Could this also be a viable alternative to HVDC lines for civilian applications?
The key thing they aren't saying is how much power it took to "send" 800 watts 5.3 miles...
Readit Newsother_herbert commented on DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming darpa.mil/news/2025/darpa... · Posted by u/gnabgib
For the most energetic, half a kilowatt hour makes me think of a high setting microwave for 30 minutes. Must be enough to roast a chicken?
Choose how ablated you want your chicken
other_herbert commented on SQL style guide by Simon Holywell sqlstyle.guide/... · Posted by u/thunderbong
I’m probably alone in this, but I dislike naming tables in plural.
IMO, reading “SELECT employee.first_name” makes much more sense than “SELECT staff.first_name”.
You can always alias to a singular … like
join users as user on user….
Then do as you please without the that if you are dealing with a user or leave it plural if multiple…
And if we’re talking personal preference I really dislike caps in reserved words in sql, even before highlighting was everywhere it still just feels archaic for no good reason
other_herbert commented on Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009) raphkoster.com/2009/01/08... · Posted by u/fanf2
semi-related, but also helps me to believe that this is the case (and not only because the different regional servers were called "shards" in Ultima Online):
in the "Game Coding Complete, Fourth Edition" book by two programmers who worked on Ultima and Sims (and other Origin/EA games of the time) back in the day, they share some war stories of programming, and if memory serves there is a portion where they talk about the original design, and the realization that lead to the sharding and how the login and shard system worked in the game.
Also, unrelated, a really neat war story about a guy who put in debug code to generate certain audio cues while a game was running to catch a bug.
The book all in all was a fun read if only for all these stories, and generally remember good coding guidelines as well but it is using older C++ that may not stand up to modern critique.
Ha re: audio cues for debugging… your pc speaker is truly an underused tool when debugging something infrequent… for example our system processes a lot of xml data and usually it’s fine but for our test suite hearing beeps and knowing there are server side issues immediately is a great thing
other_herbert commented on Show HN: What Beats Rock – AI Rock Paper Scissors whatbeatsrock.com/... · Posted by u/dragonkhoi
lol
Fire Bucket Hose Candle Power failure Welder Shovel Scissors paper rock
Deleted Comment
other_herbert commented on Addition with flamethrowers – why game devs don't unit test pixelatedplaygrounds.com/... · Posted by u/jgalecki
Thank you for the write up.
That seems like a bad scenario with bad technical management. I am wondering if you have considered not trying to implement unit tests and think about end to end tests. This might be easier for antitesting people to buy into because it’s directly ensuring your end users get the desired outcomes.
It doesn’t matter what bad terrible practices you have inside your library if the output is correct…
If you input 1+1, and it outputs 5, it will be obvious how this can be an issue.
What this will enable you to do is get some quick wins and make refactoring safer.
If management still says no, I see 3 major choices.
1. Quit
2. Write your tests and keep them to yourself
3. Mind control
As a corollary to 2, management tends to love graphs… whatever your using to build should have a plugin that could show unit test success counts and generate even a simple line graph… that alone might be enough incentive to add more testing
I think you have an off-by-one error there!
Just a ui bug, the presentation layer doesn’t match the data layer
other_herbert commented on The Amazon Prime Day 2023 AWS Bill lastweekinaws.com/blog/th... · Posted by u/bpugh
Did any AWS customers experience unavailability during prime day, eg capacity issues launching instances, due to prime day taking precedence over other customers? If there are, they're under NDA so we'd never know.
You’ve talked me into running some load tests around and before these times… around thanksgiving I’ll give it a shot too… I wonder though if it’s just a redirection of traffic… if regular business sites are less busy because people are shopping it would just slightly shift the load from one “side” to the other
Hmmmm….
other_herbert commented on Squeeze the hell out of the system you have blog.danslimmon.com/2023/... · Posted by u/sbmsr
Thanks I think this is a really interesting way to look at things.
What is the market for "wide" applications though? It seems like any particular business can only really support one or two of them, for some that will be SAP and for others it might be Salesforce (if they don't need much ERP), or (as you mentioned) some giant semi homebrewed Oracle thing.
Usually there is a legacy system which is failing but still runs the business, and a "next gen" system which is not ready yet (and might never be, because it only supports a small number of use cases from the old software and even with an army of BAs it's difficult to spec out all the things the old software is actually doing with any accuracy).
Or am I not quite getting the idea?
Lotus notes is wide… I imagine their scope creep checker was just a sticky note that said Absolutely!!