holmak

6 ms·

1.
by holmak 2y ago
In "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" by Dennis Ritchie, he writes: > Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name ‘Unix,’ in a somewhat treacherous pun on ‘Multics,’ the operati
2.
HACK*MATCH for the NES – How it was made(trashworldnews.com)
4 points by holmak 5y ago|0 comments
3.
by holmak 9y ago
It's rather bold for the Atlantic to complain about low quality news when they have clickbait garbage at the bottom of every article.
4.
by holmak 9y ago
Why not just design for deep sea exploration or nuclear applications directly? It's a heck of a lot cheaper to test prototypes in the ocean than on Venus.
5.
by holmak 10y ago
Silent, deadly electric cars... Joking aside, they've snuck up on me more than once when I'm about to cross the street and they're trying to right-on-red. I'm surprised they don't have some artificial noise to impro
6.
by holmak 10y ago
In case you didn't know, "inferior good" is an economics term with a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good
7.
by holmak 10y ago
Their market analysis, just like every other discussion of commercial space exploration I've ever seen, is circular. Space solar power, space manufacturing, space mining, space refueling... the only reason to do any of those things is
8.
by holmak 10y ago
SDL is written in C, and it has a much more pleasant way of dealing with heterogeneous event types. There is a struct called SDL_Event, which you fill by calling SDL_PollEvent() until there are no more events to read. The struct is a (discr
9.
by holmak 10y ago
I don't have any trouble with pointers. I can understand C programs just fine. But Modern C++, as the evangelists love to point out, is specifically about avoiding raw pointers in favor of smart pointers, value semantics, etc. That&#x2
10.
by holmak 10y ago
Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I think the original poster was referring to the Plan 9 team's strong preference for C over C++. Plan 9 was written with a modified version of C, and the developers seemed to be very interested in
11.
by holmak 10y ago
I tried to learn "modern" C++ style, and watched many, many videos from cppcon, but I just don't feel like I understand how to do it. I started a C++ project, #included <vector> and all the rest, and tried to do things
12.
by holmak 10y ago
Plan 9 was a research OS that was sort of intended to be a "next generation" Unix. The Golang project is led by at least one person who worked on the Plan 9 OS, and overall it seems to be heavily inspired by Plan 9's design.
13.
by holmak 11y ago
I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone in my CS classes had been programming for years, but surely
14.
by holmak 11y ago
Regardless of how you categorize the system, having more money flowing through an organization increases the incentive for the members of that system to do something unethical to take advantage of it.
15.
by holmak 11y ago
I noticed that too. It amuses me that it just takes a couple of tasteful red and blue stripes to make something look official!
16.
by holmak 11y ago
I agree that the names are confusing or misleading to modern readers. The strange choice of words in both cases seems to be due to the terms being used in a technical sense with a more specific meaning than in plain English. Plus, they are
17.
by holmak 11y ago
The article suggests that the discussed behavior is a problem because it does show up in code that "regular users" have to look at: > This paper tries to shed some light in the dark corners, and explores whether the language ca
18.
by holmak 11y ago
I have seen it claimed that null-terminated strings were encouraged by the instruction sets of the time -- that some instruction sets make null-terminated sequences easier to handle than length-prefixed ones. The article's error-messag
19.
by holmak 11y ago
I've been thinking about this lately, and there might be a great advantage to modern democracy even if it is a sham run by oligarchs. Unlike an old-fashioned monarchy or dictatorship, if you want to take over the country, you just have
20.
One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz(laughtonelectronics.com)
4 points by holmak 11y ago|0 comments
21.
by holmak 11y ago
The concept presented here of "seeking justice by appeal to the majority" reminds me of the Twitter phenomenon in which people learned that the only way to get customer service from Google/Ubisoft/Bank of America/(i
22.
by holmak 11y ago
I often think about the strange coincidence that English is the easiest language to represent in a computer. Only 26 characters, with no accents, all independently placed in series. The only awkwardness is the existence of both capital and
23.
TIS-100 Tessellated Intelligence System(zachtronics.com)
103 points by holmak 11y ago|23 comments
24.
by holmak 13y ago
I agree with your assessment -- utility with respect to time is the first explanation I thought of as well. People (and firms) have a limited ability to anticipate or defer purchases. (I can't wait 50 years to buy a lifetime supply of
25.
by holmak 13y ago
> Ask yourself: why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper? I know the the correct, rational answer to this question: "I won't buy it today, or ever, because it will always be cheaper the next day." (And then the de
26.
by holmak 13y ago
> European pharma co. Novartis made in 2012 revenues of $19.7bn in Europe vs $18.6bn in the US (and a total of $56.7bn). Novartis invested 21% of sales into R&D. > U.S. pharma company Pfeizer, total revenues of $59bn in 2012, U.
27.
by holmak 14y ago
Whenever the income inequality of the US is discussed, I wonder about the global income distribution. The US is no longer a closed system, so it may not be meaningful to consider the US income distribution on its own. Does anyone here kno
28.
by holmak 14y ago
Those alternatives are indeed all taxpayer funded, but not all act as a subsidy to employers. There was a paper contrasting EITC and guaranteed minimum income, and one of the notable differences is that EITC is a slight subsidy to employers
29.
by holmak 14y ago
> it feels like Clojure went all liberal on one end, just to get super-conservative on the other. In the brief time that I used Clojure, I also thought that the contrast between immutability and dynamic typing was very strange. Ultimate
30.
by holmak 14y ago
This is backtracking a bit, but what are the goals of raising the minimum wage? The implied goal seems to be to help the poor, but as others have pointed out, other policies (EITC, guaranteed minimum income, negative income tax) are better

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