Whenever someone posts a link about these, I get an irresistible urge to post a link to an article with pictures of one being moved by helicopter, so here goes:…
Only if they have a cash register with a control unit that can handle offline operation. Without that, they would be committing a crime.
Funny thing is, a good way of making someone hover their finger over that button is to try to deposit any significant amount of cash to your bank account. One part of the system says "Use cash!", another part says "What…
Are we looking at the same map? On the one I see, showing western and central Europe, the difference between a great circle and a loxodrome (straight line on a Mercator map) for an intra-European route would be barely…
Has the performance of sum on lists of lists in Python been fixed? It used to be pretty abysmal. But I suppose some would say that if you need to consider performance at all, you’re in the wrong language… :)
I suppose a graphite moderator would fit the description.
A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .
For those HN readers who are not stationery junkies: The “real” Blackwing pencils went out of production... I don’t know when, but it must be at least 15 years ago, probably longer. (I have only been watching this from…
If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)
More advanced slide rules typically have a set of “folded” scales, that can sometimes save a calculation from ending up off scale. In theory, these should be offset by half the scale length, i.e. sqrt(10). However,…
I remember seeing more or less the same bug 20 years ago... "Calling" process did connect, write, close. "Answering" process did accept, write("hello"), read, close. One of them got ECONNRESET on Windows NT, but not on…
As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per day the power fails after 65 days, you…
Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted,…
If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by now – give us a report!
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy,…
As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some…
Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one…
I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point, and I would certainly agree with that…
We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)
Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.
If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)...…
For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny: >>> nan=float('nan') >>> a=[nan] >>> nan in a True >>> any(nan==x for x in a) False (Because the `in` operator assumes that identity implies…
My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"? French web sites seem to have lost the plot…
Whenever someone posts a link about these, I get an irresistible urge to post a link to an article with pictures of one being moved by helicopter, so here goes:…
Only if they have a cash register with a control unit that can handle offline operation. Without that, they would be committing a crime.
Funny thing is, a good way of making someone hover their finger over that button is to try to deposit any significant amount of cash to your bank account. One part of the system says "Use cash!", another part says "What…
Are we looking at the same map? On the one I see, showing western and central Europe, the difference between a great circle and a loxodrome (straight line on a Mercator map) for an intra-European route would be barely…
Has the performance of sum on lists of lists in Python been fixed? It used to be pretty abysmal. But I suppose some would say that if you need to consider performance at all, you’re in the wrong language… :)
I suppose a graphite moderator would fit the description.
A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .
For those HN readers who are not stationery junkies: The “real” Blackwing pencils went out of production... I don’t know when, but it must be at least 15 years ago, probably longer. (I have only been watching this from…
If I remember correctly, a recent Gallup in Sweden indicated that about 25 % do not take calls from any unknown number. I don’t know whether this result has been corrected to take itself into account. :)
More advanced slide rules typically have a set of “folded” scales, that can sometimes save a calculation from ending up off scale. In theory, these should be offset by half the scale length, i.e. sqrt(10). However,…
I remember seeing more or less the same bug 20 years ago... "Calling" process did connect, write, close. "Answering" process did accept, write("hello"), read, close. One of them got ECONNRESET on Windows NT, but not on…
As for the "who would want that", I think the use case for that kind of printer today is slow logging. With a laser printer that outputs a page at a time, if you log one line per day the power fails after 65 days, you…
Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted,…
If you just toss the image at one of those newfangled AI thingamajigs (Copilot, Claude, whatever) and say "Compile this C++ program", does it work? Someone must have tried it by now – give us a report!
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy,…
As far as I can remember, most mail servers were fairly sane about that sort of thing, even back in the 90’s when this stuff was introduced. However, there were always these more or less motivated fears about some…
Obviously, it has to eventually build and run if there’s to be any point to it, but is it necessary that every, or even any, step along the way builds and runs? I imagine some sort of iterative set-up where one…
I haven’t studied the project that this is a comment on, but: The article notices that something that compiles, runs, and renders a trivial HTML page might be a good starting point, and I would certainly agree with that…
We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!
You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)
Meanwhile, Cambridge has, or at least had a few years ago, at least one combined pedestrian/cattle tunnel (there was a fence down the middle!) under a major road.
If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)...…
For the built-in float type in Python, the behaviour is a bit funny: >>> nan=float('nan') >>> a=[nan] >>> nan in a True >>> any(nan==x for x in a) False (Because the `in` operator assumes that identity implies…
My IT department blocks me from seeing this page. I suppose they wish to preserve my sanity, by shielding me from yet another config-language spec. =)
This gets extra fun when you have a product which is actually named "My Card" (which, of course, is a bad idea to begin with, but...). Is it "Your My Card" or "My My Card"? French web sites seem to have lost the plot…