oddity

16 ms·

91.
by oddity 7y ago
Python 2 is no longer receiving security updates as of 2020, so the hand is forced. When you're an operating system vendor, expecting some support team to materialize to handle security updates for a package as big as python isn'
92.
by oddity 7y ago
Without knowing the causes, I wouldn't be confident concluding that it's simply a correction to 2018 levels. But yes, it's also not worth the panic just yet.
93.
by oddity 7y ago
What events correspond to the recent peaks in the chart? It looks like the VC world was spooked around the start of December and nothing has changed its mind ever since. Given these are startups, I would expect much of the information to b
94.
by oddity 7y ago
Rust is a compelling alternative to C++ for large scale systems software (browsers, video games, etc) but, as of the last time I checked (~2 months ago) it doesn’t scale down as well as C does, or to as many platforms as C does. A lot of t
95.
by oddity 7y ago
It's not necessarily that they beat lisp at its own game. I still think the tight integration story of lisp is unmatched nearly anywhere else, but, when viewed holistically, lisp's advantages have become less compelling over time
96.
by oddity 7y ago
One of the key selling points of lisp is that it allows you to easily build a language that more closely maps to the problem you're trying to solve. In the 1970s, this was powerful because parsing was an active area of research. Today
97.
by oddity 7y ago
It’s a real shame avx-512 has so many eccentricities when it’s a much nicer ISA than anything before it (in x86 land). I would almost prefer a more predictable, high-latency decomposition into 4x128 wide uops over what we have now.
98.
by oddity 7y ago
> How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody likes their latest designs? The average consumer doesn't buy a fantastically well designed CPU if it doesn't run the software
99.
by oddity 7y ago
The list seems biased towards pre-2001, so I’ll toss one in: Cell. I hold that it was so ahead of its time, it dragged game devs, kicking and screaming, into the future ahead of schedule when they were forced to support the PS3 for the ext
100.
by oddity 7y ago
Sadly, this is true generally in tech whenever an implementation evolves past the abstraction. The alternative is that CPUs get faster, but only if all programs are rewritten for the new architecture. Arguably, this has happened already o
101.
by oddity 7y ago
Big-O is a way to talk about scaling, but in general, the average CS program does a disservice by not talking more about the critical question: "of what?" Bright students will connect their algorithm course with their systems cou
102.
by oddity 7y ago
What are the best publications, journals, twitter feeds, etc to follow if I want to understand the state of the art in BCI? How closely does shipping hardware track the state of the art? Is the research mostly industry driven at this poin
103.
by oddity 7y ago
It's almost tautological, but outside of academia, languages tend to become relevant and useful because software gets written in them. If the funding stays, then it's only a matter of time before one of the non-zero people intere
104.
by oddity 7y ago
For what it’s worth, I had a relatively positive experience with school and was a stereotypical “good” student. But, I’m entirely aware that I was motivated to learn because I liked school, because I liked learning, because I had things I w
105.
by oddity 7y ago
A good question. My best guess is that NA school systems are much less taxing than Japan's, and Japan's long history of economic stagnation has clamped down on the benefit equation even for those who do buy in to the school = job
106.
by oddity 7y ago
If you're a kid and do the cost/benefit analysis, going to school looks like a dumb decision and a huge opportunity cost for time that could otherwise be used for things with known reward (playing). Bullying, exams, homework, sle
107.
by oddity 7y ago
> Haskell’s core principles, like purity and isolation of side-effects, [are] understood and appreciated by more today than ever before If I were to summarize what I think are the most important ideas in the modern functional programming
108.
by oddity 7y ago
I highly recommend this talk to anyone who wants to have a productive discussion about language design. Too many languages and features are proposed and discussed with excessive emphasis on the syntax. The semantics are then derived from
109.
by oddity 7y ago
Explaining llvm's infinite SSA register file while sidestepping extra baggage readers might associate with local variables from other languages/computational models can be a challenge, but I think I like the approach in this tutor
110.
by oddity 7y ago
This is my best guess interpretation. I might have misunderstood some parts, so I would love it if someone else could correct me. Imagine a distributed system where nodes in the computation compute some result by communicating intermediate
111.
by oddity 7y ago
I read it as honesty and not bragging. Few people set out to create a inaccessible language with bad documentation, but given enough time and users, most languages become one. I'd prefer language maintainers and users have enough sel
112.
by oddity 7y ago
They did. Many times. First they made "C the good parts" by gathering all the various C bits then in use to make something portable and called it C89. Then they made "C the good parts" by removing all the parts that mad
113.
by oddity 7y ago
I haven't fully read through the article yet, but on the topic of FIFO-based models of computation, there are queue automatons and Post-Tag systems: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queue_automaton [1] https:&#x
114.
by oddity 8y ago
Can you elaborate? I’m not familiar with these. What are the pros/cons? As for the Apple Card, I’ve been fairly dismissive of most of Apple’s recent products, but this is the most interested I’ve been in an Apple product since the iP
115.
by oddity 8y ago
Comparing fork to gets is perhaps a bit unfair to fork. I was being lazy when I tried to suggest a spectrum of deservedly rare api calls. :) It’s not broken like gets or outdated like sbrk, but it doesn’t compose well with other parts of
116.
by oddity 8y ago
I’m a big fan of Io, but, sadly, it is no longer maintained. I’ve toyed around with writing a more minimalistic implementation suitable for lua-style embedding, but have never found the willpower to finish it.
117.
by oddity 8y ago
I'm surprised that anything still uses brk. Mentally, I've thrown it in the same pile as fork or gets, but it's been a while since I've written a OS-level memory allocator, so maybe my assumptions are incorrect.
118.
by oddity 8y ago
While the conclusion matches yours, I don't think the article you link supports your argument. I agree with the article in that I dislike the manipulative aspect of donation matching even if it's mild and for a good cause. Howev
119.
by oddity 8y ago
This seems to be a particularly extreme case of unconventional terminology usage, but on the whole, the phenomenon you describe is the inevitable consequence of trying to be concise while also not inventing words. The information density o
120.
by oddity 8y ago
The short answer, devoid of some interesting nuance, is that C++’s template system is similar to an untyped functional programming language, so the errors you get are the compiler’s attempt to make sense of the large tree of nonsense it cou

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