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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • No, even if you only had one unit for a physical quantity, you would still need to specify that unit to know which physical quantity you are describing. E.g. “That object over there is 15” vs “That object over there is 15 kg”.

    The symbol for temperature, measured in Celsius, is “°C”. It’s atomic and can’t be separated, since that would result in °, which represents the angle of something, not the temperature, and C, which is the symbol for Coulomb, which measures electric charge.









    1. I imagine that the company would have the burden of proof that any of these criteria are fulfilled.

    2. Third-party rights most likely refers to the use of third-party libraries, where the source code for those isn’t open source, and therefore can’t be disclosed, since they aren’t part of the government contract. Security concerns are probably things along the line of “Making this code open source would disclose classified information about our military capabilities” and such.

    Switzerland are very good bureaucracy and I trust that they know how to make policies that actually stick.



  • Comment should describe “why?”, not “how?”, or “what?”, and only when the “why?” is not intuitive.

    The problem with comments arise when you update the code but not the comments. This leads to incorrect comments, which might do more harm than no comments at all.

    E.g. Good comment: “This workaround is due to a bug in xyz”

    Bad comment: “Set variable x to value y”

    Note: this only concerns code comments, docstrings are still a good idea, as long as they are maintained




  • ITT: People misinterpreting the idea as “facts that your school taught wrong”, when it’s really saying, “things that have changed since you went to school” (either through a change in definition or by new research).

    E.g. If you went to school before the early 2000’s, you were taught that Pluto is a planet, while that is no longer true since it was recategorized in 2006.


  • Being able to handle it, and being able to handle it efficiently enough are two very distinct things. The hash method might be able to handle long strings, but it might take several seconds/minutes to process them, slowing down the application significantly. Imagine a malicious user being able to set a password with millions (or billions!) of characters.

    Therefore, restricting it to a small, but still sufficiently big, number of characters might help prevent DoS-attacks without any notable reduction in security for regular users.


  • Not the Doppler effect, as that only applies to moving objects, but instead the inverse square law, where the energy of the sound wave decreases by the square of the distance from the origin, since it spreads in a sphere with the energy being spread across the surface of the sphere, resulting in a very quick dropoff in the loudness.