gdwatson

19 ms·

151.
by gdwatson 11y ago
I like to mock the drive-maker's kilobyte too, but in their defense the tradition is older than standardized byte and word sizes. There was a time when drive sizes were measured in bits, and they naturally used SI prefixes for those -
152.
by gdwatson 11y ago
CenturyLink
153.
by gdwatson 11y ago
It's not unheard of for ISPs that typosquat the whole Internet like that to provide a second set of DNS servers that perform correctly for those who know how to use them. Mine does.
154.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Misinformed how? It's not as if abstinence-only education claims babies come by stork.
155.
by gdwatson 11y ago
I think the biggest problem with undefined behavior in C is that it is taken to justify violation of C's customary semantics[1] on platforms where it isn't necessary. Many types of undefined behavior in the C standard are essentia
156.
by gdwatson 11y ago
On further reading it looks like most of the convention delegates favored the concept, though of course there are always dissenters. I stand corrected. But I stand by my point about the loss of other balances within and against federal pow
157.
by gdwatson 11y ago
It's not clear that they intended judicial review at all. Keep in mind that the framers didn't assume permanent political parties, without which Congress and the president would be better able to check each other. And the system
158.
by gdwatson 11y ago
I'm not sure that's fair. Clang has excellent warnings, but it's not as if no progress was made on that front between 1979 and 2007.
159.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Grapheme-cluster strings are neat, and the decision to normalize makes sense in that context. But how does Perl 6 handle filenames, which can't be safely round-tripped through grapheme strings?
160.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Your position is that propaganda is useful and we should structure our speech for maximum utility? That way lies Newspeak.
161.
by gdwatson 11y ago
What you have described is the sort of government we have, but it's not one characterized by the rule of law -- or at least not characterized so thoroughly as you imply. If law can be retconned, then we are not ruled by law at all; we
162.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Selectively using code generation to implement closures over immutable variables could get you part of the way there while allowing a lot of the work to be done at compile time and avoiding the need for a full JIT. How much it would help pe
163.
by gdwatson 11y ago
IE only supported .ico favicons for a long time.
164.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Are you sure you're addressing the same question as the article? You seem to be asking why these are written, while the article is asking why they are published by the institutions they are.
165.
by gdwatson 11y ago
The full headline on BoingBoing is much better than the abbreviated version: "DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt." The HN headline just means that DoJ hasn't given up the fight;
166.
by gdwatson 11y ago
"Suppose it definitely was the first KJB, and said something that strongly contradicted modern theology. Wouldn't modern theocrats just ignore or discredit it?" Only a minority of a minority of English-speaking Christians reg
167.
by gdwatson 11y ago
You should read some Puritans some time. You might be surprised.
168.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Moynihan's ideas didn't and don't fit neatly into an existing political coalition on either side of the aisle. Supporters of enlarging social welfare programs and supporters of the traditional, gendered nuclear family as a n
169.
by gdwatson 11y ago
The FCC doesn't require it directly, but since it's the cheapest way to achieve what the FCC does require it's what the manufacturers will all do. That's the point.
170.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Doesn't the design philosophy of a complex piece of software matter? Doesn't consistency of philosophy provide power by enabling separate pieces to integrate smoothly? There's a legitimate discussion about tradeoffs to be ha
171.
by gdwatson 11y ago
To my understanding, one package set is built from the head of ports; that's been the default till now. Every quarter they create a new branch from the head, give it a little time (weeks?) to shake out the bugs, and build the quarterl
172.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Implementation-defined behavior is still defined, in this case probably by the platform ABI. It's simply not portable.
173.
by gdwatson 11y ago
The sorted vector has O(n) insertion cost. A hashtable has O(1) insertion, possibly amortized; a trie, if I understand correctly, has an insertion cost proportionate to the length of the string, assuming a fixed alphabet. So as the vector
174.
by gdwatson 11y ago
Nobody on HN expects Americans here to agree with current U.S. foreign policy. Why expect us to agree with past policy?
175.
by gdwatson 11y ago
It would be nice to have more detail here, at least why this is "historical" and "unfortunate". I think a lot of people feel that way about Unix features that interact awkwardly with threads. I tend to feel that threa
176.
by gdwatson 12y ago
I think the performance comment is in regard to the single-threaded common case. The reason the GIL is still around is that Guido has said that a replacement is only acceptable if it avoids performance regressions for single-threaded code.
177.
by gdwatson 12y ago
Offered terms short of unconditional surrender.
178.
by gdwatson 12y ago
Agreed that checks and balances are good, but the US constitution was written without large, permanent political parties in mind. Take the power of impeachment, the ultimate Congressional trump card against executive overreach. Why has no
179.
by gdwatson 12y ago
I hope you're making those judgments on a broader set of sources than HN and its ilk. HN has smart users, but there are big sampling biases in more areas than just intelligence.
180.
by gdwatson 12y ago
What would it take to get Computer Science departments to view the history of the discipline as an important issue to be dealt with inside the department? Surely the author's right that if the technical history of a discipline is to b

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