wpollock

4 ms·

31.
by wpollock 5mo ago
> Theres no reason to ship TS to an end user browser. As things are now, developers write code in TypeScript, then debug and update code in Javascript. It might not be much of a reason, but a single language throughout is surely easier
32.
by wpollock 5mo ago
> Because "it doesn't exist". It's just a layer on top of js, ... C++ was originally a layer on top of C. The first C++ compiler, "cfront" was actually a transpiler to C. There is nothing preventing TypeScr
33.
by wpollock 5mo ago
Long ago, I had the insight that not all users are equally technically proficient. Some had the chops to fix some problems if given sufficient information. Other users would be confused with too much detail. I was writing code for AT&
34.
by wpollock 5mo ago
I found this article interesting but lacking. Lightning also sometimes travels from the ground up to the clouds. Storm clouds produce red sprites (there are some theories about these) and blue jets, that shoot upwards towards space. Then
35.
by wpollock 5mo ago
> The thing is, I don't need that training to recognize that they are failing to contribute to society. An old lawyer joke: What do you call 100 lawyers drowning in the ocean? A good start! (Told to me by my dad, a former attorney
36.
by wpollock 5mo ago
Or more simply, use su -c 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'
37.
by wpollock 5mo ago
Interestingly, the IETF has several published RFCs for text protocols, all of which require \r\n line endings. < https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/EOLstory.txt > Note this does not apply to file formats (except for RF
38.
by wpollock 5mo ago
> In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up. /tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or
39.
by wpollock 5mo ago
I was thinking of DEL, but was obviously mistaken. Thanks for catching that!
40.
by wpollock 5mo ago
Thomas Jefferson famously said that "A coreutils rewrite every now and again is a good thing". Or something like that. When I was a beta tester for System Vr2 Unix, I collected as many bug reports as possible from Usenet (I used
41.
by wpollock 5mo ago
> ... Unicode says that 0xFF is an invalid character. Not so. You may be thinking of UTF-8 encoding. 0xff is DEL in Unicode.
42.
by wpollock 6mo ago
My mental model of columnar storage is as the old notion of parallel arrays, which I used in the 1970s with FORTRAN. Whatever you learned first sticks with you and you end up translating everything to that, or at least I do. I believe thi
43.
by wpollock 6mo ago
The source and destination addresses don't change. If a bomb takes out a router in-between (the military scenario DARPA had in mind), it is NOT IP (L3) or TCP (L4) that handles it. Rather it is a dynamic routing protocol that infor
44.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> I notoriously write bad English... You mean that you write in English badly. :-)
45.
by wpollock 6mo ago
This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful
46.
by wpollock 6mo ago
It's probably not wise to say so on HN, but one possible strategic goal of this war was to distract from the Epstein files.
47.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> They don't? It is taught in schools in the early elementary level. I see no indication that most are failing. Programming in elementary schools typically involves moving a turtle around on the screen. (My mother taught 4th grade
48.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> If the company makes it impossible for you to communicate with them, the only recourse is to draw public attention to it in order to shame them. Legal action works too. You'd be surprised how effective a letter from an attorney c
49.
by wpollock 6mo ago
Your post reminded me when Yahoo IM updated their chat protocol to an incompatible version with a gradual rollout ! Half their eight servers used v1 and half v2. A v1 only client would connect half the time depending on which server the
50.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> And, especially what most people call big-endian, which is a bastardized mixed-endian mess of most significant byte is zero, while least significant bit is likewise zero. In the 1980s at AT&T Bell Labs, I had to program 3B20 comput
51.
by wpollock 6mo ago
My fantasy: After the salesman says (for the 4th time), "Sorry, the manager won't approve that price, but if you could add X hundred dollars, I'm sure I can convince them!", I wait until they are through high-fiving ea
52.
by wpollock 6mo ago
eiffel.com is a support tooling company. Eiffel the language has the website < https://www.eiffel.org/ >. Both sites are worth a look.
53.
by wpollock 6mo ago
Age verification is simple! A Kelvar strap must be attached to the user before the device will power up. A probe in the strap takes a drop of blood from the user and analyzes the protein markers to determine the user's age. (See the
54.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> Programming languages used for correct-by-design software (Ada, C++, Rust) ... A shoutout to Eiffel, the first "modern" (circa 1985) language to incorporate Design by Contract. Well done Bertrand Meyer!
55.
by wpollock 6mo ago
You're right, thanks! This works too (but I wouldn't recommend it): assert( someBooleanExpression || ! "It is false" );
56.
by wpollock 6mo ago
Allowing Unicode characters, then stating best practice is to stick with ASCII, is weird. (Go is not alone in this practice.) Unicode identifiers have a host of issues, such as some characters have no case distinction, some have title-cas
57.
by wpollock 6mo ago
> assert(x > 0 && "x was not greater than zero"); Shouldn't that be "||" rather than "&&"? We want the message only if the boolean expression is false.
58.
by wpollock 7mo ago
> In the modern world there is no plausible scenario where this would compromise a password that wouldn't otherwise also be compromised with equivalent effort. Not sure about that. I'm no expert but for high risk scenarios one
59.
by wpollock 7mo ago
I don't believe you're missing anything. This is just stegenography with a possibly new covert channel, right? Apparently the secret depends on advisaries not noticing the special hardware deployed on each end. Would using sprea
60.
by wpollock 7mo ago
> "It was a straight port by Ken Smith (the only code in "Mocha" I didn't write) of Java's Date code from Java to C." This is funny to me; Java's util.Date was almost certainly a port of C's time.h

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