nlehuen

The Google internal equivalent to cron has a ? placeholder in the scheduling spec syntax letting the scheduler deterministically pick an arbitrary valid value within the field range. So ? 2 ... will pick any minute between 02:00 and 02:59 (and I suspect any second within that minute). The value is derived from a hash of the job definition, so overall this spreads the cron load within the hour.

Obviously cron jobs are not all equal in terms of load and duration, and hours are not all equal in terms of usage, but that still helps prevent trivial spikes similar to the one mentioned in the article (disclaimer: I'm not aware of a recent counterfactual experiment proving this, but that seems a fair assumption).

I refuse to let knowledge about Calvinball-level grotesque rules about quoting and escaping in bash encumber my mind.

> readable C > return uu____0;

If readability is the selling point, why not go the extra millimeter and add a heuristic so that this variable is named return_value for instance?

Call it "Computing Science". There, problem fixed!

While they were at it they should have explored whether those kings were actually the cause of those global climate events. You never know, with enough slicing, dicing and p-hacking you can get interesting conclusions :)

I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever!

Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).

I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.

It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).

Please reconsider this comment. Calling one side superior and the other side insects really doesn't help with the discussion, and dehumanizing a whole swath of people really has dark consequences.

I think it's implemented now. Last time I transferred from one Android phone to another, I connected them with an USB cable and the new phone prompted me to enter the old phone's PIN. I was confused why, I guess that's the reason?

The old phone's screen was OK though, and I don't remember if I had to use it to initiate the transfer.

Looks like some single quote escaping issue? I suspect the first link to be "Archduke Ferdinand VII's Bureau of Non-Demographic Surveys" and the apostrophe breaks the link.