• @Rhllor@feddit.de
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    32 years ago

    Actually had a colleague who determined distances on microscopy images that way. She would measure the scale bar included in the image with her ruler on the screen, measure the distance she was interested in and calculate the distance using the rule of three. I mean, why bother using the measuring tool included in the software.

    • @sznio@lemmy.world
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      22 years ago

      I’ve heard of people printing out charts, then cutting out the part they wanted to calculate an integral of, then weighing the paper.

      • @siipale@sopuli.xyz
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        12 years ago

        I’ve heard of it too. You would need an analytical balance to get accurate measurements weighing a piece of paper. Just cut out the part you want to take an integral of, then cut out a piece of paper with known size (or cut several pieces with different sizes to get more accurate results) and weigh each of them. I guess this used to be cheaper and faster than using computers when computers were big and expensive.

  • BoofStroke
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    2 years ago

    Programming languages that use white space to delimit structure are annoying at best. I get annoyed at yaml too, but I’m ok once I have a few templates set up.

    • @lhamil64@programming.dev
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      12 years ago

      One of these days I’ll actually look up how YAML indentation works. Every time I use it it’s trial and error until I stop getting errors.

    • @CoderKat@lemm.ee
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      12 years ago

      Ugh, there’s some parts of YAML I love, but ultimately it’s a terrible format. It’s just too easy to confuse people. At least it has comments though. It’s so dumb that JSON doesn’t officially have comments. I’ve often parsed “JSON” as YAML entirely for comments, without using a single other YAML feature.

      YAML also supports not quoting your strings. Seems great at first, but it gets weird of you want a string that looks like a different type. IIRC, there’s even a major version difference in the handling of this case! I can’t remember the details, but I once had a bug happen because of this.

      Performance wise, both YAML and JSON suck. They’re fine for a config file that you just read on startup, but if you’re doing a ton of processing, it will quickly show the performance hit. Binary formats work far better (for a generic one, protobuffers has good tooling and library support while being blazing fast).

      • @vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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        12 years ago

        json 5 does support comments. alternatively, yaml is a superset of json. any valid json is also valid yaml. but yaml also supports comments. So you can also write json with comments, and use a yaml parser on it, instead of a standard json parser