ekidd

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691.
by ekidd 9y ago
I've interviewed a fair number of programmers over the years. There's a surprising number of people who interview well and who have good resumes, but who can't actually code. (By "can't code", I mean, "Can
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by ekidd 9y ago
I had a lot of great college professors, but Hany Farid (the subject of this article) was always one of my absolute favorites. He always placed a strong emphasis on strong mathematical fundamentals, once joking in class that we only think A
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by ekidd 9y ago
In C++, null references are Very Bad, and they trigger undefined behavior: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4364536/is-null-referenc... I don't think I've ever run into a null reference in the real wo
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by ekidd 9y ago
> Another thing that has been attempted is a stdlib for Rust that uses syscalls into the kernel much like Go's. With Rust, it's easier just to replace the C library! In particular, cross-compiling with a static musl-libc has
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by ekidd 9y ago
> The trick with using Rust in this component was convincing my coworkers that no other language was right for job, which I believe to be the case in this instance. I ran into a similar use case in one of my own projects—a vobsub subti
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by ekidd 9y ago
> Problem with your idea, is that low level kernel will use a lot of unsafe Rust, which will lose lot of benefits. I've actually worked on a toy kernel in Rust (using the excellent tutorial at https://os.phil-opp.com&#x
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by ekidd 9y ago
There's a ton of work being done at the compiler level to make Tokio more pleasant. This includes: 1. async/await. This is analogous to async/await in C# and ES6, and should make the syntax a lot nicer. https://git
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by ekidd 9y ago
Yes! I have a very nice Samsung Chromebook Plus, which folds into a tablet, and which has a pen, but for roughly 1/3rd the price of the new Chromebook Pixel. I use it as a large format document reader, and as an easy-to-secure, easy-to
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by ekidd 9y ago
The easiest modern machines to wipe and restore are probably Chromebooks. I often recommend Chromebooks for corporate travel, especially for companies using Google Apps in the first place. It also helps protect against laptop theft. Plus, t
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by ekidd 9y ago
> it's one big reason why I think UTF-8 is generally the wrong way to expose Unicode to a programmer, since it lets them think they can keep that cherished "one byte == one character" assumption right up until something br
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by ekidd 9y ago
Yes, this is exactly how we do it: Our build systems all run stable, but developers use nightly for RLS and clippy. We did have one developer who was excited about using Rocket (which he said was much better than the other Rust web framewor
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by ekidd 9y ago
Well, as noted above, there were two physically failed disks—one which triggered the rebuild, and a second disk which failed with read errors during the rebuild. Then the RAID card died. According to the official policy, the equipment shoul
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by ekidd 9y ago
I've called upon Drive Savers before, when an employer's RAID 5+1 drive lost two disks in one afternoon, the second halfway through a rebuild—and then the proprietary, ancient RAID controller board died before we got somebody onsi
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by ekidd 9y ago
I've read a few million words of French—nothing special, but enough that if a text gives me trouble, then it's also likely to break Google Translate. Over the years, I've collected a few example texts which give Google Transl
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by ekidd 9y ago
Ah, Dylan was a ton of fun. First, some personal background: When I was an intern at Harlequin, I was one of the first users of Harlequin Dylan. Later, when CMU stopped work on Gwydion Dylan, I helped start an open source project to maintai
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by ekidd 9y ago
The easiest way to invalidate a theory is to see what predictions it makes, and to figure out where those predictions were wrong. One recent example: the choice between austerity and stimulus, in the US and Europe, shortly after the 2008 do
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by ekidd 9y ago
And if you could build an AI smart enough to do all that, then it might logically conclude that the one thing all the problems you describe have in common is humans. I don't think there's any simple or easy solution to these probl
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by ekidd 9y ago
Editing git history makes sense in several cases: 1. Projects like the Linux kernel which use frequently use 'git bisect' to perform a binary search on the history of project (to find when a bug was introduced), or where the patch
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by ekidd 9y ago
Personally, I've been happy with Rust for writing an MPEG-2 subtitle decoder. I posted about this earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753201 For me, the biggest advantages over C/C++ were: 1. Rust
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by ekidd 9y ago
Yup! perf and kcachegrind actually work nearly as well for Rust as they do for C/C++. It's all just another LLVM compiler that emits debug info, as far as Linux tools are concerned.
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by ekidd 9y ago
This sounds like a snarky remark, but it does have a point. Many large-scale nutrition studies rely on surveying thousands of people about their diet and lifestyles. Unfortunately, this works best for detecting very dramatic health effects,
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by ekidd 9y ago
> If you're competent with proofs in Idris, you can write your EVM programs as an Idris DSL. Yeah, all my formal proof experience is with Coq, which is just a bit too idiosyncratic and difficult for this sort of thing. But I seem to
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by ekidd 9y ago
Corecursion and codata are cool, and I would trust Solidity vastly more if it were a "total" functional language with no mutable state and aggressive type checking. Or if it were something more like https://www.idris-la
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by ekidd 9y ago
> 2. Ethereum software has security hole, gets hacked The last time this was discussed on Hacker News, I found this comment particularly instructive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 It points out a great ma
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by ekidd 9y ago
"Calories in, calories out" is both true (in the thermodynamic sense) and accurate enough to be useful (in a practical sense). I've personally performed the experiment, using MyFitnessPal and a $14 digital scale, and it turns
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by ekidd 9y ago
> Having a _completely_ different extension/package paradigm for every major and minor piece of software is not a user-friendly approach. The central problem is that from an upstream author's perspective, distro package managem
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by ekidd 9y ago
> If AFL would catch the same bugs, Rust isn't better than C in this case. You can find a list of my vobsub bugs in the Rust Fuzz Trophy Case: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case They are: 1. The shift ove
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by ekidd 9y ago
> Rust isn't going to help you with that. As I noted elsewhere in this thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753692 ), I've actually been working on a low-level media decoder in Rust. Compared to my e
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by ekidd 9y ago
The author focuses on rewriting low-level media decoders in Rust. I have bit of experience in this area. I've been slowly working on an MPEG2 binary subtitle decoder in Rust: https://github.com/emk/subtitles-rs A
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by ekidd 9y ago
I've bought well over a hundred O'Reilly books over the years, and after 2002 or so, I bought almost all of them as DRM-free PDFs. But in recent years, I've only averaged an O'Reilly book or two per year, because they&#x

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