eblume

As I understand it, these constellations are all low enough in orbit that stuff deorbits from atmospheric drag relatively quickly. I think you get a few years at most for these sorts of satellites.

The "Kessler syndrome" worst case scenario - I'm just recalling stuff from Scott Manley videos here - I think is a 'really bad decade' where a cascade of collisions makes launching in to LEO impossible until everything settles down in 10ish years. Bad, yeah, terrible even, but possibly worth it in some sense? I mean, it makes about as much sense to me as growing subsidized corn for ethanol gas, I suppose. I'm sure someone is making money.

Well you have to have another core free to run your sick winamp skin, otherwise how will you keep up your K/D?

I'm saying that they may still have done exactly that. If they were using A(r), they would have posted the job.

Your link says that A(r) still requires posting the jobs officially, though. It certainly seems like they skipped that. Also, the director lied.

The point here, I believe, is that 1Password will only prompt you to enter the 2FA code if the domains match, same with the password. Your point that if you've already decided to enter your password then entering the 2FA code isn't much of a hurdle is sound, but from the perspective of a user of 1Password, it is indeed very surprising (and rare!) when I try to log in to a page and find that 1Password won't show my log in because the domains don't match. It happens, usually due to some cross-origin login flow, but it's rare. So I think the claim isn't false, it's just based on a premise that might not factor in for different people.

I'm genuinely perplexed by this, how is the puzzle even a puzzle if you don't judge it by formal logic?

I don't know why this has to be about men and strength and cycles of violence. I think this is about value extraction. During times of plenty, we structure our economy to maximize the value, and in our current policy that means putting sugar in everything. It's what makes the most money. We don't factor in the cost, and we don't value the alternatives. We turn sunlight in to sugar in to human fat, because it makes the most money.

In war, scarcity and changes in spending priorities mean the economics changes and we don't get as much money in the sunlight->sugar->human fat chain, so we make less human fat.

I don't think this is a good idea, but I do think it is what we are doing.

But really my philosophy of it is not the important thing here, I offer it merely because, respectfully, I don't agree with your framing.

It would also be simpler to just ban cigarettes and alcohol and all of those things that the State of California knows to cause cancer. Complete prohibition is not the only policy tool we have, and indeed it's usually a pretty bad tool.

Right now, recycling (at least, of plastic) is a lie. This law is about forcing companies to stop lying. Seems appropriate to me.

It's worth mentioning here I think that github's code search is really quite good. I'm not trying to say that github can do no harm or that github "owning" OSS code hosting is a good thing, but the github search bar is a utility that IMO is worth the price of admission.

I think that sourcegraph maintains a similar quality OSS code search that can be searched for free but I have not personally used it.

I'm afraid it's staring right at you, in the name of the app: "Wallet". They want to replace your wallet. It's not enough for them to be in every person's pocket; they need the rest of the pockets to be empty, as well.

I'm being hyperbolic, but I worry _not by much_.

You may wish to investigate cloudflare's image API: https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/cloudflare-images/

If the reason you were unable to use a CDN cache was because your access patterns require a lot of varying end serializations (due to things like image manipulation, resizing, cropping, watermarking, etc.), then this API could be a huge money saver for you. It was for me.

OTOH if the cost was because compute isn't free and the corresponding cloudflare worker compute cost is too much, then yeah, that's a tough one... I don't have a packaged answer for you, but I would investigate something like ThumbHash: https://evanw.github.io/thumbhash/ - my intuition is that you can probably serve some highly optimized/interlaced/"hashed" placeholder. The advantage of thumbhash here could be that you can optimize the access pattern to be less spendy by simply storing all of your hashes in an optimized way, since they will be extremely small, like small enough to be included in an index for index-only scans ("covering indexes"). (I have not actually tried this.)

That's how the Door to Hell[1] was made.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_to_Hell

I know what that is!!!!

So this could fall under their jurisdiction with 'illegal export'?

SQLite is amazing. It is a tech that no programmer should be unfamiliar with. It takes at most a day or two of playing with it to learn all of its various quirks and tricks, is easy to bake in to any project regardless of language, and performs like mad.

This seems to be further confirmation that the ONLY safe way to use bitcoin is to use a full blockchain wallet such as Bitcoin Core. Any software which attempts to 'fake' it by not keeping the full blockchain has issues, exactly like this one being announced today.

This is a serious problem for Bitcoin, because right now it takes 2-3 days to download and verify the full block chain, and is fast approaching 10^H^H40 gigabytes in size.

There's going to need to be some sort of mitigation for this at some point but I don't see how that's possible.

That's a horribly misleading little segment there... the time scales were completely incompatible. A CT scan is an instantaneous event, a stay on the ISS lasts 6 months, and the smoker's lungs statistic is over an entire lifetime.

On an unrelated note, I love the font on this page - "ff-quadraat-web". Very natural and easy to read.

I have an example of a similar journey I followed.

The Lua language has a 1-based indexing scheme. Furthermore, the only thing that differentiates a hash-map from an ordered array is the existence of only keys in the range [1, ∞) (and they must be entirely contiguous starting from 1 until the last present key).

The interface for arrays and hash-map data types is uniform, called a 'table', which has your standard `mapper[key] = value` syntax (and also, equivalently, `mapper.key = value` for well-formatted string-literal keys).

This results in the very surprising and confounding fact that if a naive programmer doesn't realize that Lua has this system, they will very likely end up starting from 0 and build an unordered hash map rather than an ordered array - complete with all the resulting performance penalties and unordered traversals.

For a long time this struck me as being absolutely absurd and very damning. After working with Lua for a while, though, there began to be a certain elegance to it that I could admire. There is a SO post that goes in to some of the benefits[0][1].

I still much prefer 0-based indexing though.

0: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2785704/why-do-lua-arrays...

1: Irony intended.

Hermann Zapf, Sir Christopher Lee, and Ornette Coleman all in one day. A dark day. Rest in peace.

That was just bizarre. Had a stomach ache. Typed 'stomach ache', hit the button. Ache gone.

The brain is a strange, strange organ.

Back when I was learning Go, I was astounded to learn that GOMAXPROCS was set to 1 by default. It didn't seem to make any sense to me given the nature of the claims of the language. Of course when I investigated why the default was 1 I learned the reasons why (which this article talks about), but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm glad that Go has matured to the point where this can be a historical footnote! Good work, Go team.

I just restarted my investigation of Haskell yesterday. This is very sad news. Haskell is a beautiful language, and while I still struggle to write even basic programs in it I can tell that every time I solve an issue I'm having I am becoming a smarter programmer.

He will be missed!

Thanks for the touching post - it's always good to hear these human stories about the people who write the software we use every day.

I have a question though - the post does not mention Mihai having passed away but has a mournful tone. A commenter on the blog post said 'rest in peace'. Is Mihai retiring from development due to illness, or has he indeed passed away?

One of my favorite questions to ask candidates goes like this:

"What's your favorite programming language?"

"Describe three things you would change about that language."

And as a bonus question if they aren't faltering, for each improvement they list, I'll ask: "Can you think of a programming language that does that thing correctly?"

I find that programmers I respect/admire can all answer these questions enthusiastically and without hesitation. As with all interview questions though, you do need to worry about false positives and negatives.

This question always reminded me of the (excellent) book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". The author explores the philosophy of engineering as being the art of separating things in to their components. At the risk of spoiling some of the book, a major struggle the author goes through is the paradox that there seems to be an infinite number of ways to split some kinds of systems, with no productive work ever being done. This question feels like that... you can split it down to the tiniest discrete system and you'll find you haven't gained much.

That's not to say that you wouldn't gain SOMETHING, nor that it's a bad interview question. I actually like it. It's just not terribly productive, in an engineering sense.

Only one way to know that: give it a try!

The "Science China" (anyone know if it's a reputable journal?) article that this article uses as its primary source[1] is behind a fairly expensive pay wall, but based on the abstract I think it's pretty clear that this effect is not alarming at all.

I'm sort of confused by the language but it sounds like they are saying that some small fraction (1%?) of radioactive Cesium will be reaching the coastline of the US in greater concentrations at first and then lesser concentrations.

No where, I think (but I'm not super clear on it - read for yourself!), does the abstract indicate that the concentration of Cesium reaching the US will be environmentally damaging. My guess is that we'll be talking about very small trace amounts of Cesium emitting nearly undetectable amounts of radiation.

But I am not a nuclear physicist or any other related sort of scientist!

1: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11430-012-4520-2

Sorry, I'm not the parent commenter.

I'm too busy to check but I'd bet money that it's a Mersenne prime. The series looks exponential (like 2^n) and it's not hard to imagine that fenceposting (±1) led to each member in the series being (2^n)-1 - which is the form for Mersenne primes.

Edit: Dang, I was wrong. ;)