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adbachman

Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.

It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.

this is their thing, yeah.

the C in CBP, "Customs", is specifically this kind of stuff.

Re:Gemini 3.8 Flash on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @12:34PM (#49538774)
Still zero on the felony bench.

Is this weakness in their training regimen the impact of operating under regulatory frameworks for too long?

Re:Dates That Don't Exist (2015) on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @11:13AM (#49170111)
I ran into this in a Ruby on Rails test suite a few years ago and wrote up my findings here: https://gist.github.com/abachman/f97806e1c0fe8e4e1849e5f8412...

tl;dr - ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone used absolute seconds counting to determine dates while DateTime used a proper Gregorian calendar. This means dates before October 15, 1582 have different internal values when compared.

The behavior showed up because a test was using a DateTime value to set a MySQL DATETIME column to the DB minimum value, which is 1000-01-01 00:00:00, and then comparing the DB record attribute to the original variable used to set it.

Something like:

  date = DateTime.new(1000, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 'UTC')
  record.update(happened_at: date)
  record.happened_at == date # => false
I "discovered" the missing Gregorian dates when I wrote a loop counting forward in time from Jan 1, 1000 until the corresponding TimeWithZone and DateTime records returned true when compared with ==.
Re:LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua on Monday April 06, 2026 @01:10PM (#47663770)
they include a LÖVE demo in their documentation: https://dev.fennel-lang.org/wiki/CookbookPong
Immediate full screen fake virus scanner ad on Android.

What's up, OP?

Re:C10kday on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @09:57AM (#44798037)
I had the same thought, "oh damn, I haven't heard about 'the c10k problem' in ages" :D (it was "solved", right?)

Given the author, his history in the field, and the project, though, I'm confident the repetition is intentional.

Like a contemporary rapper dropping Doom bars on a track, I read it as an homage / callback / shout-out, even if the meaning is changed.

Re:GSA Eliminates 18F on Saturday March 01, 2025 @08:18PM (#43226077)
Hopelessness is their tool, not ours.
No joke, I actually hit this condition in a test suite and ended up stumbling across the October 1582 date in a Ruby library. It wasn't until I searched "October 10 1582" on the Web that I learned the significance. https://gist.github.com/abachman/f97806e1c0fe8e4e1849e5f8412...

tl;dr - MySQL uses 1000-01-01 as the minimum value for a datetime field. Different Ruby libraries use different methods to represent dates, which can lead to situations that appear to claim that 1000-01-01 != 1000-01-01.

Re: on Sunday February 09, 2025 @10:18PM (#42996566)
The concern is always leverage and conflict of interest.

Is there something about you that you would do anything to keep covered up?

Are you susceptible to outside influence?

Can anyone, in any country, compel you to act counter to the interest of your employer?

Foreign property means you are, at the very least, going to take interest if/when the foreign government threatens it.

what are/were Reddit's top two or three cached structures / things?

guessing post bodies and link previews feels too easy.

comment threads? post listings?

was there a lot of nesting?

it sounds like you're describing a whole post--use message, comments, and all--for presentation to a browser or crawler.

(sorry, saw the handle and have so many questions :D)

Re:The Zizians and the Rationalist Death Cult on Saturday February 01, 2025 @10:02AM (#42898812)
Absolutely!

If it means you are unable to make any decisions or reach any conclusions which do not align with your -ism, then you're in a dead end.

Re:Fork in the Road on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @10:45PM (#42861279)
No. Federal employees take an oath to defend the Constitution, not the current executive.

Civil service in the US has been neutral politically and merit based for the last 140 years. It stands directly opposed to the "spoils system" which awarded positions to friends, campaign contributors, family members, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

Re:Chatham House Rule is suddenly everywhere in the Bay Area on Saturday January 11, 2025 @11:01PM (#42671186)
"Chatham House Rules" is not a problem that needs solving. I've only seen it used as a courtesy extended by peers to each other out of mutual respect.

"We will have conversations and share information and we agree we can act on the information but would all prefer not to be directly quoted or have the information we shared be shared with others outside the meeting."

It's not legal, it's social.

Break trust with a wiretap (really?) and you'll just find yourself no longer invited to the fun places.

Maybe it was before your time, but Diablo was absolutely huge in its day. Like, "top 10 for the 1990s" huge.

Created (or at least established or set the benchmark for) the action RPG genre, spawned clones and imitators, and has multiple triple A sequels.

Left a HUGE footprint, in other words.

the only moves available are:

1. Split an integer into two smaller integers.

2. Combine (add) two integers into a larger one.

Both suggest that negative numbers are not possible.

Re:We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin on Friday April 05, 2024 @01:28AM (#39938961)
In my top five, too. I have two copies right now, the second is a first edition I found at a free bookstore. I've given one other away, will probably send another with a kid when they move out.

It's the dryness, for me. She evokes the setting so clearly and in so few words, it took me by surprise. Also my first exposure to thoughtful anarchist ideas, which has been fun.

That and Wizard of Earthsea. Which is as spare, poetic, and strange as any YA magic fiction book wishes it could be.

Re:How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale on Friday March 15, 2024 @08:21AM (#39714726)
This is the important question.

We evaluated several horizontally scalable DBs and Cockroach was by far the slowest for our access patterns.

I like the, "if you slice, your sister gets to pick first" energy.
This is 100% accurate to my experience working as a software developer for the US federal government.

Important humanitarian mission (I worked in the asylum and refugee org) filled with true believers, dedicated civil servants with a heart for service, managed by career middle managers.

18F, USDS, interesting smaller contractors, and all the "innovation" orgs direct hiring software devs like me were aimed at supporting the mission, but it felt like they were never going to win over the system of 9 digit contacts to support the status quo.

Re:Why I Like Obsidian on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @09:43AM (#39028366)
I use this setup. My notes folder is a git repo, I have a private repo on GitHub as backup. Then two moving parts.

a backup.sh script, which boils down to: `cd ${obfolder}; git add .; git commit -m "auto backup $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)"; git push`. Give it a `chmod +x` and it's ready.

a crontab entry: `1 17 * * * ${obfolder}/backup.sh`, which is "at 5:01pm every day, run the backup script.

${obfolder} is the actual path of the vault directory and I haven't had to think about it in years.

Re:TinyML: Ultra-low power Machine Learning on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @08:34AM (#39027425)
We can each have our very own Dixie Flatline construct.
Re:Pluto, a Modern Lua Dialect on Friday December 29, 2023 @09:32AM (#38805288)
> the ?? would help a little bit

that's the only point of the operator.

given: a = 0; b = 42;

then `a or b` and `a ?? b` give two different answers, but take the same number of characters to write.

> just explicitly check for nil

1. I am lazy and 2. I am explicitly checking, that's why I picked `??` not `or`

Re:Advent of Code 2023 is nigh on Friday December 01, 2023 @12:26PM (#38489394)
that's interesting.

my example data did include the edge case that caught me out in part two, but didn't include it in a way that broke my first pass at a solution.

funny piece is it didn't click until i submitted a wrong answer, read my code for a few minutes, added a bunch of logging, and then saw the trick. i looked back at the given example and it was right there the whole time, just not called out explicitly.

Re:How I got here (Preston Thorpe, incarcerated developer) on Saturday November 11, 2023 @01:27PM (#38233012)
link to the Cory Doctorow story, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", for anyone else who's interested: https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/

I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.

the missing context from the previous comment is that Tao used GitHub Copilot to help with learning Lean.

He's been writing about it as he goes, most recently: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/111271244206606941

There's a thin line between by-the-books malicious compliance "throw away all the keys" and "intentionally destroyed company property". You'd sure want "please delete all our information from your personal devices" in writing.

I can imagine a company whose business is impacted by intentional deletion of data by an aggrieved ex-employee could make a convincing case in a civil suit, even if criminal charges don't stick.

you heard them, a literal potato from the ground.

even a big old russet only has, what, like 32 bites?

Re:Duo Outage on Monday August 21, 2023 @10:52AM (#37210338)
Same for my kid picking up info for the beginning of their first year at Univ of Maryland.

Millions of students coming online, textbooks are digital now, SSO all the things. Perfect storm.

Re:Bret Victor: Update July 2023 on Friday July 07, 2023 @08:34AM (#36630740)
ha, yeah, that reads as an argument fragment. I didn't express my whole thought.

It's the sort of statement that might get someone called out as being somewhere negative on some political spectrum, but I read it here as academic.

Dude probably gets absolutely spammed with, "can you read my paper | review my project | comment on this article?" requests.

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