wpollock

7 ms·

91.
by wpollock 1y ago
Sounds like you have some APS model. I had those issues, and switched to Cyberpower. The alarm can be muted and the battery lasts for many years. A UPS is a must for me. When I lived in the midwest, a lightening strike near me fried all
92.
by wpollock 1y ago
POSIX only guarantees advisory locks; mandatory locks are an optional feature and are not supported in Linux. See for example < https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77931997/linux-mandatory... >.
93.
by wpollock 1y ago
Aside from this, having such a class provides a convenient place to hold all the int utility functions, and the same for the other primitive types.
94.
by wpollock 1y ago
>Again, it is hard to overstate just _how_ bad the previous version [of Java time] is. The original Java Time classes were likely a last-minute addition to Java. They were obviously a direct copy of C language time.h. It feels as if the
95.
by wpollock 1y ago
Happy user of Flym, a free Android reader: https://github.com/FredJul/Flym
96.
by wpollock 1y ago
Thank goodness this isn't an issue on HN. SMELLY CUTICLES? BUY OUR CUTICLE DEODORANT! Seriously, how come TVs don't come with companders built in?
97.
by wpollock 1y ago
You've forgotten about BASIC, SNOBOL, APL, Forth, and PL/1. There were many interesting programming languages back then. Good times!
98.
by wpollock 1y ago
Slightly off-topic question: is it still necessary to list monospace twice, the way it was years ago, to have monospace render at the correct size?
99.
by wpollock 1y ago
Until retired as a professor, I used Thunderbird and the GPG plug-in to sign emails. That makes them immutable no matter who hosts the email server you use. I encrypted the emails holding grades, if the recipient said they were able to de
100.
by wpollock 1y ago
A critical section is code that accesses mutable shared data in a non-atomic way (i.e. as several steps, the classic example is: fetch data into a register, process that data, store the result back into memory). A lock is a mechanism that
101.
by wpollock 1y ago
This is interesting. I believe one way to deal with such breaking changes is to have multiple PRs, where the breaking change in each is hidden (protected) by a feature flag and tested by unit tests. Once all the PRs are committed, end to
102.
by wpollock 1y ago
42!
103.
by wpollock 1y ago
I wonder if the issue is with exposing internal IDs to end users. I'm sure the experts here have already thought of this, but could someone explain why using encryption or even an HMAC for external views of a primary key doesn't
104.
by wpollock 1y ago
If you read many sources without taking notes, it becomes difficult to later cite your sources. Your attitude makes sense when reading for pleasure, such as HN posts unrelated to your work.
105.
by wpollock 1y ago
I'm certainly not knowledgeable about these algorithms, but I'm willing to look foolish. In any regular polygon, you can fill it with a line of any thickness by starting at one vertex and spiraling inward until the shape is compl
106.
by wpollock 1y ago
The Boost library went the audit route, but AFAIK, few other repositories (or libraries) have done that. I believe it's a cost and lack of manpower that prevents that. You may not have the time to audit dozens/hundreds of depende
107.
by wpollock 1y ago
On my Samsung: Settings >> Device Care >> Storage
108.
by wpollock 1y ago
Good to know! I am reminded of using *roff in the 1980s. Punctuation such as periods at the end of lines marked end of sentences, and nroff would insert two spaces in that case. In HN, you can force two spaces between sentences. Bu
109.
by wpollock 1y ago
> I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century. In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)
110.
by wpollock 1y ago
How can one learn modern CSS and is there an online reference that is up to date?
111.
by wpollock 1y ago
> But... we humans can easily conclude this is safe. After the evaluation of list_ref_a.push(5), my_list is still there, and it's still in a valid state. So there is no risk of memory errors when evaluating the second call to push.
112.
by wpollock 1y ago
This always bugged me. It isn't switching your choice that gives the 2/3 probability, it is exercising a choice once one of the doors has been eliminated. The odds are the same as flipping a fair coin to decide on which of the
113.
by wpollock 1y ago
50000^7 ÷ 100000000 = ~2.5E17 years. That's a long time!
114.
by wpollock 1y ago
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that Big-O is useless. I'm reminded on an incident in the 1990s, when I was an instructor teaching C at the local telco, when a student showed me a (COBOL) program that had stumped his pr
115.
by wpollock 1y ago
Big-O isn't as relevant as it once was. Modern hardware includes mutithreading, piplining, numa, and complex caching. Some operations can take less than one CPU cycle and others can take hundreds, or exceptionally thousands of cycles.
116.
by wpollock 1y ago
>it's been ages since I saw that [XML/XSLT] used on the web out of RSS/Atom feeds (which are practically dead, for better or worse)... Not dead. I read HN using their feed!
117.
by wpollock 1y ago
Not quite. The shell ignores a she-bang line; it's the kernel that reads it. I have an explanation here: < https://wpollock.com/Unix/ShellScriptingIntro.htm#shebang >
118.
by wpollock 1y ago
HN is family friendly. Please don't use such language!
119.
by wpollock 1y ago
I still bookmark using my browser. Periodically I back them up. Additionally, if the content is of long term interest, I post the link to archive.org, ensuring its continual availability. (As a college professor, I have found too many gr
120.
by wpollock 1y ago
It has always amused me that Integer division by 0 results in "floating point exception", but floating point division by 0.0 doesn't!

More ›