tragomaskhalos

10 ms·

61.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
"you can't swing a 9-iron in the Apple/iOS ecosystem without hitting a pragmatist in pain". This line was very funny, but I wonder (not being an Apple person myself) the extent to which, 8 years later, Swift has alleviat
62.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
It's a shame that Amos isn't involved in the governance, as - to this outsider - he seems to have both the technical chops plus the sort of calm personality that would smooth out a lot of the unnecessary drama
63.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Appreciate that this US-centric, but no such inventory can be complete without https://www.phallus.is/ , The Icelandic Phallological Museum.
64.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
The 'own C compiler' is from Joel Spolsky from when he worked at Microsoft: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... . And indeed this states that it was p-code. I'm old e
65.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Excel is a law unto itself. The 'feature' that irritates me the most is how a cell copy is forgotten unless you paste immediately. Bear in mind that this is an application so iconoclastic that it had its own C compiler.
66.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Historically at least a common use case for dynamic sql was to build up a predicate based on user-selected filters, where the user can select one or more conditions from a larger set. Handling this with a single static query requires the pl
67.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Coptic had these as loan words, although whether they were literary or used in daily discourse I don't know. Afaik modern Greek does not have these very handy little words sadly.
68.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Unfortunately there has and always will be the obvious cheaper way to produce "expendable soldiers", as a certain current conflict brutally illustrates.
69.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Amazing stuff - immediately reminiscent of two blokes pissed out of their heads who've broken into a five-a-side court for a kickabout on their way home from the pub.
70.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Having the full set of the volumes on a shelf was quite the power play back in the day - and you needed a long and sturdy shelf. It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit cou
71.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Reminiscent of Borges' story 'Funes the memorious', whose title character has a completely eidetic memory and invents his own number system where each number is its own distinct word or phrase - a system described rather beau
72.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
A big part of this is that there casual traveller will typically primarily interact with people who work in hospitality - hotels, restaurants, bars - for whom dealing with foreigners is a major part of the job and who will accordingly be he
73.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
The part about feeling a certain tristesse that your native language is a shared commodity rather than a cosy secret was very resonant. And a native English speaker who tries to speak the local language in, I would say, most any sizable E
74.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
I read this comment in the voice of Johnny Rico from "Starship Troopers".
75.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
When crafting more complex SQL queries it's quite easy to make a subtle mistake, mess up cardinality etc; I'm sure chatGPT would be excellent at mirroring those kinds of error unfortunately.
76.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
4. Spelling reforms have been introduced to amend the orthography to rationalise it and better reflect current pronunciation. This is what some people advocate for English - entirely misguidedly in my view.
77.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
No coverage of this nonsense would be complete without also mentioning that CON, AUX and PRN and a couple of others are verboten as filenames in Win. Although apparently you can defeat this via e.g. \\?\C:\con
78.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
I have a vague memory of a Borland C++ coming bundled with a rather funky Smalltalk-inspired container library - this was pre-STL and in fact pre-templates even. Perhaps another old fart can confirm or correct?
79.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
interesting that we are given a glib explanation for this phenomenon at school that doesn't quite make sense, and this finesses it nicely. In similar vein, the simple explanation of why images are inverted in mirrors falls foul of a li
80.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
They used to flood the Colisseum and re-enact naval battles - would pay good money to see that tbf.
81.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
In a pub years ago with some sort of early-internet online game available, guy trying to join got an error message because of the name he'd used: 'Geoff'
82.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Interesting challenge: do arithmetic using only the 'head variant' Mayan forms!
83.
by tragomaskhalos 3y ago
"... manuscript was taken to an isolated Greek monastery in Palestine, possibly to protect it from occupying crusaders, who often equated Greek script with heresy against their Latin church and either burned or looted many such texts .
84.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
Is that ad placement a genius piece of guerrilla marketing, or a recipe for total confusion, among the general population at least? Perhaps both.
85.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
Another reason, in addition to other replies and separate from safety concerns, is that strcpy, memcpy etc are nowadays usually implemented via more efficient compiler intrinsics rather than an explicit loop.
86.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
K&R contains this beautiful koan-like string copy code: while (*t++ = *s++) ; Honestly the elegance of this thing was one of the hooks that made me fall in love with C. But this was from a now-forgotten age of innocence
87.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
A pox on printers with DRM cartridges and all their works. We binned ours a couple of years back in favour of an Epson something-or-other. It's not exactly the world's greatest printer, but it has two absolutely killer features -
88.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
Another factor: If you watch a film in the cinema then the surroundings are almost completely dark, which makes it easier to see what's going on on a dark screen. However we increasingly consume content at home where there is typically
89.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
This is a valid point, but on the other hand we don't seem to have solved the problem of deciding the sweet spot of language features that are the best on-ramp for kids to get into coding. For my money, we'd actually be better off
90.
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
Again we see that irredentism is the great evil of our age, combining as it does a toxic nationalism with a total disregard for the peoples whose homes and lives are slated to be steamrollered by invasion.

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