dwheeler

44 ms·

481.
by dwheeler 5y ago
It's interesting to look at how people have handled the axiom of choice in Metamath, since the axiom of choice has long had some controversy. Metamath lets you state your axioms, then show that proofs build from their axioms. Each such
482.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I agree. OLPC wasn't a failure in the same sense as the others. They created laptops, they got used, and a lot of people did learn a lot. It didn't succeed to the level they hoped, but that's true for almost all projects. I
483.
by dwheeler 5y ago
You certainly did! But there are a lot of people who think "OSS license means there are no requirements" and think it's okay to do things like copy without attribution when the license requires attributions. I know you didn&#
484.
by dwheeler 5y ago
It's not just the GPL. Almost all open source software licenses require attribution; without that attribution, any copy is a license violation. Whether or not the result is a license violation is tricky legal question. As always, IAN
485.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Python was created February 1991, but it didn't have a boolean type until 2002 per PEP 285 < https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/ > The rationale for making bool a subset of integers is for ease
486.
by dwheeler 5y ago
The CompCert compiler is not under the GPL or LGPL, it is under a proprietary license. Some parts may be released with other licenses, but that is different.
487.
by dwheeler 5y ago
For developers, the key is this: > organizations should consider implementing a content security policy (CSP) into the application [and] avoid directives such as unsafe-inline or unsafe-eval The problem with countering cross-site scripti
488.
by dwheeler 5y ago
If I recall correctly, Alpha was important in the history of the Linux kernel. Originally the Linux kernel only worked on Intel chips, but the effort to modify it so would also work on Alpha set the stage for it to run on many architectures
489.
by dwheeler 5y ago
> But, Python 3 took longer than a decade to kill Python 2 as they were trying to give people “plenty of time”. I disagree, I think you're learning exactly the wrong lesson from the Python3 debacle. It took a long time for Python 2-
490.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I agree with the author, that is a ridiculously short time for a breaking change in widely-used functionality. Every "update that breaks things" is teaching your users to not update the software, ever. Frankly, it's hurtful t
491.
by dwheeler 5y ago
> Why would they deliberately put duplicates in unicode though? IIRC, to enable adoption. Many of the codepoints were adopted from other encoding systems, and it was often useful to support 2-way conversions without loss while Unicode wa
492.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Indeed. For an extreme example, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short poem in Classical Chinese in which every word is pronounced shi when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing: https:&#x2F
493.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Obviously using a dedicated instruction is fastest in normal cases. But if you need to implement popcount or many other bit manipulation algorithms in software, a good book to look at is "Hacker's Delight" by Henry S. Warren,
494.
by dwheeler 5y ago
> Why would we ever expect qualia to be based on specific and static combinations of neurons? I agree. In short, they've discovered that they're measuring the wrong thing. Since we don't understand a lot about the brain, t
495.
by dwheeler 5y ago
This is a useful technique. But it'd be nice if library developers would make it much less necessary. Removing interfaces makes it hard to update, even with ast based techniques, and encourages developers to never upgrade. Then when a
496.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I think the HN title should say (2017). It's amazing, but it also shows how poor the defense against buffer overflows is in many programs.
497.
by dwheeler 5y ago
It may be extinct in some places, but in many others HTML knowledge is quite alive. React is great for some tasks, but it's ridiculous for others. Its use can be overengineering, and it presumes that JavaScript execution is always allo
498.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I'm not sure this is that important for understanding biological neural systems. But it might enable mass parallelism!
499.
by dwheeler 5y ago
There are various ways to construct real numbers and complex numbers. One approach is given in Landau's Foundations of Analysis (a.k.a. Grundlagen der Analysis). You might want to look at the Metamath Proof Explorer materials on constr
500.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Ok, but what is expected to be different in 3.0? That is left unsaid.
501.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I defended my PhD in 2009 at George Mason University (GMU). It had two halves, but they were reversed: the first half was private, the second half was public. I think that's a better system. In the first half I was privately grilled by
502.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Just to clarify, all the proposals that were intentionally vulnerable and were really vulnerabilities were not accepted in the first place. However, that event triggered review of all University of Minnesota proposals, and that's what&
503.
by dwheeler 5y ago
> It also suggests that companies be innovative and constantly expanding their portfolio of treatments. This is the right approach, both for a company and for society. In fact, it's so obvious, that it's weird anyone thought th
504.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I agree, stopping at 1.5 C is extremely unlikely. You have to get worldwide agreement to do very hard things. I see little appetite for that. I also don't see any way to make it less hard, though if there is any hope that's where
505.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I just posted how the Linux Foundation’s communities have already built supports for parts of this EO: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/blog/how-lf-communities-e...
506.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Every country protects its food, water, and energy supply. Exceptions stop being countries.
507.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Within various parts of the US executive branch, presidential executive orders that say "do X" without funding to match are also called "unfunded mandates" - at least sometimes. I certainly heard the phrase used that w
508.
by dwheeler 5y ago
At a high level the executive order contains more-or-less what people had been expecting (there have been several reports about what it would probably contain ahead-of-time). It includes a significant emphasis on information sharing, softwa
509.
by dwheeler 5y ago
Bribery is against the law, I presume this is simply the result of a criminal investigation. Also, bribery is insidious. Once some happens, there is considerable pressure for competitors to also engage in bribery to stay in business. So it
510.
by dwheeler 5y ago
I have. There are a few simple rules that, once you learn them, eliminate those kinds of problems. The main one is always use double-quotes around variable dereferences. The second is learning a few patterns, like find ... -print0 | xargs -

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