ekidd

99 ms·

841.
by ekidd 10y ago
The Linux libc API changed a couple of times in the 1990s (a.out → ELF, libc5 → libc6, etc), but the Linux kernel ABI (what libc uses to talk to the kernel) has been stable since practically the beginning. Linus detests breaking anything
842.
by ekidd 10y ago
Yup. Current weight is a sum of several variables: body fat, muscle, water, and digestive track contents. Nearly all day to day variation (up to three pounds in my case) is water. The long term trend is mostly body fat, but I need at least
843.
by ekidd 10y ago
One nice thing about the "2 different forms of media" rule is that it would protect you against bad batches of hard drives. Sometimes, when people buy multiple drives at once for servers, they wind up with drives from the same bat
844.
by ekidd 10y ago
> elk I'm pretty sure that hitting a full-grown elk is a poor choice, and often a fatal one. A large, full-grown elk can weigh 600 pounds and stand 5 feet tall at the shoulder, which means it will probably go over the crumple zon
845.
by ekidd 10y ago
> I still argue, to every Rust user I meet, that they should turn on overflow checking in Release builds too. Yeah, I remember when the debug-mode overflow checks were added right before Rust 1.0. There wasn't enough time remaining
846.
by ekidd 10y ago
> However, unlike more dynamic languages, the return types are usually Result<SuccessValue, SomeErrorType> Yes, this is a more complete and precise explanation. :-) I rather like Rust's error handling in practice—it adds only
847.
by ekidd 10y ago
Randomly looking at the "Trophy Case", it looks like most of these errors are run-time "panics". We can break Rust errors down into three main categories: 1. Compile-time errors. This includes most memory-related errors,
848.
by ekidd 10y ago
Articles like this one, and the recent project on libraries like Helix http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ make me awfully tempted to rewrite inner loops in certain production Ruby projects in Rust.
849.
by ekidd 10y ago
In practice, n^100 is not a thing that happens except in weird or contrived cases. n^2 is common. n^3 turns up here and there. I've heard of n^5 in graph algorithms, I think, but it's pretty exotic. Let's see if I can provide
850.
by ekidd 10y ago
These articles explain the mathematical underpinnings of Rust's borrow checker. The explanation is actually fairly simple, but it assumes prior familiarity with abstract algebra. For people who are unfamiliar with posets, lattices, etc
851.
by ekidd 10y ago
My experience with Rust's borrow checker is that it can be pretty frustrating for about a week, and then it mostly stays out of the way, only popping up to report dumb bugs. After that, maybe once per 2,500 lines of code written, I sti
852.
by ekidd 10y ago
Mutliple inheritence can work quite nicely, assuming a reasonable "linearization" algorithm that decides what order `super` should use when walking up the class hierarchy, so that no method needs to worry about calling into multip
853.
by ekidd 10y ago
As somebody who works with one of the companies on that list, I just want to say that, yes, using Rust in production is a great experience. (At least once I made friends with the borrow checker, which took some experimentation.) We especial
854.
by ekidd 11y ago
It's a really tiny thing, but Faraday uses https://github.com/faradayio/credentials_to_env to download secure credentials from a Vault server, and write them to environment variables or files. Alternatively, you c
855.
by ekidd 11y ago
Personally, I rather enjoy writing clean Rust wrappers for gross C APIs. Doing so does require a solid knowledge of C, and familiarity with a small bag of Rust tricks. In my experience, the Rust standard library is extremely convenient and
856.
by ekidd 11y ago
From the article: Because you want to ensure that you always pass the majority of tests, you tend to think about this when you change and extend the program. You therefore are more reluctant to make large-scale changes that will lead to th
857.
by ekidd 11y ago
I'm sure most people would agree no conscious experience of understanding would emerge from the combination of man + rule set. There's a subtle dishonesty in the Chinese room experiment, because it's asking you to imagine a
858.
by ekidd 11y ago
I started writing a small-to-medium-sized web application in Elm, because I wanted to try out FRP. I mentioned my experiences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10726648 In short, Elm has some nice error messages, a
859.
by ekidd 11y ago
Ugh, I hate situations where multiple screwups turn into massive data loss. I'm glad this one worked out. I remember the time when a sysadmin gave two weeks notice and left just before the Christmas holidays, before getting new backup
860.
by ekidd 11y ago
Elm is a profoundly interesting language, but I've had mixed experiences developing in it. I've been working on a small-but-hairy web app using Elm, and my first reactions are: 1. Elm encourages highly-rigorous state handling, tha
861.
by ekidd 11y ago
It's unethical to inflict "needlessly hard" technologies on a client who isn't using them already. But an enormous fraction of the world's valuable, productive software is both needlessly complex and built using (ar
862.
by ekidd 11y ago
I sympathize, because I occasionally try to pair program in French, and yeah, it can be a struggle—and French spelling is far more rational than English spelling, despite the silent letters. But if you're having trouble with listening
863.
by ekidd 11y ago
As github pages, technically are virtual domains, they share the same ip with many other pages, if you want to support https, you need to serve either each page on a different ip (not free), or they need a to configure multidomain ssls If
864.
by ekidd 11y ago
Author here. As steveklabnik says, I'm figuring this out as I go along, with much help from the amazing OSDev wiki: http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page Basically, this stuff is a ton of fun, and I'm just sharing my le
865.
by ekidd 11y ago
Let's consider a US buyer of Parmesan: I have a choice between regular "Parmesan cheese", which is held to no particular standards in the US, and "Parmigiano-Reggiano", which is both expensive and (IMO) predictably
866.
by ekidd 11y ago
There's a way of thinking about things like "Tennessee Whiskey" and "champagne" that makes good business sense: They're basically shared regional brands. In Europe, many traditional kinds of cheese, alcohol and
867.
by ekidd 11y ago
If you want a mostly nice, mostly well-documented development toolchain, you can either: 1. Install some proprietary, GUI-based development tools and color inside the lines, 2. Figure out what toolchain you want your students to use, and pa
868.
by ekidd 11y ago
In languages like C and C++, you have precise control over memory allocation and pointers. If you want to say, "My data structure should contain exactly these bytes, and be located here ", then you can easily do so. This low-le
869.
by ekidd 11y ago
The article makes some claims about childhood language learning: But some researchers argue that synesthesia, which appears in 4% of the general population, is actually an exaggerated manifestation of associations we all make from an early
870.
by ekidd 11y ago
MakerBot appears to have gotten themselves trapped between Printrbot (proprietary, entry level) and Lulzbot (open source, more expensive). Well, and about 40 other competitors. I own a Printrbot Simple Metal, which is a nice machine. But th

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