JonC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widdershins

Just because it sounds cool.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262046305/introduction-to-algorithms/

This one is pretty hardcore. I bought the 2nd edition of it over 20 years ago when I started my career as a developer due to not doing a CS degree.

It’s not necessarily how far things are, it’s that you need a car to get to places in a sensible way.

I’m a fellow Brit, but have stayed in suburban US enough to have experienced how different it is. You might have a supermarket a couple of miles away, but if you want to attempt to walk there, you’ll often be going well out of your way trying to find safe crossing points or even roads with paved sidewalks.

Train stations are mostly used for cargo in most US cities. If you don’t have a car, you’re pretty much screwed.

Some cities are different. NYC being the obvious one. You can get about there by public transport pretty easily in most places there. San Francisco is another city that is more doable without a car, but more difficult than NYC.

I stayed near Orlando not too long ago and there it’s just endless surburban housing with shops and malls dotted about mostly along the sides of main roads. You definitely need a car there.

Also take a look at the Specification Pattern for something similar.

That’s something I would only use if the logic becomes very complex, but it can help break things down nicely in those cases.

Why the assumption that reactivity is only a front-end thing?

I’ve used it plenty on the back-end when dealing with streams of data that need to trigger other processing steps.

I mean, why does anything have value?

In the strict financial sense, something is only worth what somone else is willing to pay for it. That’s the whole premise of financial trading. Getting a bit beyond ELI5 now, but most exchanges use something called a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to let the participants in the market see who wants to buy and sell what and for how much, and also to match those buyers and sellers. This is a good intro: https://optiver.com/explainers/orders-and-the-order-book/

In terms of shares in companies, then they do have some fundamental value according to the market. If you buy a share in the company, you get a share of the profits (paid as dividends), which gives those shares some value. Obviously, there’s a lot of speculation too as people are involved, so emotions and wild predictions can come into play!

Financial instruments that get traded aren’t limited to shares in companies though. There are all kind of other financial instruments that get traded every day, some are pretty basic like buying and selling different currencies. Others involve all kinds of crazy financial engineering , like the sort that caused the crash in 2008!

Most have some fundamental value based on their attributes, so it’s a little different to the likes of an NFT. The big issues come if the values that the market has agreed upon don’t match reality, which is what happened in 2008.

If you strip things back, the most fundamental point of a market is to bring buyers and sellers together and to enable price discovery.

The price of a financial instrument you see on a stock exchange or similar is simply the last traded price between a buyer and a seller. If you want to buy or sell something, then the price you get depends on who wants to sell/buy on the other side and what price they have put an order in for.

The more trades going on in the market, the more likely it is that you will be able to buy at a price close to what you see as the last price in the market.

If you only allow trading every hour, then you lose some of that price discovery.

Additionally, as already mentioned, trades would likely still happen, but away from the designated marketplace. If I want to sell something, then I may just ask who else has the thing I want to sell and try to negotiate a price directly with them.

That way, fewer trades happen in the marketplace and more trades happen in private away from there.

That sort of limited trading does happen for some very niche products that don’t have a lot of potential buyers and sellers. For common financial instruments, have a lot of participants wanting to trade, having a centralised marketplace helps avoid the issues that would come otherwise.

Now, you can argue that in practice it doesn’t work as well as the theory, and I would agree there. If you are a HFT, then you can make money by getting in milli or microseconds ahead of others.

For a lot of market participants, that doesn’t really matter though. The big banks typically don’t do that sort of trading. They are buying and selling on behalf of their clients, both individuals and companies that want access to the market. The bank makes their money by charging a margin to their client (similar to how it works for pretty much any retailer), and the fact that the HFTs are making all these trades helps them with price discovery and liquidity (ensuring there is someone to buy what they want to sell, or sell what they want to buy)

Although filling an entire trunk full of peanut butter, let’s say 500kg worth (assume a 450 litre trunk and density of 1.1 kg/l according to Google), then adding all that weight over the rear axle would affect the handling and balance of the car, potentially making it dangerous and therefore illegal to drive.

So, it’s not actually that clear cut that it wouldn’t be illegal!

Yeah, it’s one of those scenarios that happens so infrequently that people rarely think about it.

Until it does happen and then everyone gets confused!

Technically, the line is at the second to last opponent in the direction of attack.

The usual case is that the goalkeeper is the last opponent, so the line is at the last defender. If the keeper comes forward past some of the defenders, then the line would be at the second last defender.

The attacker also has to be ahead of the ball to be offside, which doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the link. You could have two attackers, both in offside positions, but if the one with the ball passes to the second attacker and the second is behind the ball when the pass is made, then it is not offside.

So I deleted the story before I posted it, and began to realize that even though I’m 40, and should be past all this, it still hurts, and I’m a deeply broken person.

The thing about trauma (and it likely is trauma) is that it often just doesn’t go away on its own and you need to do work on it. So, why should you be over it?

Should is a loaded word as it pretty much always comes from what you learned as a child. You should do that. You should be like this.

That “should” probably comes from your father when he told you how you should be as a child.

It sounds like you aren’t over it now, but that’s ok. It’s ok not to be over stuff that happened in childhood. But the important thing to understand is that you can get over it with work. Being aware of that is the first step on that road.

Apparently it’s because CrowdStrike installed their device driver as one that must start when Windows starts.

Explained here: https://youtu.be/wAzEJxOo1ts?feature=shared&t=675

I’ve linked to the specific time where he explains that issue, but tbh the whole video is worth watching.

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I won’t be holding my breath on anything meaningful changing with drug policy though

It bothers me that the height chart suggests there are 10 inches in a foot

The third dude was Kumar from the Harold & Kumar movies too

It’s looking like this one is going to be a lot closer than I thought two days ago!

I still remember the code for Braeburn Apples, over 25 years after I worked in a supermarket.

For some reason, their code of 6969 sticks in my mind.

Maybe let’s just say that you and I have different senses of humour and leave it at that.

For me, the humour comes from the fact that I pretended not to understand the image and point out that there are no plugs in the image. It’s a bit of wordplay that relies on the fact that people sometimes call plug sockets plugs.

I’m from the UK.

It was a joke. Don’t take things so seriously