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bio_end_io_ton Knitters got knotted in a purity spiral (2020)

For what it's worth, clicking on any of those links brings you back to the one by Gavin Haynes.

bio_end_io_ton Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

On the other side of the coin, you can have situations like in 1989 when Jethro Tull beat Metallica for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance at the Grammy's.

bio_end_io_ton Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

one screen comms, one screen work, comes in at #2

bio_end_io_ton Beware of strncpy and strncat

The author should've been wary of strncpy, because his solution is wrong.

"If there is no null byte among the first n bytes of src, the string placed in dest will not be null-terminated."

So copying sizeof(dest)-1 will not append a NULL byte as the author implies. You'll have to do that manually.

bio_end_io_ton Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know

This assumes negatives are represented as two's-complement, but that's implementation-defined. Testing whether a negative number is even by ANDing it with 1 won't work in a system that uses one's-complement.

bio_end_io_ton The Evolution of C Programming Practices: A Study of Unix (2016) [pdf]

It bothers me when "goto" is assumed to be "a maligned language construct".

People who think "goto" is evil should also give up the other jump statements: continue, break, and return (and also switch, though its not listed as a jump instruction in the C standard, at least not in '89 or '99).

You can see some contradictions in the paper regarding goto. For example, they state that deep nesting should be avoided, but goto should be avoided as well, even though one benefit of using goto is to limit nesting depth. From the Linux Kernel coding style doc: - unconditional statements are easier to understand and follow - nesting is reduced - errors by not updating individual exit points when making modifications are prevented - saves the compiler work to optimize redundant code away ;)

bio_end_io_ton Ask HN: What's the strangest place you wrote code?

While in the hospital receiving chemotherapy. But I don't think this even comes close to beating blackberry + merry-go-round.

Also, does "in a dream" count?

bio_end_io_ton A Simple Open Source Tool for EC2 RightSizing Analysis

The "Efficiency" metric is very useful and I really like the web interface. This is a great tool!

bio_end_io_ton How to get around the 8GB limit on root volumes in AWS?

This sounds particularly useful for customers that spin up instances constantly, because every time then spin up an instance they are paying for 8GB. They could create instances with smaller root volume and save.

bio_end_io_ton The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)

The 1/6000 figure comes from a paper "Probability of a tossed coin falling on its edge" from 1993. I looked for it in the hopes it clarified the type of coin used, but the paper, as far as I could find, is behind a paywall.

Nevermind, found a link that talked about the paper. They used a US 5¢ coin, a nickel which has a flat edge and I think the thickest edge out of all (common?) US coins. At least it has the thickest edge to face ratio in terms of width.

bio_end_io_ton The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)

What type of coin are we talking about?

A coin with rounded edges won't land on its edge 1 out of 6000 tosses. A coin with a flat edge that is thicker than either of its faces (or just thick in general; doesn't have to be thicker than the faces) will land on its edge a great deal more often.

Also, a coin with a heavier "tails" side will more often land on heads in a spin.

I guess I should read the paper. Maybe it clarifies.

bio_end_io_ton Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

http://www.fittedcloud.com/blog/

FittedCloud is a small start-up that does automatic cloud resource optimization. They post regularly and go into topics ranging from technical details of machine learning to cost optimization for AWS resources (EBS, EC2, DynamoDB, etc).

As far as I can tell, they are the only company around that can automatically scale up and down EBS resources in a way that the customer only pays for what he or she uses, rather than paying for over-provisioned, unused storage...all without downtime or performance hic-cup. These guys know a lot about the cloud and storage.