pdw

15 ms·

151.
by pdw 4y ago
Also worth checking out: Jason Dyer's blog, https://bluerenga.blog/ , where he's playing through all adventure games. So far he's made it to 1982. Jeremy Parish's youtube channel, where he's going th
152.
by pdw 4y ago
And also that many of the stones are buried deep in the earth.
153.
by pdw 4y ago
That's a great book. Its binary search is buggy though :) https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...
154.
by pdw 4y ago
That might have been Brian Harvey's _Computer Science Logo Style_. Downloadable here: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/
155.
by pdw 4y ago
The other commenter said that it's a joy to read and that's certainly true. If you're interested in software folk tales and such, it's worth getting. I still see it recommended as a practical book however and indeed the
156.
by pdw 4y ago
It was a brilliant book, but I feel it's too stuck in the early 90s to recommend today. It's a pity.
157.
by pdw 4y ago
I'm confused. Which software is he talking about? I can't think of any program screwing up Ctrl-C in a bad way.
158.
by pdw 4y ago
Code that does things like strcat(strcat(strcat(strcpy(...), ...), ...), ...)
159.
by pdw 4y ago
Well, what did you do before intmax_t was added to C99? - POSIX defines that in_port_t is equal to uint16_t, so for that type there's no problem at all ;) - Don't use printf/scanf for this, roll your own - Refuse to print&#x2
160.
by pdw 4y ago
But all major C compilers promise that they won't make ABI changes. So I'd rather say that standardizing intmax_t was a mistake.
161.
by pdw 4y ago
I think it's best to regard intmax_t as a failed experiment. E.g. GCC has long supported __int128, clang has _ExtInt, other compilers have similar extensions, but they refuse to increase intmax_t due to ABI concerns.
162.
by pdw 4y ago
It was Dijkstra's article, but he submitted it with the title "A case against the Go To statement". Wirth was the journal editor and he choose to rename it to "Go To statement considered harmful". Knuth ties into th
163.
by pdw 4y ago
He might have considered pattern matching a form of runtime type checking.
164.
by pdw 4y ago
Out-of-order execution and pipelining date back to the 1960s. The paper calls out the similarity: "If one views the blocks of this scheme as very complex instructions, then this architecture devolves to a pipelined architecture for exe
165.
by pdw 4y ago
It's referring to the "Open Systems" hype of the 80s / early 90s. The term "open source" became popular only much later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)
166.
by pdw 4y ago
I never got deep into TeX, but I browsed the code at one time and some of what I found seemed utterly insane to me. For example, it includes an IEEE floating point implementation, based entirely on TeX string expansion [1]. I don't kno
167.
by pdw 4y ago
Well, congratulations, you now have a build dependency on Vim. (xxd is not a standard tool, it ships with Vim.) It's also only suitable for tiny files: compile time and RAM requirements will blow up once you go beyond a couple of megab
168.
by pdw 4y ago
I always preferred Tank Wars over Scorched Earth
169.
by pdw 4y ago
It's hard to differentiate between completely disabled JavaScript, some individual JavaScript files being blocked by an (overzealous?) ad blocker, and the browser not implementing some required JavaScript feature.
170.
by pdw 4y ago
Such a comparison operator exists: IS (NOT) DISTINCT FROM.
171.
by pdw 4y ago
You're perhaps under the impression that OpenSSH was the original implementation: it's not, it's a relative latecomer :) The original SSH was (and still is) commercial software, see ssh.com. You basically end up with three gr
172.
by pdw 4y ago
It must have been an early version of AAC. Bell was involved with that. And another message in the thread claims "the early versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good as the later versions (which became apples stuff
173.
by pdw 4y ago
https://archive.ph/eSqP4
174.
by pdw 4y ago
No, they own the trademark. I think the copyright of the old Unix code ended up with Novell in the 90s, so it would now be owned by Micro Focus.
175.
by pdw 4y ago
To be explicit, SQLite doesn't support concurrent writers. In WAL mode it can handle a single writer with concurrent readers. In "vanilla" mode, a writer requires exclusive access to the database.
176.
by pdw 4y ago
I guess you weren't a Google Reader user. Join the club :)
177.
by pdw 4y ago
This StackOverflow question references it: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4292683/how-do-i-tell-au... It took years for the GNU maintainers to publish a libtool that fixed this bug, and then years for libtool
178.
by pdw 4y ago
No, OP was referencing a long-standing bug where libtool would force Fortran checks even in projects that didn't need it at all.
179.
by pdw 4y ago
"I can grab the kernel sources from 1997 and build them today." Where would you be grabbing it from? ...From a website? "Websites shut down, large websites with big storage demands are especially vulnerable to attrition. Who
180.
by pdw 5y ago
XML and everything that's build on it

More ›