Niten

22 ms·

211.
by Niten 14y ago
Huh, I didn't realize that some hardware folks are still so irrationally jealous of the label "engineer" being applied to software engineers as well. In truth the distinction between a physical versus information end-product as a prerequis
212.
by Niten 14y ago
shrug I do think it's interesting to find out, in concrete terms, the sort of real-world assumptions that a compiler might make, which make C's undefined behavior what it is. Yes, pointless in terms of fixing the actual program, though..
213.
Both true and false: a Zen moment with C(markshroyer.com)
177 points by Niten 14y ago|51 comments
214.
by Niten 14y ago
Yes, at the risk of sounding arrogant, what is this doing on the front page of HN? This isn't a security flaw and it isn't new, it's a well-understood Unix design decision. If the aim was to educate people about Unix design principles, the
215.
by Niten 14y ago
The thing I find most interesting about Flame: whoever developed it surely understood that by being released into the wild like this, their new cryptographic attack was guaranteed to eventually be discovered and analyzed. And yet they spen
216.
by Niten 14y ago
Looks like a rebranded Fit-PC3: http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc/fit-pc3-info/
217.
by Niten 14y ago
For one thing, if gender discrimination were the major cause of the lack of female software engineers in our society, then one would expect other societies to do better. But that isn't the case. Even in famously egalitarian Sweden, only 3
218.
by Niten 14y ago
> It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'gir
219.
by Niten 14y ago
Likewise, I'll defer to anyone who can present hard data to the contrary, but my intuition is that you're spot on here. I've always been a geek. When I was 12 my father's coworker gave me a BASIC compiler, and I would stay inside working t
220.
by Niten 14y ago
The christian bible also claims that a man gathered every species from the earth and saved them from an angry god's globe-encompassing flood by stuffing them all in a big boat. What point are you trying to make, exactly?
221.
by Niten 15y ago
> mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it. If that's your complaint, then your beef isn't with email in particular, but with the mailbox paradigm in general. But I for
222.
by Niten 15y ago
Exactly. It would be no small matter to come up with an alternative system that has the simplicity, flexibility (including flexibility of archival), and most of all the freedom of email – and have it work anywhere near as well in practice
223.
by Niten 15y ago
Along similar lines, this morning I was thinking how wonderful it would be if whatever interfaces exist between the ship's computer and the rest of the 0x10c game world are rich enough to make security vulnerabilities in players' DCPU-16 co
224.
by Niten 15y ago
The database tests are meaningless, I think, since they're comparing e.g. ORM in Django and Rails to a single, non-abstracted SQL query in Bottle. It's very apples and oranges.
225.
by Niten 15y ago
No, not immediately, but Santorum and the American religious right in general make no secret of their disdain for this country's founding principle of the separation of church and state, and are clearly eager to impose their religious dogma
226.
by Niten 15y ago
I do value my own time, and I'll say it again – post setup, I really spend no appreciable time keeping my mail server running. My VPS provider handles all hardware issues (with zero downtime in the last two years), backups consist of a nig
227.
by Niten 15y ago
I disagree on most points... 1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And onc
228.
by Niten 15y ago
> If you host your own what software? Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year
229.
by Niten 15y ago
Even leaving aside completely the issue of working conditions in the factories that produce all these smartphones running any OS, one could make a strong case that Apple is more "evil" than Google on account of its restrictive policies arou
230.
by Niten 15y ago
No, this would be like Apple legally prohibiting you from porting any code you wrote in Xcode to other platforms. It is highly abusive, and sets a dangerous precedent if we allow them to get away with it.
231.
by Niten 15y ago
Yes, but even on devices where the baseband has full access to main system address space, the baseband device is something that varies from one Android phone to the next; on the other hand, the Android Market is a constant across almost all
232.
by Niten 15y ago
I would assume that the backdoor for Android devices is the Android Market itself. Because Android is open source and each device manufacturer has its own build, it isn't really plausible to have a single backdoor within the core operating
233.
by Niten 15y ago
Can anyone fill us in on how they're collecting such accurate 3D detail for all these buildings? I mean are they flying airplanes with 360 degree cameras over the major cities at low altitude, for instance?
234.
by Niten 15y ago
pkgsrc already supports Windows Services for Unix, it may well work on top of this too (though I haven't looked at Gow yet and I honestly have no idea how it differs from MSYS). But when I think "Unix-like core plus package management on Wi
235.
by Niten 15y ago
Some people have legitimate complaints, there are a couple minor bugs and glitches in Unity still. But mostly what I see is knee-jerk resistance to change; even if Unity is a better UI, they hate it because it's different from what they're
236.
by Niten 15y ago
(I'm the author of this module.) Yeah, I admit part of me felt dirty implementing this by commandeering operators. But my brief time with Haskell and F# has biased me enough toward this style of function composition that I preferred to dea
237.
Pointfree style in Python(markshroyer.com)
104 points by Niten 15y ago|32 comments
238.
by Niten 15y ago
This is such a silly complaint. If the story is true, then Microsoft is simply making an offer. Either it's worth enough to the magazine to place a Microsoft ad without being paid for it, and they accept the offer; or it isn't, and they re
239.
by Niten 15y ago
Some programmers having to use Microsoft software is a bigger deal for society as a whole than saving the world's poorest people from malaria and polio? That is a simply insane stance, if you really believe that.
240.
by Niten 15y ago
The point was that it kills parallelism – Node is just a single-threaded event loop, running on a single core. And since computing fibonacci numbers is a CPU bound activity, that type of benchmark would be relevant but for the memoization

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