spindle

I keep imagining an elevated 5xx response is a 599 when it should be a 503 or a 504.

My favourite advice for how to quit vim is to run a vim command that someone wrote that calls emacs and asks it to tell the operating system to kill vim's process. I'm sorry that I've lost my link to the details.

> hindley milner type system for the language

Hindley Type Milner Language

#ifixeditforyou

I believe that practically the whole barrier to getting rid of legacy COBOL systems is testing the replacement system. Of course it's possible but it's very very expensive ... I don't have numbers for how expensive, but I've worked on financial software in COBOL on a mainframe, and nothing was the least bit abstruse or scary or difficult about it except the worry that our test suite might not be comprehensive, no matter how much we worked on it (and we worked on the test suite about the same amount as we worked on all the rest of the code put together). But at least our test suite appeared to cover all the cases that eventuated when we ran our COBOL code. How confident would be be that it would cover all the cases that eventuated when we ran translated code? THAT is the problem (or at least was for us). Nothing at all to do with whether translating COBOL can be made easier.

You're my hero

KEYBOARD? Tha were lucky

No, but it's FUN!

I found out last week that Stone Temple Pilots released two albums of totally unrelated music with the same name.

I've worked for a few medium-sized non-profits that fund research. Getting lots of money once you're already established has no downsides. You probably already have a contingency plan for how to spend it, and if not you and your board establish a new process for calling for and approving projects. It's not rocket science (sorry - I don't want to appear dismissive of your post - I just couldn't resist that joke).

I spent several years doing tech support for computer science academics (among others) in one of the world's best universities and literally never came across the sort of attitude described in that article.

And also comparing brains to clockwork.

FWIW, I'm the same, and one (admittedly minor) motivation was not having to decide what kind of car to get next.

I was about to say look at Lineweaver's work, but then I saw that this IS Lineweaver's work :-)

Per year not per month, which of course is just grist to your mill.

Yes!

Happily, it's become okay for them to talk about astrobiology. It was mostly taboo until a few years ago. (Just speculating here, but I think it was the discovery of lots of exoplanets that caused astrobiology to become permissible.)

Good question.

In astrobiology (and I think also in biology and most of chemistry) it means any molecules that contain carbon, with a few exceptions (exceptions include carbon dioxide and diamond - they don't count as organic). Strange definition, perhaps, but I'm certain that's what it means in astrobiology.

Organic molecules are not necessarily in living things and, indeed, interstellar dust clouds contain huge quantities of amino acids and other organic molecules which most astronomers believe have never been near a living thing.

And many car manufacturers, right?

I wish I could upvote this more than once. Those are omissions that could lead to important information being lost in a way that you probably wouldn't notice when checking your backups.

> It's that that

Made me laugh, given the topic!

One of the reasons it's not so famous is that it's had various historical struggles, including being stuck at 32-bit for a long time IIRC (I'm hazy on the details and corrections welcome). I love it though.