thequux

19 ms·

121.
by thequux 6y ago
You'd think I was an expert, given that I gave that segment of the talk, but I haven't yet dived that deep into Genera's internals. As I understand it though, you don't have the concept of page faults at the image level;
122.
by thequux 6y ago
Sadly the deep dive got cut due to time limitations (both in terms of time during the talk and finding out that all of my alphas were in various states of non-working as I started preparing that segment) Had I had time, I would have patched
123.
by thequux 6y ago
We've been talking about doing a follow-on talk this year focusing on network computing environments. Plan 9 and Apollo DomainOS are likely to make appearances, but more ideas are welcome.
124.
by thequux 6y ago
I don't have good recommendations for a book, but I can recommend spending a few weeks implementing it. libpacp is probably the easiest way to send and receive raw ethernet frames, and you only need to implement ARP, IP, and TCP to h
125.
by thequux 6y ago
That $250 isn't (generally) tax-deductible. At the moment, I'm making ~€80k as a SWE in Belgium (reasonably good pay but not the highest), and my net income is closer to €150/day. At the top of my career, I expect that I coul
126.
by thequux 6y ago
> Clever code isn't usually good code. Clarity trumps all other concerns. Generally this is true, but with the caveat that what actually matters is 90th percentile (or maybe even 99th percentile) complexity. If you have a choice bet
127.
by thequux 6y ago
The difference between binary and text is deeper than just line endings and character set; PDP-10's, for example, stored text 5 7-bit characters to a 36-bit word. In text mode, it would unpack that to ASCII, whereas binary mode would p
128.
by thequux 6y ago
IIRC, ancient PKZip uses a very weak encryption algorithm that isn't well supported by modern cracking programs. If you're interested, though, I'd be happy to take a shot at it.
129.
by thequux 6y ago
Sounds kind of like this paper from 2015[1], which has been a source of inspiration for me for the last 5 years since I read it. [1] https://archive.org/details/tr2015004_cuneiform/
130.
by thequux 6y ago
I have a server with 384GB of RAM sitting next to me, and in two months of uptime with the only shielding being a pile of IBM iron on top of it, it has detected a grand total of 0 errors. This is, of course, an anecdote rather than data, bu
131.
by thequux 6y ago
Are you familiar with IBM i (née AS/400)? There's a similar idea there, where programs are compiled to a virtual instruction set called TIMI then statically recompiled to whatever the machine's native instruction set is at th
132.
by thequux 6y ago
So was I! https://thequux.github.io/posts/advent-of-cobol/advent-of-co... Sadly, I got jammed up with dealing with stream files on day 4, and then a C3 talk got accepted, so I haven't gotten much time to work
133.
by thequux 6y ago
In those situations, captchas don't offer any improvement over a text field that always asks you to put a 3 in it. It's just different enough from other systems that it requires custom programming, and that's just not worth i
134.
by thequux 6y ago
I have heard about this from Romanian friends as well. 30-50 lei/day seemed about average (€6-10); for comparison, a decent fast food meal would be 10 lei and monthly salaries are on the order of 4000 lei.
135.
by thequux 6y ago
I'm working on learning COBOL for IBM i, and to do so, I picked up a server that runs it on eBay (€500), learned to install it, then started reading the IBM documentation[1] You can skip the hardware purchase by joining the IBM i Hobby
136.
by thequux 6y ago
A few years ago, I wrote https://github.com/0x20/backtab to sell drinks at the local hackerspace; it's worked well so far, and the backend has a fairly simple REST interface. Since then, my flatmate got me interes
137.
by thequux 6y ago
I think that there's some extent to which the mere fact that something is your job drains the motivation from it. In my day job, I work on some world-changing technology that will massively improve the state of security; I see applicat
138.
by thequux 6y ago
Most of those old POS systems were actually either 3270 or (more likely) 5250 applications; i.e., block mode terminals instead of character mode terminals. While the difference between block mode and character mode terminals is a fundamenta
139.
by thequux 6y ago
When I was at UCLA, I took a class on compilers where we could write our compiler in any language we wanted. I had recently discovered Stratego/XT in some random wikiwandering, and decided to use it for my compiler. In the end, the typ
140.
by thequux 6y ago
Most parser combinator DSLs use PEGs to parse, which don't actually prevent ambiguity, but instead hide it. I strongly recommend using something that compiles your declarative grammar into LL(k) or LALR(k)
141.
by thequux 6y ago
I agree with everything you say, except your advice to use a parser combinator library, because most implement PEGs. Hammer is, of course, an exception to this, as long as you call `h_compile` to tell it to use a different backend. Why not
142.
by thequux 6y ago
Recent (as in, within the last ~3-5 years) versions of GNU tar automatically detect the type of compression and apply the appropriate tool, so you can often get away with `tar xvf`.
143.
by thequux 6y ago
It depends on the CPU, though in most CPUs, the comparison is a separate instruction from the branch. For example, on x86, CMP RAX, RBX JL label would jump if RAX < RBX. Similarly, on ARM: CMP r1, r2 BLT label &#x
144.
by thequux 6y ago
I live in Gent, Belgium, which has more bike traffic than car traffic on any given day. Biking here is treated as a way of life. I've been spoken to for biking without a mask, even though I was not in a heavily populated area (I was ri
145.
by thequux 6y ago
This reminds me of the bike routes in Flanders and the Netherlands. There is a dense network of cycle routes, with every intersection being numbered (these are called "knoppunten"). At each numbered intersection, there is a signpo
146.
by thequux 6y ago
I grew up in the US, and learned on standard US qwerty. After I moved to Europe, I found myself needing to type French, German, and Romanian words enough that I set up XCompose and I've been very happy with it. You just pick one key to
147.
by thequux 6y ago
Both of these are true, but I find that the second, at least, isn't as much of a problem as you'd expect. Most modules that configure services give you the ability to specify complete config files, which you can build whatever hig
148.
by thequux 6y ago
tee will also write to stdout, which can often mean that you get a bunch of binary gubbish splattered all over your terminal. I recommend instead using "|sudo dd of=/dev/fb0", or, if you have moreutils installed, "|
149.
by thequux 6y ago
In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I lose about a day a year to weird Linux quirks, and I run an extremely non-standard setup that has accumulated over the course of the last ~20 years. Back when I was using a Mac full-time, (~2010ish
150.
by thequux 6y ago
My ISP (Telenet in Belgium) may just be unusually good, but, while there's fairly sparse documentation on IPv6 and their DHCPv6 only gave me a /64 by default, all I needed to do to get more was to configure my router's DHCP c

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