xkcd

roflwaffle

There's a thread over on realworldtech.com that has a lot of pros and cons of used enterprise SSDs (Linus mentions how consumer ones have a non-zero chance of losing all data if you lose power at the wrong time). Can't say I'm sold. I've been more curious out refurbished rotating drives. While the ...

roflwaffle

As a follow up, I've found some good deals on used enterprise SSDs off of eh4y with hardly any use recently. You have to look for a while, but compared to consumer SSDs you can eventually find either similar performance/capacity at a lower cost or better performance/capacity at similar cost. I imagi...

roflwaffle

The biggest downside I can think of is that ram and GPUs are relatively expensive. In terms of SSD speed/performance, Optane seems to be the bees knees, but it's expensive. Like someone said earlier, an SSD on the PCIe bus might be able to outperform an SSD on SATA, which is capped at ~500+MB/s. htt...

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but I support unifying/simplifying the tax rates for capital gains and earned income. Why? Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Capital gains are (mistakenly) seen as free money, as opposed to earned income. But it's not ~ capital gains come with risk - sometimes risk of total an...

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I think it's also because the federal government favors taxing "consumption" as opposed to assets/investments. Hopefully they won't move away from that, since IMO it encourages prudent/restrained consumption and disciplined wealth management, but we'll see... I don't see how doing away wi...

roflwaffle

I think it depends on what's being loaded/used. Optane has much better read latency than even the best SSDs, so if enough stuff can be cached, optane plus an HDD could be better than an SSD of the same cost. On the other hand, if there are more small files that can't be read sequentially than can fi...

roflwaffle

I think it's also because the federal government favors taxing "consumption" as opposed to assets/investments. Hopefully they won't move away from that, since IMO it encourages prudent/restrained consumption and disciplined wealth management, but we'll see...

roflwaffle

especially if I have the luxury of making sales on my own schedule. ...which you don't. In a buyout, for example, you get what's offered. If it's a cash buyout, you pay taxes on money you would prefer to have remained invested. Further, it's a windfall that can't be spread out over several years, s...

roflwaffle

Inheritance tax is already a wealth tax - which gets around the issue of when to value the items that make up that wealth. Why is an annual wealth tax better than an inheritance tax? Someone can place assets in an irrevocable trust to avoid paying estate tax in the US, although that amount needs to...

roflwaffle

You could also try 16GB-32GB of Intel Optane, either as a your boot drive if your installation is smaller enough, or as a cache for the HDD. Depending on the workload, it provides performance that's similar to or better than very good SSDs. https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8157/intel-optane-memory-...

roflwaffle

I'd love it if you or someone else were just able to create something that would parse and evaluate help files/etc in different languages to create an index of functionality. The hardest part would be putting it all together with unique descriptions for similar behavior across different languages.

roflwaffle

I bolded the very low power part for emphasis, but my point wasn't that the OP or anyone should build a particular system. I'm emphasizing that if someone can get by with a lower powered and/or older set-up, then they'll have far more time to look for deals/comparison shop, and can probably put toge...

roflwaffle

It's kind of tough to build a high quality system for ~$200. It's possible, but you more or less have to get a good idea of how much different components are selling for and then wait for the absolute best deals on those components. Assuming you can reuse your case and hard drive, and had time to wa...

roflwaffle

I also find Visual Studio to be a little cluttered and confusing, especially compared to alternatives like SharpDevelop. I think it has more to do with the design of VS than with .NET as a whole. At the same time, the syntax of Java is more confusing to me than the syntax of C#, and I'm an analyst, ...

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We could, but it's probably not the best bang for our buck. There's a lot of blacktop and asphalt roofing out there that's pretty dark, and there are still a ton of things we could do in terms of renewable energy/efficiency, especially in building design. Commenting on the results, Helene Muri, of t...

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That would be a technical architect here, or maybe a director, but a director isn't usually as hands on.

roflwaffle

I think both Turing machines are designed to search for inconsistencies in ZFC. The 7910 state machine was found by using Laconic to compile a graph theoretic statement whose truth implies the consistency of ZFC. SRP is required for the machine to run forever (If it doesn't run forever and stops at ...

roflwaffle

It's a subjective label, like most, but at work it seems to be associated with a "full-stack" engineer who can work "OK" at scale. Having said that, what's "full-stack" and "OK" is mostly related to the work environment. Someone who is full-stack at the g00gz ...

roflwaffle

Easy *nix installs are the hardest part, but I imagine some searching would help with specific models. HP has a ton of "convertibles" that aren't too expensive (http://flash.newegg.com/Product/N82E16834264499).

roflwaffle

I'd also go with an inexpensive laptop with good battery life+a good at home workstation. You can get some pretty beefy used Xeon chips/boards that have good support (40 pcie lanes) for GPU computing and have fairly decent processing power themselves for a lot less than you'll pay for any mobile wor...

roflwaffle

It sounds like you're describing Stoke. The only difference is that it has an optimization mode that lets it temporarily violate some of the hard constraints so it can further optimize some of the soft constraints. I think this lets Stoke move out of local minimums it may otherwise settle into under...

roflwaffle

I use Batch/PS/VB for win specific things that are easier and/or only possible with those languages, and Python for everything else because the syntax is usually easier on the eyes. I'll also use a spreadsheet for simple patterns and/or notepad++ for horizontal text editing if what I'm doing is supe...

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You know, as much as I try to come up with excuses, databases simply get NULL wrong. Okay, yes, they make some good points - when MiddleName IS NULL it doesn't mean they don't have no middle name, it means that you don't know there middle name, so you can't say two people are the same by comparing ...

roflwaffle

Do you have any farms nearby? Depending on their operations, they might have a substantial amount of LDPE (I'm thinking for greenhouse covers and the like) you could buy off of them from not too much once it's reached the end of it's life. Any business that unpacks a lot of small components. There's...

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Police brutality is a tough issue. Body cams help, but on the individual level, there are many laws that allow police to legally use disproportionate force. For example, an officer in MO who has probable cause to believe that an individual has committed or attempted to commit a felony, or may inflic...

roflwaffle

A quick search brings up this function... https://writeonly.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/deepcopy-is-a-pig-for-simple-data/ Apparently deepcopy can handle odd situations like objects that contain themselves, so as long as you don't have any of those situations I imagine you could use the "deepish_c...

roflwaffle

I'm seeing the y50 with an i7 refurbished for ~$750 on ebay, which seems like a good deal. I was going to suggest a piecemeal build of a refurb mobile workstation, but at that price I'd just get the newer laptop. With that said, I agree with Zamfir. Desktops are great for gaming rigs. You can get so...

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If it wasn't for the HD screen, I'd recommend a refurb chromebook. Unfortunately, the only inexpensively priced one with an HD screen (CB5-571) doesn't have support for seabios/custom firmware and I'm not sure if the HD is upgradable.

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The "Which" allows us to compress the "Why" more than we would otherwise, especially since the "Why" in the work item may be buried in a history of 40+ comments. But in general, yeah, our unit (everyone including the business) workflow is kind of broken. We're going thr...

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It's good for psuedo-anonymous communication, where you're trying to hide your identity from other people in general, but I think large government agencies can figure out what is sent from where via traffic analysis.

http://thestack.com/chakravarty-tor-tra ... sis-141114

roflwaffle

Regarding referencing work items: if you need code comments (as opposed to check in comments and associated work items) to help track changes, your classes may be too large/coupled. They really are. Part of it is that we migrated from Delphi a couple years ago and a lot of our stuff hasn't been con...

roflwaffle

As a disclaimer, this is very hand-wavy. But... I'm coming up with some different guesstimates for ARM vs x86. These benchmarks put a A4-5000 at ~2.3x a quad core A7... http://www.notebookcheck.net/SoC-Shootout-x86-vs-ARM.99496.0.html And passmark puts the C2750 at about twice the performance of the...

roflwaffle

I love my pebble. But... I have ADD, so any device that helps streamline/simplify things is a benefit. Someone w/o the same issues probably wouldn't find a smartwatch as useful.

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My day job is programming a control system for vehicle emissions testing. According to EPA regulations, we need to produce output that is correct to seven significant digits (!). (We're actually given gas densities to eight significant digits, and need to use that exact value!) The problem is that ...

roflwaffle

Good blog post! I see that every day at work. We have a ton of logging to find problems, but for the most part we don't have anything or anyone monitoring those logs, so it's generally customers who point out when something is broken.

roflwaffle

I'm new to coding, so I shoot for a code to comment ratio of ~3:1 to keep track of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I don't have a job as a developer, but I routinely look through code at work to try to figure out what's going on for customers. We mostly use comments to reference changes/TFS wor...

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I'd like to create a Frankenstein Chromebook. It's a little bit about the money, but it's mostly about doing something novel/fun. http://hackaday.com/2012/08/10/swapping-out-eee-pc-bga-chip-for-1-6-ghz-upgrade/ What I'm trying to figure out before I drop $15-$25 on a known working mainboard and reba...

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I've plugged a FD in backwards on a running slot 1 PIII (I was a little cavalier with hardware upgrades). It fried itself, a CD Drive, a PS, and the ram, but everything else, including all the PCI cards, still work to this day.

roflwaffle

Has anyone heard of adding a socket to a BGA motherboard? I've seen successful BGA DIY swaps, and even heard that it's possible to solder pins onto a BGA processor and use it in a socket (http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/370183-bga-vs-pga.html#post4718204), bu...

roflwaffle

Sed + Batch or Bash depending on where you are is what pops into my head first.

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