ben509

12 ms·

61.
by ben509 6y ago
I think nil/null is a symptom of the real issue: the language permits partially constructed data types, so it has to assign something . That's a consequence of the "always mutable" model whereby the responsibility of in
62.
by ben509 6y ago
> Writing to and reading from a nil channel blocks forever. Have any experienced Go devs found cases where this behavior is useful?
63.
by ben509 6y ago
I discount Turing's works because of his suicide. I think the Turing award ought to be renamed. Consider all the love and respect directed at Robin Williams after he died. The perverse reality is that for someone in a suicidal frame of
64.
by ben509 6y ago
My source is simply running `cython -a` to see all the highlighted lines, and fixing them and observing how many hoops I have to jump through to get code that doesn't interact with the interpreter. Cython makes you do more work to avoi
65.
by ben509 6y ago
It still is, and Cython is great for accelerating critical Python code. A C extension is far preferable when you want to code in C, either to write a new data type[1], or write a Python frontend to a C library[2] that is too complex to be w
66.
by ben509 6y ago
It's going to be a PITA when USB 832.1 comes out and we need a light-year of lead to deal with neutrino interference.
67.
by ben509 6y ago
You're looking for something similar to Python's namedtuple.[1] (Though modern python should use a dataclasses in the stdlib or the attrs package.) Essentially, you have an array/list/vector under the hood, and a mapping
68.
by ben509 6y ago
You're swapping moving a mostly hollow ship with containers for moving a far larger volume of solid earth.
69.
by ben509 6y ago
One argument in favor of it is the 8GB file may cause a runaway process to crash, leaving you without it continuing to chew up space and able to recover. A second argument is it's not opened by any process. One problem I've had fi
70.
by ben509 6y ago
> Personally I would trust readers to click on the article... This is already contrary to all available evidence.
71.
by ben509 6y ago
> There is a popular opinion among developers that SQLite is not suitable for the web, because it doesn’t support concurrent access. No, the issue is it doesn't have high availability features: failover, snapshots, concurrent backup
72.
by ben509 6y ago
So why do they bother adding new features to Windows? I'll answer my question: Companies make decisions on the margin. They don't care that they have 85% of the market. They want that next percentage point. The users who might swi
73.
by ben509 6y ago
> In the GPLv3 (and it was there in GPLv2 and v1) clauses 15 and 16 are the Disclaimer of Warranty and the Limitation of Liability. To be fair, proprietary software licenses have the same clauses, but the free-softers cannot claim the mo
74.
by ben509 6y ago
One way to explain OTPs is a proof by induction. The base step: Start with one bit. The key is also a bit chosen at random, and the cipher text is plain XOR key. You can then work out that no matter what key is chosen, you have no reason to
75.
by ben509 6y ago
You could call it aesthetics, but it's also readability, and that's an important aspect of tests.
76.
by ben509 6y ago
I like the concept, but using the profiler to grab locally declared tests is a bit more magic than I'm comfortable with in my tests. Something like this might be a good compromise: def describe_my_function(register): @reg
77.
by ben509 6y ago
My only issue is that the rule doesn't give you a good way to annotate that the object is documented by its signature. Sometimes devs are lazy, but the rule doesn't make them not lazy so you get pointless docs like: def matr
78.
by ben509 6y ago
> Second of all, algorithms aren't patentable. Algorithms absolutely are patentable because they are computing "machines." It's mathematical equations that aren't patentable, because they're closer to laws o
79.
by ben509 6y ago
If you define "care" as in, "random updates cause enough instability that they make alternate OS's favorable for accomplishing the same tasks," I'd cite Windows autoupdate as fairly hard evidence that people do
80.
by ben509 6y ago
I've only ever noticed "natural" scrolling was wrong when it became an option on desktop machines. It makes perfect sense when I'm on a phone that I'm grabbing the content, since I'm reaching out and literally
81.
by ben509 6y ago
I think when individuals or even companies roll over, it's because the mob's attack can be quite scary. It's easy to point at the people who stay their ground and say, "see, they didn't cave and did just fine."
82.
by ben509 6y ago
> What policies are being passed that are helping materially black people? Mostly nothing. Corporations can largely only avoid harming various groups, and engaging in fair business practices. They're not set up, by their incentive s
83.
by ben509 6y ago
Or else you and other bondholders take away their credit card.
84.
by ben509 6y ago
It's a joke. Lossy compression can only work with specific formats where information loss is acceptable, theoretically anything but in practice usually audio and video. If gzip tried to do lossy compression, not knowing what the data i
85.
by ben509 6y ago
Fundamentally, the sync wrapper has to ask the event loop to wait for the async function to complete. Assuming it's possible, one way is to create a new event loop in a thread. This means you're creating and tearing down threads f
86.
by ben509 6y ago
If the requestor only knows the filename, now you have to cache the filename to hash lookup. Then you've just moved the invalidation problem around. This is a great strategy if the object is controlled by a build process, so your cli
87.
by ben509 6y ago
It's a problem in that you can't arbitrarily compose synchronous and asynchronous functions. Many languages have a distinction between statements and expressions, and some language designers thought that was ugly and designed lang
88.
by ben509 6y ago
Notably, the FSF recommends against[1] modifying the GPL. And, you'd want to hire a lawyer to go over whatever scheme you're thinking of. It's easier to draft a separate license agreement if you're the sole copyright hol
89.
by ben509 6y ago
Likewise. What's dismaying is that there's no practical way on Facebook to have civil discussions about politics, it just doesn't work. I don't think it'd even be all that hard. What you'd want to do is have a
90.
by ben509 6y ago
The "people do" half of the headline isn't really addressed in the article, but it links to a piece[1] that proposes a mechanism. [1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rag

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