dwheeler

50 ms·

631.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Work done by US government employees as part of their official duties is in general not under copyright within the US. But that is a much narrower statement. Most software developed using government funds is not exclusively developed by gov
632.
by dwheeler 6y ago
You can absolutely make a request. If you are interested in the software, go ahead. However, the Freedom of Information Act only applies to records, and software is not always considered a record. So Freedom of Information Act request will
633.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> There’s basically never an irrecoverable state in git That is technically correct but irrelevant. If a user doesn't know how to easily recover, then there's a problem. There should probably be a "git undo" command t
634.
by dwheeler 6y ago
There's more to it than that. I think mercurial's user interface has its advantages, but when they were facing off each other, git was far faster and quickly added more advanced capabilities. Power users preferred the speed, and t
635.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Methinks not. I was around for all that history, and that is exactly my point. Savannah, bitbucket, and SourceForge all added support for git later because they had to. They added support for git because git won, not because it failed. Also
636.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Git is a success. Claiming otherwise is silly. Git's user interface (porcelain) is not a great thing. Not because it's a CLI, but because it's not great for non-power end users. Case in point: Lousy naming inconsistencies
637.
by dwheeler 6y ago
No, git essentially won. GitHub is the single most common site for OSS projects, but there are many others, and they generally use git as well. GitLab obviously supports git. SourceForge supports git. Savannah supports git. Bitbucket suppor
638.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Why not use $ ?
639.
by dwheeler 6y ago
A fun snarky article. It missed another potential issue: many modern systems use cache prefetching, where they intentionally start loading the "next" memory area. As a result, sequential memory access is often much faster than b
640.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> Open Source authors (including myself) have complained of automatic security scans. They yield way too many false positives, increasing the burden of maintaining repositories. Unfortunately all tools have either false positives or fals
641.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Calculus is the underpinning of statistics and probability. So you don't get rid of calculus that way :-). I think more discrete math - at least first-order predicate calculus - should be added to high school math. But that would not t
642.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Wikipedia doesn't require things be at the country level. For example, it has Esperanto: https://eo.wikipedia.org
643.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I agree, you can own your own domain name without having to do everything yourself. Like anything else, if you don't want to do something, hire somebody else to do it. I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my we
644.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I am self replying to give everyone an update. I just got another email from my Congressman's office. It said: > Our office has submitted an inquiry on your behalf to the US Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden which included a letter of su
645.
by dwheeler 6y ago
If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there. If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is
646.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I've had a phone call, and email, and a follow-up email from my congressman's office to discuss this case. Again, that's no guarantee that the result will be what we want, but there is clearly traction. Again it's not li
647.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Agreed. One of the reasons that Python grew popular so fast was its "batteries included" approach. When a developer needs to do some common thing, it's really helpful to have one obvious way to do it that is highly reliable a
648.
by dwheeler 6y ago
I wasn't suggesting that a Congressman directly go to bat, though that would be awesome. Any US citizen can contact their Congressional Representatives' Office to request that some bureaucratic problem be resolved, and the Congres
649.
by dwheeler 6y ago
The Congressman himself doesn't read these things. There are staffers in his office who do this. It's the usual way to try to get things unstuck. I already got a phone call back from the Congressman's office from a staffer. S
650.
by dwheeler 6y ago
My Congressional Representatives' Office called me this morning. They want a little additional information about Daniel Stenberg, and then they will write a letter to the US Embassy. Obviously that's no guarantee that the problem
651.
by dwheeler 6y ago
They have an incentive to do it because the congressman is my representative, and I am a voter who is a complaining. I live near DC, so I guess I assume others know more about the US system than is common knowledge. My apologies. Please let
652.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Exactly. I'm not expecting my letter to actually be read by my congressman, that's not the point. Every US Congressman has staff who get letters like this everyday. They send them to the appropriate agency, and track them. It&#x27
653.
by dwheeler 6y ago
This is absurd. I'm a US citizen, so I'll contact my Congressman to have his staff look into it. I don't have any special power, any US citizen can contact their congressman, but maybe that will kick-start something.
654.
by dwheeler 6y ago
> I've never met any Ada programmer before who thought Ada does not have a relatively long and steep learning curve. You'd be the first I've met. Make that at least two, I think Ada's pretty easy to learn. One thing t
655.
by dwheeler 6y ago
Yes, but many ISO documents are not publicly available (they're paywalled instead, even though ISO doesn't pay the authors). The Ada rationale is publicly available, so anyone can see exactly why various decisions are made. That&#
656.
by dwheeler 6y ago
As noted in the article I posted earlier, Ada isn't that difficult a language to compile, it's just that early Ada compiler developers assumed it was hard, so they made it hard. The GNAT Ada compiler is OSS, so you can look it you
657.
by dwheeler 6y ago
The GNAT Ada compiler is open source, generates good code, and has really good error messages. There's a story behind its development, which I tried to summarize here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/make-it-simple-dew
658.
by dwheeler 6y ago
This is an absolute delight. Some of these do a good job of being authentic, too. Some use thee and thou correctly with the correct conjugations, use "mine" instead of "my" in front of a vowel sound, and so on. Truly a l
659.
by dwheeler 6y ago
This is a cool application, but I was left unimpressed with the final results shown in the paper. It's intriguing that it works at all, yes. But look at the pants and skirts... there is a lot of detail in the original that is lost or o
660.
by dwheeler 6y ago
It's true that some use quantitative models, and some don't. But all experts use past experience as a guide. As the present becomes more different from the past, it becomes more uncertain that past experience is relevant.

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