pcwalton

29 ms·

421.
by pcwalton 3y ago
Regarding Zig, note that the author writes "starting a new project in a memory unsafe language in 2023 is foolish as demonstrated by the endless flow of vulnerabilities."
422.
by pcwalton 3y ago
You can sort of add new keywords backwards-compatibly using a trick called "contextual keywords": you require that they be placed in a syntactic position in which no identifier could legally go, and you maintain them as legal iden
423.
by pcwalton 3y ago
Problem is, the personality traits that lead people to commit crimes in the first place are the same personality traits that lead people to eviscerate their own defense. The unfortunate truth is that most people who have the self-control to
424.
Complex Hearts(sharbonline.com)
21 points by pcwalton 3y ago|1 comments
425.
by pcwalton 3y ago
> If I rolled up in a prototype personal transport which could go 1000 miles on a single AA battery, would you complain that the seats were poorly stitched? If the poor stitching were taken as a point of pride and the community refused t
426.
by pcwalton 3y ago
I agree with you to some extent, but the solution is fd: change the tool's interface to make simple things easy. Deleting the tool entirely does nobody any favors. As bad as find(1) is for simple stuff, piping du(1) to grep(1) is worse
427.
by pcwalton 3y ago
Looking at the Unix to Plan 9 translation [1] gives me a different opinion. To name one egregious example, omitting find(1) in favor of piping du(1) (what is supposed to be a disk usage analyzer) to grep(1) is not an improvement; it's
428.
by pcwalton 3y ago
The inclusion of Ukraine's territorial defense does a good job of showing that what really animates these types of discussions is anti-Americanism, not any sort of principled opposition to violence.
429.
by pcwalton 3y ago
I know absolutely nothing about the specifics of this incident (I don't even know who would have made this sort of decision) and it seems overblown to me as well. I wouldn't say "silly", because I don't discount the
430.
by pcwalton 3y ago
In my other comment I wrote "open source ecosystem" in order to avoid all the speculation about how much SPARK is used in commercial avionics and whatnot.
431.
by pcwalton 3y ago
Both SPARK and Rust provide memory safety, so it's perfectly reasonable to use popularity as a "tie breaker". Applications are written by people; the more people who can usefully contribute, the more work can be done.
432.
by pcwalton 3y ago
Rust has a much larger open-source ecosystem.
433.
by pcwalton 3y ago
A proof that P=NP doesn't necessarily mean that NP-hard problems are solvable in any practical sense. The time complexity claimed by the paper, O(n^2 * m^3), grows quickly, and the constant factors may be high. In fact, I'd go so
434.
by pcwalton 4y ago
This homicide is obviously included in San Francisco crime statistics.
435.
by pcwalton 4y ago
The Linux kernel API is so complex, and so ill-specified, that the only practical way that would maintain userspace compatibility would be to run the Linux kernel itself under macOS. (Microsoft tried to implement the Linux API in NT with WS
436.
by pcwalton 4y ago
I've lived in SF for years as a residential property owner, in the Bay Area for over a decade, and I say bring on the development. Views on this issue are not as one-sided as you think. (Also, the idea that you need to have lived here
437.
by pcwalton 4y ago
The_Donald was (1) banned and (2) not the official politics forum. It's more like characterizing Reddit as a whole as left-leaning because /r/politics is, which is, in my book, a fair claim.
438.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Unfortunately, I just checked and ChatGPT gives the correct (slow) answer to your question: def is_concatenation_of_two_dict_words(word, dict_words): """ Returns True if the input word is a concatenation
439.
by pcwalton 4y ago
The board specifically set aside for politics on 4chan is probably the most popular neo-Nazi discussion forum on the internet. "Far-right" is a completely fair description of the political leanings of that site.
440.
by pcwalton 4y ago
RationalWiki was created in opposition to Conservapedia, so it's not unsurprising that it would attract users of the opposite political persuasion to the latter site. The comparison to Encyclopedia Dramatica, a dead wiki that in its he
441.
by pcwalton 4y ago
This isn't linear interpolation , but it is a discrete approximation of a linear differential equation (note that all linear functions can be described as lerps, but that's uninteresting in this case): x'(t) = 0.2(b - x(t)
442.
by pcwalton 4y ago
For a long time Form 1040 was the top Google result for "pdf".
443.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Yes, it's possible to do physically based diffraction grating effects in the traditional pipeline. Here's a tutorial on it: https://www.alanzucconi.com/2017/07/15/the-nature-of-light/ (I actual
444.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Yep. There's a meme that always pops up on these threads that changes made to Firefox to "be more like Chrome" were the catalyst for its decline, but that's clearly not true if you look at the data; if anything, that mem
445.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Click on "Why do Palo Alto schools need PiE?"
446.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Yes. To give a concrete example, California schools on the whole spend about $14,913 per student [1], while Palo Alto spends $23,038 [2]. [1]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi... [2]: https
447.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Scratch is brilliant, and the research that has gone into creating a visual programming language has paid off handily. I wish that node-based visual scripting systems like Unreal Blueprints (and, to a certain extent, things like Blender Sha
448.
by pcwalton 4y ago
You can use Ruby for this task too. I used to use Perl for throwaway one-liners, but on advice I switched to Ruby because of the bigger community and I'm pretty happy with it. (Python isn't as nice for one-liner text processing, b
449.
by pcwalton 4y ago
I fought to keep this feature around in Rust. I was inspired by OCaml (which the old Rust compiler was written in), where you could write: let x = foo() in let x = bar x in let x = baz x in print x In a functional langu
450.
by pcwalton 4y ago
Go evolved very organically. Look at the inconsistency in the way nil slices vs. maps work, for instance, or the way comparisons against nil for interfaces work. Go may be simple to explain at a high level, but the details are very complex.

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