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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.

    **Q20:  *Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?*****A:  No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

    https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html



  • It’s a risk management strategy where you only do checks afterwards.

    “Trust” means that you don’t make processes wait on passing checks before proceeding, because that would be expensive and/or slow.

    “Verify” means that you have a separate process that comes through and runs checks afterwards, maybe on only some of the things you trusted, to catch issues.

    It’s ideal when you have high-volume and/or low-latency processes where failures are low stakes but you still want to catch systemic issues eventually.

    It’s related to the idea that “the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero”.



  • For the first part, I was like, yeah, that’s pretty much how all C++ GUIs work: a markup file describes the structure, a source file controls the behavior, and a special compiler generates more C++ code based on the markup file to act as glue.

    That’s all pretty standard, and it’s annoying, but I didn’t really get why they were making such a big deal out of it.

    Missing documentation is also annoying but not uncommon for internal widgets.

    What really elevates this from simply annoying to transcendentally bad, is the lack of error messages, the undocumented requirements that resource IDs be sequential, and the mandatory IDE plugin. That’s all unforgivable.



  • I assume that they mean that OpenCL, which is a traditional GPGPU language, is a very restrictive subset of either C or C++ (both are options) plus some annotations.

    In fact, OpenCL toolchains already use the Clang frontend and the LLVM backend, so the experience of using and compiling them is very close to C++.

    The talk mentions all of this; it says that a benefit of using full C++ on the GPU over using OpenCL is that you don’t have to deal with all the annoying restrictions and annotations.











  • This is just about possible in NYC if you 1) work in a high-rise by a station 2) commute during peak times with frequent trains 3) live in a high-rise by a station.

    For example: Downtown Brooklyn or Exchange Place high-rise <=> WTC.

    The other option would be to live within walking distance. A <20 minute walking distance to a downtown or midtown office is reasonable.