely would characterize recent payments as "avoidable preference" payments and seek to claw them back — with claw-back being the presumption and the vendors having the burden of proving that they're entitled to keep the payments (which is somewhat of a PITA). [0]
3. If the recipient of such a gift happens to be a foreign "official," then the criminal penalties of the (U.S.) Foreign Corrupt Practices Act might become salient. [1]
[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-bankruptcy-payme...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to steal that idea next time someone talks about time delays and says "it's not a big deal!" Awesome!
This is 50ms. This is 200ms. doesn't quite work as well. Depending on the situation there has to be some theshhold of diminishing returns.