bluetomcat

11 ms·

91.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
The proliferation of conditional "maybe" functions is a sign that your call graph is contrived and unnatural. You shouldn't be checking "userLoggedIn == true" in each and every accessor function. Ideally, such check
92.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Because the coding style is different. The basic unit of code is the procedure, not abstract entities like DateTimeCalculator or EmployeePayrollManager. Procedures are sensitive to the context where they are called. A procedure calling anot
93.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
In procedural C land, unit testing is nowhere near as relevant as it is in memory-safe OO lands. Assertions are far more relevant. You want to detect illegal program states in development as early as possible. In C11, you also have static_a
94.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Any knowledge about "society" is very context- and time-sensitive. The trap for "smart" people is that they abstractly apply rigorous explanatory models to human-made institutions and enterprises. It skews their social u
95.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
These high-profile apps are elaborate spying devices. Besides the UI code, they probably have thousands of classes, some of which abandoned as dead code, with names like ProfileViewActivityLocationTracker...
96.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> Display a cute image that shows that the service is drastically failing (like a whale or something), and then people will know to stop trying to repeatedly log in. Probably not so easy to implement in behemoth apps, consisting of 20&#x
97.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> Why is it such a difficult idea for the "daemon" writers to accept is beyond me Because the basic OS interface is a 50-year-old design with "terminals" being the central I/O entity. Differentiating between &quo
98.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
It's Unix parlance for a forked child process that detaches from its interactive terminal with the setsid() syscall, becomes a child of init, possibly closes or redirects the 0/1/2 file descriptors to logging facilities, poss
99.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Been there, done that. Don't be a code beauty queen. Make it compile and make it run on your machine. Study the basic control-flow graph starting from the entry point and see the relations between source files. Debug it with step-into
100.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
I am in this industry in Eastern Europe for almost 20 years now, and my LinkedIn title is "experienced computer programmer". I think it most accurately describes what I'm good at - building and fixing stuff. I've built p
101.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
It's more of an American cultural trait. People are fearful and obsessed with safety. They can be vocal and overreacting for trivial stuff. They often act in a virtue-signalling manner and put stickers on their cars. Before anything ge
102.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
I feel that “privacy” is a wrong way of framing the problem. Sure, we may have end-to-end channel encryption, iPhone security lockouts and GDPR regulation. Still, everytime you shoot a photo with your mobile phone, an impersonified algorith
103.
The Pitfalls of Pure Rationality(bbu87.blogspot.com)
1 points by bluetomcat 3y ago|0 comments
104.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
The way the shell works is an essential part of Unix design, and the fork/exec pair suits it very well. In the forked child process before the exec, the shell can execute arbitrary code that inherits all file descriptors and manipulate
105.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
1995 text editors didn't use a "layout engine" that executes JavaScript, attempting to JIT fragments of code. They were an event loop that processes native OS events and responds with repainting areas of the window. They also
106.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
They will probably accept a request for unpaid leave, but there isn't a different role I can imagine in that company. We are a small programming team of 10 people managed by a single team manager. The majority of the rest are support p
107.
Ask HN: Where do you find low-stress remote programming jobs?
4 points by bluetomcat 3y ago|5 comments
108.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> Writing a toy program that fills the screen with "HELLO, I AM COMPUTER" does not feel like you just learned a magical incantation that makes this machine do your bidding. But there's joy to be found in writing pointless
109.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
It was originally developed as a multi-user time-sharing system. Multiple users would access the system simultaneously via the attached teletype terminals. The "shell" program handled such an interactive user session. All IO was b
110.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
It's a collection of hacky tools for manipulating a DAG of objects, identified by a SHA-1 hash. If you look at it this way, you wouldn't expect any consistency in the CLI interface.
111.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Financial issues aside, it brings a lot of uncertainties and responsibilities in your everyday routine. For good and bad, your mind is never truly alone for the rest of your life. The child gets sick and nothing else matters at that moment.
112.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> There are 10kloc C programs that could be 10 lines of shell Only when the shell calls other external C programs. Ten lines of calling ffmpeg or curl is not shell programming. > there are 1kloc shell programs that could've been
113.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> Traditionally, UNIX commands were written under the assumption they were going to be used primarily by other programs. They had more in common with functions in a programming language than with graphical applications. Not quite. They w
114.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
The hard ones for me were countries in mainland Africa, island nations in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and small adjacent countries that you associate in a group – say Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, or Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan,
115.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.
116.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
The implicit definition of "success" from the article is probably navigating through the capitalist value system established by the market, and making a profit. It also implies that this "market-based" monetary value sys
117.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> pointers aren't complex They are complex if you are coming from the Python world. To truly know their recursive declaration syntax, you have to see it from a compiler's perspective. Pointer arithmetic isn't something you
118.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
> Lowering taxes on beer in pubs? Raising taxes on social media accounts? Reforming the whole media system to not incentivise engagement. Let Facebook become a place where one shares family pictures with close relatives. Reward the YouTu
119.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Nowadays we encode micro-stories in memes. We address a particular situation with the most relevant meme. We don't comprehend any overarching stories or belief systems apart from capitalism, free-market economics and technological prog
120.
by bluetomcat 3y ago
Any abstract reasoning about societal issues is about “groups of people”. Individual peculiarities must always be taken into account when reasoning about a particular case, but collective profiling is needed in order to take action at a wid

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