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Maciej Piechotka

 Discussion on answer by Philipp: If v…

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Maciej Piechotka
Aug 26, 2022 13:56
@Stilez Desecrating a corpse?
 

 Discussion on answer by Michael Welch…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jun 7, 2021 16:33
@Mark isn't most of the negative side effects of bacteria result of poisonous effects of their waste products? It won't cure it by itself but I wouldn't be surprised if it could alleviate the symptoms.
 

 Discussion on answer by jakebeal: Are…

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Maciej Piechotka
Oct 2, 2020 16:16
@Davor Except that this policy makes pilots with mental health issues hide the problem instead of seeking help as their livelihood depend on it wikipedia article with links to primary sources. I'm not sure if we can consider it solved if pilots are trying to pretend nothing bad is happening instead of seeking a treatment for something that is manageable with modern medicine (or hide that they are getting treatment in fear of loosing license).
 

 Discussion on question by TheEnvironm…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jun 30, 2019 21:50
In the most abstract way the universe is losing 'value' by increasing entropy. But part of the value would be lost nonetheless - If I put solar panels as part of enterprise (and other people would hold shares) as the solar energy is converted to electricity. However (to first order approximation) the solar power would be lost anyway so nothing looses value.
 

 Discussion on answer by Lawrence: Ban…

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Maciej Piechotka
Aug 23, 2018 07:55
@NicHartley shared key and public key are known cryptographic algorithms. The simplest way I can think of is signing tuple (time, terminal, payment, nonce). That said there were known attacks on particular implementation of chip technology. Probably security.se or cryptography.se would be better place.
 

 Discussion on answer by P. G. A.: Doe…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jun 27, 2018 20:27
@Kaithar With regard to the two stationary objects - imagine two cars running in parallel to the North which represents time (East-West represents space). At some point around north pole they will collide even though they did not 'move' - they path theough space-time led them to the same place.
 

 Discussion on question by norlin: Wha…

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Maciej Piechotka
May 18, 2018 16:09
@PeteKirkham Note that in medieval setting fiat money is unlikely to arise and modern central banks try to achieve various goals using manipulating demand and/or supply of money. Without getting too much into theory the British penny (or any other modern currency) is not a good example as the value is not defined in terms of any commodity (either contained within coin or available for exchange). I don't know British law but in many cases it would be illegal to convert coin into raw metal.
 

 Discussion on answer by Richard U: Et…

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Maciej Piechotka
Apr 26, 2018 20:21
@MaskedMan Setting aside the NAT latpop should not be any more accessible than a building with doorman. Yes - 0day happens but in principle it is not accessible. OTOH often to get on parking you aren't seen by anyone (except CCTV). Laptop also by definition contains propertary information while parking space... usually does not. It's a difference between taking multiple items from 'try it' trace and taking item from shelf under your jacket - both are not ok but one will get you in much smaller trouble than another.
 

 Discussion on answer by Blrfl: Why is…

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Maciej Piechotka
Mar 1, 2018 00:04
@jpmc26 In most cases it can be explicitly shared. IIRC the discussions in GNOME few years ago about isolation the idea was that application could request 'open file open dialog box' to OS via privilege call and only get access to file selected by user. The open dialog box is operating in 'elevated' privileges outside app so it can access all meatuser files while app cannot.
 

 Discussion on answer by Keith Morriso…

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Maciej Piechotka
Feb 21, 2018 23:31
@bjorn At maximum the gamma will be 1/(1 - 0.5^2) = 1.33 but for the average speed 1.04-1.09. Probably at maximum speed it's visible but as far as time dilation goes probably not that important. I'd be more interested how they survived 2829G of acceleration over 3h (assuming speed of 0.5c and constant acceleration).
 

 Discussion on answer by L.Dutch: Coul…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jan 25, 2018 18:04
@jpmc26 Sun is 99.8-99.9% of mass in solar system. The giants account for 99% of remaining mass. Those planets (assuming Earth orbit) would be farther than distance from Earth to Mars at closest (54.6 Gm vs 180 Gm - give it or take). I would assume it would be approximately stable.
 

 Discussion on answer by Konrad Rudolp…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jan 24, 2018 14:18
"You are probably confusing the flu (influenza) with the common cold, which is colloquially often called “the flu”." - this might dilute your answer but cold is caused by variety of viruses including influenza virus. That said it's not as if flu killed 3-5% of world population during single pandemic.
 

 Discussion on question by Jayden Harr…

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Maciej Piechotka
Dec 11, 2017 21:30
@John "the issue is domesticating an organism that is unsuitable to domestication is all but impossible, humans are intelligent which is one of the worst traits for domestication". That depends on scope and definition of domestication. I think recent theories are that dogs co-domesticated humans as both species seen benefit. And from description it seems that it would be similar to domestication of dogs, cats and rats than sheep and cows.
 

 Discussion on question by Utku: Is so…

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Maciej Piechotka
Dec 1, 2017 13:34
@Utku "The output of compilation is binary" output of gcc is assembler. By default it is passed to as directly but it is text nonetheless. Output of clang can be LLVM IR or C or JavaScript. For that matter C preprocessor is a small language which outputs text IR for compiler.
 

 Discussion on answer by DMGregory: Wh…

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Maciej Piechotka
Nov 14, 2017 02:23
@Baldrickk The idea is that code in (CHEATS_ENABLED == 1) might slightly change behaviour which exposes a bug. For example if forces a barrier between threads or something.
 

 Discussion on answer by berry120: Man…

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Maciej Piechotka
Nov 8, 2017 09:27
@bobo2000 "1) Going on annual leave without notifying me or offering to support me to find cover as a tech lead" I think it has been risen a few times in answers and comments that timing matters but I don't think you provided any answers. Anyway - what if he wasn't going on annual leave but was hit by a bus or turn a two week notice? You would be in similar situation and team should be prepared for such situation (if it's your third day you probably couldn't do much... but than the leave was probably discussed way ahead of your hire).
 

 Discussion on answer by Richard U: Ma…

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Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
BTW. At this point I think part of discussion should be moved to chat?
Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
@called2voyage As I mentioned in first comment it might be correct business decision. Probably correct technical decision would be a compatibility layer which would allow both new and old code to be used. I'm unable to make the call given information OP provided and I'm not sure OP is privy to all of them. All I did was dispute "Change is not inherently good or bad." as both in software and evolution change is usually bad, however sometimes benefits outweighs the costs. The way you look at this seems to sound a bit like survivalship bias (ok. it's not a fallacy here).
Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
@called2voyage au contraire genetics have the same problem. For every beneficial mutation that can happen there are multiple which cause cancer or birth defect (otherwise UV/α/β/γ would not be so bad). The only reason we see the evolution is because it takes a very long time so good changes have chance to arose Basic underlying machinery is almost always the same - AFAIK there was no change to RNA codons. However evolution have no foresight it cannot make jumps and makes error truly at random while people can have foresight [disputed].
Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
@RichardU TBH I don't think my comment is an answer as I don't have any AI/actionable advice to OP. If it was CTO asking on programmers SE it might be different. I'll think about it.
Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
(...) Going back to OP problem the cost of rewriting software is huge. I mean buisness-destroying huge. If the new product is a library which doesn't have any sort of backward compatibility it imposes on users a huge cost not only in training but in porting the code - code that has been working. Now the new library might be correct business decision (OP doesn't give enough information about it) but if I had to rewrite and debug a huge portion of code for no apparent benefit (it was working) I'd be grumpy too. There are reasons why COBOL 2014 exists.
Maciej Piechotka
Oct 13, 2017 02:46
"Change is not inherently good or bad" possibly digressing I'd disagree - change is inherently bad as it involves costs - change itself, retraining, changing habits... and hopefully your solution is at place in phase space where more changes would make it worse. Sure in practice most people don't make changes which would make it worse but it doesn't make it less inherit. In many practical cases the benefits outweigh the cost (including the losses for 'friction') but change for sake of change is usually bad. (cont.)
 

 Discussion on question by RichS: If t…

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Maciej Piechotka
Sep 18, 2017 13:33
@Fattie There is diminishing returns as large ships go. Think about tanks or planes - there are 'zillions' of the single model as it makes no sense to have larger tanks. Since they are unified you can easily replace them without re-training, you can streamline the production, etc.
 

 Discussion on answer by John: Why wou…

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Maciej Piechotka
Sep 5, 2017 17:22
@jamesqf "In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fission is either a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts (lighter nuclei). The fission process often produces free neutrons and gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay. (...) Nuclear fission can occur without neutron bombardment as a type of radioactive decay" - from Wikipedia. At least during physics class I think I was thought that α and β are types of fission.
 

 Discussion on question by DirtyDev: I…

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Maciej Piechotka
Sep 3, 2017 13:14
@tsh (at least in my case) Because 'heavy' things fall so they are on bottom while empty air goes to the top?
 

 Discussion on question by dsollen: Ho…

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Maciej Piechotka
Sep 1, 2017 07:27
What about old time idea that belief/worship is power. Gods feed on worship so the one with most followers have the most power. Humans are essentially worship/power generators.
 

 Discussion on answer by Jay: Students…

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Maciej Piechotka
Aug 26, 2017 10:46
Pseudocode might be useful in some cases - especially if they describe algorithm and code deals with low-level issues and details so it is much more verbose. That said adding 2-3 lines of comments seems excessive in most cases and especially not for every loop/variable - unless comments discuss each edge case separately or multi-thread interleaving (in which amount of comments might at such places exceed amount of code but this is exception rather then rule).
 

 Discussion on answer by sempaiscuba: …

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 27, 2017 13:25
@Davidw Quick search on Wikipedia shows that in broadest definition toll of Nazi Germany was 21 million. USSR under Stalin had death toll on 15-20 million over slightly larger period of time though the number is "hotly debated". It seems that in pure death toll Nazi Germany wins if only barely.
Maciej Piechotka
Jul 27, 2017 13:25
@Jeff Well, neither 2.4-7.5 million of Ukrainians nor 150,000-500,000 of Poles were part of Nazi aggression. Yeah, ordinary soviet citizens paid the price but I don't think Stalin can be called as justified. [For that matter as % of population Poland, Lithuania and Latavia had larger losses. I don't have data for Ukraine as it wasn't an independent country at the time]
 

 Discussion on question by Ben I.: Adv…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 15, 2017 04:29
I know this is partially off-topic but it might be worth mentioning tragic history of Turing for the LGBT+ community for 'people like me'. I'm sure most people do know story of Turing but for those who don't know - he was forced to take hormone to reduce libido as homosexuality was considered a crime back then - or at least mental illness. It is assumed that he committed suicide because of that. It was only posthumously when UK government pardoned him and issued an apology.
 

 Discussion on answer by L.Dutch: Woul…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 7, 2017 02:10
Too late to edit - the above is true for any shape and distribution of mass (assuming no singularities and other non well-behaving properties).
Maciej Piechotka
Jul 7, 2017 02:10
Because gravitational force field is continuous (assuming no singularities) there is (at least one) point in planet where F = 0 due to intermediate value theorem. That is assuming that planet is not infinite in one of directions. [This property can be shown for various formulations of problem as without singularities gravitational potential has minimum].
 

 Discussion on answer by HopelessN00b:…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 3, 2017 13:20
@AlistairMacDonald while you can teleport state of particles you cannot read the state without destroying it so deciding which parts you don't like is 'hard'.
 

 Discussion on answer by Flater: Two E…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 2, 2017 16:04
@Flater index is not always numerical. Consider DB (or associative arrays) where index can be any data type. I'd argue that index is used to look up things (as in index in library) while ID is suppose to be unique (as ISBN).
 

 Discussion on question by dsollen: Re…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jun 27, 2017 17:49
Other then DOS and detection of presence highier level protocols can nest security inside the lower-level ones. TCP/IP is completely insecure but I can run SSL over it. Open WiFi is not a problem - I can run VPN through it. Unless it is against TOS lower level protocol is not problematic. You need to find a way to eliminate cryptography altogether - and even then you still have problem of people talking with code (instruction to European resistance during WWII were sent as songs over radio)
 

 Discussion on question by Bregalad: W…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jun 24, 2017 19:42
"In both cases it seems extremely unlikely that this money will ever be refunded" - note that it doesn't matter if the debt will ever be paid of for lenders - only that all payments are made on time. It is similar as with credit card - they don't care if I'm having balance on it as long as I'm paying minimal payment and my debt-to-income ratio does not go too high. It might not be prudent to run balance (though goverment debt is more like mortage or college loan as in it may be benefitial to take as investment).
 

 Discussion on answer by Ben Miller: D…

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Maciej Piechotka
May 16, 2017 11:31
@Kaz OTOH HFT can be said to provide arbitrage and liquidity. So they can be think as a trader who transport the wood from sawmill to carpenter - it doesn't produce value directly but it helps minimizing losses. (Whether HFT do that is longer discussion but it is less clear cut then you make it).
 

 Discussion on question by Deutsch Pir…

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Maciej Piechotka
Apr 29, 2017 12:14
@Kik That what I heard as well. I don't have a source. Explanation was that it sound wiser.
 

 Discussion on question by Jacob Henni…

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Maciej Piechotka
Apr 20, 2017 20:41
Are you sure he didn't referred to model as opposed to AES? Encryption in back-end can be problematic for most cases as attacker usually exploits the front-end to gain access without needing to access the data at all (assuming front-end actually do retrieve the data back instead of data being write-only). The only case (other then 'write-only' data) where encryption do help if the attackers gains access to offline storage. [By write-only I mean application is normally writing data and you read them only in exceptional cases].
 

 Discussion on answer by Paul TIKI: Co…

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Maciej Piechotka
Apr 15, 2017 20:41
The problem is that modern education system requires a lot of resources. Remember this is before printing press so books are very valuable. Economy depends on child labor and taking large portion of population out of work until age of 13 (just primary school) may have catastrophic consequences (starvation). Also you would need to have a huge amount of educated people as teachers. Sure - nowadays with cheap books, after mechanization of agriculture and with huge food surplus we can afford such 'luxuries' but that would require huge effort to get to the point when such plan is conceivable.
 

 Discussion on question by Blaszard: H…

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Maciej Piechotka
Mar 6, 2017 13:05
@Blaszard I am not familiar with the exact rules but after denial you can usually reapply but after being caught laying you probably can be charged with prejury. I would imagine that being banned for certain period is more likely then prison time but that definitely qualifies under bad idea.
 

 Discussion on answer by Mołot: Why wo…

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Maciej Piechotka
Aug 23, 2016 21:46
The only things that Japan produced more in 1939-1945 then US in 1943 was submarines. And in 1944 and 1945 the yearly production increased. I don't think kamikaze in 1944 was significant - in fact AFAIK it was due to lack of experienced pilots they started using it rather then other way around.
Maciej Piechotka
Aug 23, 2016 21:46
@nzaman while it wasn't helping the Japan was basically doomed from the beginning - combinedfleet.com/economic.htm. To give some numbers the US produced more aircrafts through 1943 then Japan through the whole war, almost three times more mechant ships, over three times more air carriers.
 

 Discussion on answer by James: How ca…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 29, 2016 23:58
Also you need to be very careful if the phrase doesn't already have some meaning in language. For example I saw college (szkoła wyższa) translated as high school just because "szkoła" is school and wyższa is "high" (well - should be technically "highier"). For examples in English search for ponglish or chinglish (some may be hilarious or downright offensive).
 

 Discussion on question by Terry: Curr…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 26, 2016 14:01
In setting with magic having unobtanium which is rare and known for boiling temperature of over 20000 °C (thus making it very valuable), but too soft to be useful in other practical way except by possibly superpowers doesn't make it much less hard.
 

 Discussion on answer by DavePhD: Does…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 23, 2016 10:44
@HenningMakholm - of course Belgium
 

 Discussion on question by TrEs-2b: Is…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 1, 2016 13:01
In addition to @Frostfyre I think (whales don't die from cancer as much)[[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox]](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox]) - any cancer which would have endanger its life would need to have structure and it tends to develop meta-cancer so they are unable to grow as big. Sufficiently big alien may be almost immune to cancer because of that.
 

 Discussion on answer by Alexander O'M…

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Maciej Piechotka
Jul 1, 2016 11:26
@Mindwin arguably the C was good for what it was designed for - high-level assembly for writing system code. It is sometimes (ab)used to do much more but it was never designed to program webpages as it predates TCP/IP. Sure you can write a webpage but it's like complaining that hand-saw does not have safety features of modern tools and you can cut yourself. In comparation PHP (last time I've touched it) was more akin to a chainsaw where there is no protection between hand and saw - it is designed (well, evolved) to be used for webpages and it record is... questionable.
 

 Discussion on answer by ratchet freak…

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Maciej Piechotka
Feb 18, 2015 22:07
"the preference in C++ is for std::vector and plain unordered lists" - wouldn't more correct way would be that preference in C++ is to pass functors to collections and use default ones like std::hash? @Malcolm I guess the problem is that in some cases you want two list containing same elements to be equal and in some cases to be unequal if instances are different.
 

 Discussion on answer by Winston Ewert…

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Maciej Piechotka
Aug 26, 2014 23:28
"To count as syntactic sugar, java would have to be pretending that you really wrote foo_int and foo_double functions but it doesn't." - as long as we talk about overloading methods and not polymorphisms what would be a difference between foo(int)/foo(double) and foo_int/foo_double? I don't really know Java very well but I would imagine that such renaming really happens in JVM (well - probably using foo(args) rather then foo_args - it does at least in C++ with symbol mangling (ok - symbol mangling is technically an implementation detail and not part of language).