joelshep · HackerTrans

4 gün öncediscuss

I may be misremembering Godel's proof or misunderstanding your last paragraph, but I thought Godel's proof actually presented a specific undecidable statement. The hope then was that somehow undecidable statements could be cordoned off from decidable statements, and Turing's result showed that that wasn't possible. Perhaps that's what you mean by "the nonexistence of a single algorithm that correctly answers every instance in that family"?

joelshep

geçen aydiscuss

Interesting. I've had exactly the opposite experience. The Surfaces I've owned (3 so far, over the last 8 years) have been much more reliable than the other Windows laptops I've used over the same time period (mostly at work). To the point I bought myself one for work and didn't bother trying to expense it because I was so happy to have a laptop I could rely on (and I could use it for personal use once it was "retired"). Not invalidating your experiences, but they've been really solid for me.

joelshep

3 ay öncediscuss

Did Apollo 8 go to the moon?

joelshep

3 ay öncediscuss

Hardly. Remembering the end of 1968, when Apollo 8 made the first manned voyage out of earth's orbit, and orbited the moon:

Newsman Walter Cronkite remembers the year of Apollo 8: "The whole 1960s really culminating in 1968 were the most terrible decade, undoubtedly, of the twentieth century and very possibly our entire history, even including the decade of the Civil War. America was divided as it never had been since the Civil War and by the Vietnam War, by the civil rights fight.

"Everything seemed to come to a head in '68. There were the assassinations of two of the leaders of the more liberal causes. Bobby Kennedy, shortly after winning that election in California that probably would have put him over the top as the presidential candidate that year, and Martin Luther King, of course, in Memphis, was a terrible blow to the entire cause of civil rights. By the summer of '68 the Democratic convention turned out to be a terrible shambles of violence and counter-violence by the Chicago police... By December the country was pretty far down."

joelshep

4 ay öncediscuss

You can buy the Handbook of Model Rocketry and have essentially all the knowledge that's encoded in OpenRocket or RockSim. You just lack the automated simulations and the parts catalogs (whose weights and dimensions should generally be double-checked anyway). The rockets designed by these programs assume static stability. If you want guidance of some sort, that is entirely on you: that's not remotely a capability available in these programs. If you want to launch at a funny angle, that's also entirely on you. If you want "accuracy" regardless of wind variations, motor variations, etc., that's entirely on you as well. There is a huge distance between the capabilities and the accuracy of simulations of programs like this, and what you would need to come close to developing an effective weapon.

joelshep

4 ay öncediscuss

Not true in the US either, in any meaningful way. Weight thresholds are different, FAA thresholds are different, allowed control systems are different, etc., etc.

joelshep

4 ay öncediscuss

But hopefully not that kind of interest.

Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has been very good about self-policing. Most folks who are serious about the hobby closely follow the safety guidelines published by the two national organizations (Tripoli and NAR), and steer newcomers to as well. Serious accidents are few and far between, intentional damage even more so. Compare this to, say, drones, which seem to be more widely embraced by the public, but are much more closely regulated and have been implicated in a number of serious incidents like https://abcnews.com/US/drone-operator-charged-hitting-super-... . Model and amateur rockets are cool. Folks mis-using them are going to run into a lot of pushback from pretty much every direction, because it'd only take an incident or two to ruin the hobby for everyone.

joelshep

10 ay öncediscuss

I "identify" strongly as Democrat (meaning, I vote consistently, but not purely, Democrat). I've also subscribed to The Flip Side for a number of years, which will take a news story a day and present viewpoints on it from left-leaning, right-leaning and libertarian news sources. That seems like a form of balance. I find more often than not it lowers my stress level about the news, not so much because of the voices reinforcing my own perspectives, but because the opposing perspectives are usually well-presented. I can read those and think "Well, I don't agree with that, but now I can see how the facts could be interpreted that way by a reasonably intelligent person." That gives me hope that it's actually possible to have a dialog about seemingly partisan issues, and a reminder that having different viewpoints is human and worthy of respect, not inherently malicious.

joelshep

geçen yıldiscuss

This is great: thanks for sharing it. In 1983, Compute! magazine published yet another article on these opcodes: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue41/Extra_Instruc... . Now I can finally understand the why, not just the what.

joelshep

2 yıl öncediscuss

Depends on the workload. In the past, I've worked on several workflow-based systems that performed lots of OLTP operations to drive live workflows forward, but once a workflow was done the operational data became a lot less interesting. So there it made sense to (say) partition the operational data and table by month, and roll off partitions after 3-6 months.

joelshep

2 yıl öncediscuss

To continue the speculation ... as a ship that size is slow to turn or halt, that seems to suggest that even if the ship hadn't suffered a power failure then it would have passed quite close to the bridge pier anyway. Was that expected?

joelshep

3 yıl öncediscuss

In our galaxy, or anywhere? In our galaxy, potentially 1-3 times per century but there are reasons (besides probabilities being what they are) that we humans haven't actually observed one in some time: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-milky-supernovae-millennium.ht... . Across the universe, the estimate is one star goes supernova every ten seconds. Actually observed: about 1-2 per week. There are systems and amateurs who regularly scan the night sky looking for evidence of supernovas and other "transient" objects. And a central database where they are reported: https://www.wis-tns.org/ . Get an account and sign up for notifications, and you'll get several a week reporting things that probably went boom far, far, far away. Looking to place bets? Betelgeuse is considered a strong contender for the next supernova progenitor that we humans will see with our naked eyes, probably even during daylight hours.

joelshep

3 yıl öncediscuss

Yes: I find "what" comments critical. Naming things is hard; getting two people to agree on the concept the name represents is harder. I write "what" comments -- usually at a class, class field and method level -- religiously because it articulates the concept the class/field/method is supposed to represent. The whole point of writing code is to build a logical model of real-world concepts; if you can't articulate the concept, you can't write the code to model it. Sometimes these comments help others, but I find their greatest value comes when I finish writing the comment/documentation and compare it to the code. I often find that they don't quite match -- my code isn't doing what I just said it is -- and that forces me to either clarify the concept or fix the code. Either way, the model ... erm, system ... is better than it would be if I just relied on names alone.

joelshep

3 yıl öncediscuss

If God is omnipotent, surely that would include the ability to do things that we mere mortals would construe as harmful or self-defeating, wouldn't it?

joelshep

3 yıl öncediscuss

It might be obvious as far as it goes, but it's also incomplete in at least two ways. One is that as tweaks and optimizations and "supplementing the system in some way" often involves increasing its complexity, even if just a little bit at a time. It adds up with time. The more important thing is this: if you're already constrained on vertical scaling, and you don't have a firm grip on how fast your system is scaling, then you can't just stop with making the db more efficient. That's just postponing the inevitable, and possibly not for more than a couple of years. If you're in the position the author portrays, get the database under control first -- for sure -- but then get started on figuring out how you're going to stay in front of your scaling problem, whether that's rearchitecture, off-loading work to systems better suited for it, or whatever. Speaking as a former owner of a very large Amazon database that fought this battle many times, trying to buy enough dev time to build away from it before it completely collapsed. We were too content with performance improvements just like the ones described in this article, before finally recognizing we were just racing the clock.