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dbrower

90 karma · joined September 26, 2013

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dbrower··on The earliest versions of the first C compiler known to exist
I don’t think anybody thinks or thought it was.
dbrower··on The earliest versions of the first C compiler known to exist
it was a lot simpler in capabilities. much of the complexity is because of feature creep.
dbrower··on WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill
How much did the engineering time to make this optimization cost?
dbrower··on Using an 8K TV as a Monitor
Just looked and I'm not seeing ANY 55" 8k around right now. All the ones I'm seeing now are 65" at the smallest, and that seems way too big.

I've found a 43" 4k is about the right pixel size for me; a 49" 4k was too big on a desk. Fortunately, it died and I could get a smaller replacement.

I suspect a 49/50" 8k would be ideal, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

dbrower··on TypeSpec: A new language for API-centric development
Will it translate to yaml for toolchains that want that?

I'd be delighted to have a high-level IDL that gave the same sort of thing that CORBA IDL gave us 25 years ago -- schema and stub generation for multiple languages.

dbrower··on Client libraries are better when they have no API?
How is that not an API?

It’s offloaded the work to an adapter.

dbrower··on What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
Not diversity. Younger cheaper quotas.
dbrower··on The Magic of the Blackboard
I was looking for the chalk v marker on whiteboard shootout, and it was conspicuous in absence.
dbrower··on Pascal in Forth (1983)
Ah, an ancestor of Typescript!
dbrower··on How to Build a Windmill (2012)
So, at his site, 10+ years ago, his wind produced more frequent power than PV would have, at 3x the cost of a commercial solution.

Even then, PV would have been more cost-efficient. Now with storage probably even more so.

Small wind is a mug's game except in very specific circumstances.

dbrower··on *(char*)0 = 0; – What does the C++ programmer intend with this code? [video]
It doesn't have to be the NULL macro, which is correctly defined as plain 0.

The literal 0 is treated specially, so this could indeed be one of those 'turns into a weird bit pattern NULL pointers', if such a thing existed in the wild anymore.

But you're correct in that there probably haven't been any since the turn of the century or whenever the last Univac mainframes got turned off.

dbrower··on If only Borland had stuck with Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M (2013)
Part of it is that by 1986, CP/M was dead for new development of anything, and Modula-2 was also on fumes.

It would have been business malpractice to spend money on CP/M products at that point.

dbrower··on IBM COBOL for Linux on x86
1998 was a bit early, but I could easily have imagined it any time after 2000. I'm frankly surprised it has taken this long.
dbrower··on Flight incident: Passengers titled ‘Miss’ counted as children [pdf]
oof
dbrower··on On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
It's not Democrats, it's business owners needing that labor. The Republicans are equally bad in practice, it's their rhetoric that is tougher.
dbrower··on Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard
Cool!

Windows please.

Someone. Anyone.

dbrower··on The Selectric Typewriter
The Selectric keyboard touch and feel was vastly superior to the best mechanical keyboard you can get today.

Truly fabulous.

I really wish there had been a terminal or keyboard based on that. I like my UNICOMP clacky, but I'd gladly pay $1000 for a Selectric-feel unit.

dbrower··on United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden
This is going to go pretty much like it went for Frank Snepp and "Decent Interval", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Snepp
dbrower··on Big Oil Doesn’t Like EV Subsidies, Just Its Own Giant Subsidy
A better argument than imputed carbon offset is the oil depletion allowance, which is a pretty explicit subsidy for extraction industries.
dbrower··on OUP/M: CP/M-like operating system for 6502
Is there a C compiler for it?
dbrower··on The Day I Played Bill Gates and Satya at Ping-Pong
Could either of them apply topspin or return it?
dbrower··on Ask HN: How much job hopping is acceptable?
A reasonable career trajectory is something like doubling the time at each place until you hit the 8-10 year mark, modulo uncontrollable events, like a place shutting down.

When you have someone who's been repeatedly changing employers every 12-18 months for a while with no mitigating factors, you begin to wonder about ability to commit.

It may matter less if your are in a field where things are done in sprints, the person is likely to be instantly productive, and there isn't a lot of complexity to absorb.

There are people who have the temperament to be short to mid-term contractors, and who don't like to be and wouldn't be good long-term hires.

dbrower··on This is not a place of honor
I've read the report several times (it keeps coming back every 5-7 years or so) since publication, and I've never felt like a reliable solution had wither been found, or was in the offing. There is good thinking, but the problem itself seems very daunting. I think that is the real lesson.
dbrower··on SpaceX CRS-7 Failure Investigation Teleconference Thread
Listen to the "This American Life" about NUMMI, and you'll see that this approach was endemic to GM assembly and it's supply chain for, like, ever.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/n...

dbrower··on I spent the last 15 years trying to become an American and failed
Not many of those have professional careers in STEM, law or medicine, the "highly qualified" potential immigrants in question.
dbrower··on gettimeofday() should never be used to measure time
I think the article and much of the discussion misses a larger point -- time is hard, and very very hard when there are multiple systems with different clocks. The APIs are the way they are because there just aren't solutions especially since all systems ultimately have unreliable connections to good time sources.

The miserable APIs are New Jersey/Worse-is-better answers to intractable problems.

dbrower··on Obama Will Seek to Raise Taxes on Wealthy to Finance Cuts for Middle Class
" If your parents spend their lives accumulating a couple million dollars in assets they want to pass onto the children, you should not have to liquidate their entire estate just to give nearly half in taxes the day after they die."

Why not?

If they did more careful planning, a bunch of stuff would be in trust(s), or have been gifted before hand.

I see no reason why taxing capital gains belong to an estate is bad policy -- otherwise they go untaxed.

And for the record, we're 1%-ers likely to get hit by these proposals. It'd be good for the country if we and everyone who made this much paid more, and I'd love to soak the 0.1% and the 0.01%.

dbrower··on Dirty Coding Tricks
+1. That should always work as an exmaple of "crash only" programming. It's nice to get shutdown working for valgrind, but it should never be necessary.
dbrower··on Intrusive lists in Doom 3
73.6% of statistics are made up. I had to look that up: http://www.businessinsider.com/736-of-all-statistics-are-mad...
dbrower··on F.C.C. Considering Hybrid Regulatory Approach to Net Neutrality
Awful. Instead of throttling Netflix at the backbone level, they'll do it in the local loop.

A single, neutral regime is the only viable one that doesn't mess things up.

The trick is how to NOT turn title II into a highly regulated service like the POTS loop, but into one the encourages competition within the bounds of traffic neutrality.

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