Maybe a geekbench from yesteryear. Back in the mists of time it was apocryphally known as "eight megs and continually swapping". But I guess that's a couple of orders of magnitude out nowadays.
> Even when engineers get creative, there’s logic: a butterfly valve actually looks like butterfly wings. You can tell how the name relates to what it actually defines, and how it can be memorable.
Editor MACroS still has a logic. It isn't just random.
More to the point, what does a John Deere S7 600 do, or a 310 G-Tier, or a Z515E ZTrak? Emacs is an editor. That part is descriptive: an editor edits. The product name is not expected to describe what the product is. The general product category is what does that.
> The product name is not expected to describe what the product is.
There are some exceptions, but the agriculture machinery industry has actually gotten pretty good at making the names useful, with reasonable consistency across brands. S7 600: 600 tells that it is a class 6 combine, which is a value farmers understand as it pertains to the combine's capacity. For tractors, the John Deere 8R 230 sees 8 indicate a large row-crop frame, and 230 indicates a 230 HP engine. A New Holland T7.180 is, you guessed it, a medium row-crop frame with a 180 HP engine.
It may look like nothing to outsiders, but there is a lot of useful information encoded in there once you know what to look for.
Useful if you already know the basics of what it is. My point is that "S7 600" by itself doesn't tell you anything if you don't have some knowledge of the product already. The knowledge that it's a combine is separate. Similarly, "emacs" tells you nothing if you don't know it, but the generic term "editor" is descriptive.
Software doesn't generally encode product attributes into the name the way 230 means 230 horsepower and such, but that's because software doesn't really have things like that to put in the name in the first place. Most software doesn't have specific variants like that, and software that does is almost always differentiated on feature set rather than numbers.
Software often puts the version in the name. Which is the same as the S7 designation in the case of said combine. S7 is just a restyled S7x0 series combine, which was the successor to the S6x0 series.
It's not a perfect system. Before the S6x0 was the 9x70STS series, after the 9x60STS series, and the 9x50STS series. You can find a version number in there, albeit not a perfectly sequential one. Although that's nothing new. Windows 3.1 turned 3.11, 95, 98. iOS 17 turned 26. You get the picture.
Technically it is "combine". Originally it was known as a "combined harvester-thresher", which is maybe what you're thinking of, but that was soon shortened to "combine" and it has stuck ever since.
"Combine harvester" showed up in some places later where context was needed to figure out what "combine" means, but it was seemingly only for context. "Combined harvester-thresher harvester" is pointlessly redundant.
I'm conflicted because you're not entirely wrong (that it's not just the software industry), but the name is because the combine combines steps that used to be separate.
> The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references.
Checking references can be useful when you are not familiar with the topic (but must review the paper anyway). In many conference proceedings that I have reviewed for, many if not most citations were redacted so as to keep the author anonymous (citations to the author's prior work or that of their colleagues).
LLMs could be used to find prior work anyway, today.
The obvious solution is for half of the hardware to run on dark energy, counteracting the heat generated by the other half. Venture capitalists, use my gofundme site to give me the millions needed to research this, thanks.
> I can put the cuff on my arm and sit at my desk for 20 minutes to be nicely rested and calm, and then take 5 different measurements with a few minutes between each one. ...
Doesn't it take more than a few minutes for one's circulation to return to normal after a BP measurement?
Eh, not really. We measure blood pressure every five minutes (or less) for patients under anesthesia. They're pretty reliable. Of course, they're unconscious, so they can't really anticipate the discomfort of the cuff going up on their arm and react to that, and frankly given that they are being carved open the pain of a cuff is pretty minimal by comparison.
This post, along with the tutorial links it and the comments contain, provide good insights on the topic of caches, coherence, and related topics. I would like to add a link that I feel is also very good, maybe better:
In the 1980s, PT and ET were common. I was working at Bell Labs then, and one of my jobs was to change the time zone (back then it was two words) on the testing machines, as needed. This is stuck in my memory since to change the timezone, you needed to edit the Unix kernel source code and recompile it!
Wasn't there a HN post a few weeks ago, describing how your phone's location can be tracked without anything installed and without leaving any trace on your phone? I think it was an exploit of CSS7 protocol used by networks?
That password should include symbols too! Without symbols, each character is one of 62 values (sticking to ASCII letters and digits). Including symbols makes it much harder to guess passwords of a given length. Even better would be Unicode letters, digits, and symbols, even if you stick to the Basic Multilingual Plane.
Best would be non-text, binary strings. Since I already use a password manager, I don't really need to type passwords by hand. But I do understand most people prefer text passwords that could be entered by hand if necessary.
Except that's exactly what the Mossad will be expecting us to use, for our uber-secure password! By eschewing symbols and binary, we are actually meta-out-smarting their ultimate giga-quantum nuclear crypto cracker.
Or: This is Bob "Dim Bulb" Jones we're talking to. KISS, and maybe we can convince him to upgrade his password to "iwantacoldbeernow".
Sorry, your password does not meet complexity requirements because it does not contain at least one of each of the following: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numeric digits, nonalphanumeric symbols.
I appreciate this post! I was hoping you would add an inline CSS style sheet to take care of the broken defaults. I only remember one off the top of my head, the rule for monospace font size. You need something like:
But I vaguely remember there are other broken CSS defaults for links, img tags, and other stuff. An HTML 5 boilerplate guide should include that too, but I don't know of any that do.
> It is interesting that no software engineering or computer science course I’ve seen has ever spent any time on CI/CD.
It's hard to fit everything student needs to know in the curriculum. Someone else posted here they had 10 pages of proofs per week, for one course. I would have been fired for assigning so much homework!
I was a CS professor at a local college. My solution was to ignore CS1 and CS2 curriculum (we were not ABET accredited, so that's okay) in the second course of Java programming. Instead, I taught students Maven/Gradle, Git and GitHub, workflows, CI/CD, regular expressions, basic networking, basic design patterns, Spring Boot, and in general everything I thought new programmers ought to know. I even found a book that covered much of this stuff, but in the end I wrote my own learning materials and didn't use a book.
The course was a victim of its success. The school mandated the course for non-Java programmers too, resulting in a lot of push-back from the non-Java students.
If anyone is interested, I have the syllabus online still (I've since retired) at <https://wpollock.com/>. Look for COP2800 and COP2805C. I can also send the Java teaching materials as a PDF to anyone interested (book length, but sadly not publishable quality).
>Someone else posted here they had 10 pages of proofs per week, for one course.
Huh. As a professor, I would not be able to grade this kind of volume in any serious capacity. Especially since proofs need to be scrutinized carefully for completeness and soundness. I wonder how their instructor manages.
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