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dead10ckon Jami: Share, Message, Call freely and privately

Is this for real? They really thought git was an appropriate tool on which to build a messaging service?

dead10ckon Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor

Not quite, it gets you about 90% there. Even with a grammar to use off the shelf, you still need to write queries to make use of it for highlighting, text object selection, auto indenting, etc. These have so far been particular to the editor.

dead10ckon Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor

This is surely just the bias of those willing to make a comment one way or the other. If you are so-so about it, you probably don't make the effort to make a comment.

dead10ckon Terraform is not the golden hammer

This stuck out to me too. Terraform absolutely does check the current reality of the state and applies changes to do what the HCL tells is to. They are either using terraform in a really weird way, or this article was written by someone that doesn't actually run terraform themselves.

dead10ckon An Accident No One Talked About

Am I the only one who was extremely confused by the writing? I think the whole effect was just lost on me, because I went from thinking her brother was the one who died, to thinking he was the driver, to finally getting to the part where she actually says explicitly that he was the other boy in the road.

dead10ckon Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)

Show me where anyone involved in Rust in an official capacity has claimed that "reliable software cannot be written in C/C++"

dead10ckon How I get my employees to work 80 hours a week

Wow this guy is fucking delusional. I can't believe he seriously thinks his employees are smiling every day, and that they aren't burnt out because they "believe in the mission"

dead10ckon Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

Wow. So you are saying that because I chose not to use Chrome that all software suffers? I didn't realize that there was only one good choice, or that Firefox was "slow and bloated," or that my choice of which software to use somehow contributes to the quality of code that software engineers outside of Google write.

MRU tabs is essential to my usage flow. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. I frequently have many tabs open, and I need to be able to quickly switch back and forth between two or three tabs. People have been clamoring for MRU tabs since Chrome came out, and Google and the Chromium developers simply ignore them. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=161960

dead10ckon Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

Chrome was always a non-starter for me without an option to cycle tabs in most-recently used order.

dead10ckon “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

Wow, judging from the comments in here, there are a lot of people that are in management positions that are horrible judges of technical ability and value. This question asks so many things that it doesn't really ask anything at all. No matter which field they decide dive into, if they can dive into any at all, it sheds no light whatsoever on their ability to solve problems, or their ability to learn new difficult concepts. Moreover, making assumptions about where their specialties lie because of the topic they chose to answer in is wrong--if they answered well, they could be skilled in many other topics as well, and if they didn't, that doesn't mean they're incompetent--it means they didn't know how to answer what is essentially a trick question.

dead10ckon Go vs. C: A Language Comparison of Concurrent Programming Features

I may do that in the future, once Rust has stabilized. They've recently changed the concurrency model to use native threads, instead of green threads, so their documentation is not accurate at present. And a comparison between them wouldn't really be meaningful anyway, until Rust has stabilized. That said, I'm sure there are plenty of other articles that compare Go and Rust.

dead10ckon Interface Upgrades in Go

They list the algorithms explicitly here:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/security/Mess...

And here:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/secur...

dead10ckon Interface Upgrades in Go

Another example of "Wtf were they thinking when they wrote this?" in the Java stdlib is MessageDigest. To build a digester object, you must pass it a string literal to tell it which algorithm to use, and catch a NoSuchAlgorithm exception. Instead of, you know, just using an enum for all supported algorithms.

dead10ckon Is the NYPD About to Start Ticketing More Cyclists Due to a Mathematical Error?

Exactly. No policies are changing. They're just putting more resources into enforcing existing laws.

dead10ckon Is the NYPD About to Start Ticketing More Cyclists Due to a Mathematical Error?

Even if the numbers are completely made up, I'm not going to be outraged that police decided to enforce laws that cyclists need to be abiding by anyway.

dead10ckon I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)

As many others have already said, if you've been programming for 18 years, then yes, you are a programmer. I wouldn't say you're crazy for not liking puzzles, but I would say you're crazy for not liking puzzles and pursuing a Ph.D in (what I assume is) Computer Science, since that is invariably what most research involves, and what most Ph.D level jobs are going to involve.

dead10ckon Shall we fork Fedora?

Hmm, perhaps I haven't been around long enough to experience breakages like this, then. I began using Arch before the switch to systemd, and I use it with vanilla Gnome. The only thing that came close to a breakage was the recent move of java-common, but the email that went out from the mailing list included instructions for the upgrade that made it completely painless. Although I could definitely see that causing grief if you hadn't caught the email before upgrading.

dead10ckon Shall we fork Fedora?

I've used Arch as my primary OS for over a year now, and I've never had any major problems. What flakiness have you experienced?

dead10ckon Rustful – A RESTful web framework for Rust

I'm curious about how these web framework crates, like this and IronFramework.io, are dealing with the imminent obsoletion of rust-http. It seems rather strange to build a completely new web framework on rust-http when it will soon be completely replaced with teepee.

dead10ckon Helping my students overcome command-line bullshittery

My thoughts exactly.

"But what about the magic of version control, GitHub, pull requests, forking clones, cloning forks, diffing forks, forking diffs, etc., etc., etc.? None of that matters for someone who works with binary file formats (i.e., user culture) rather than plain-text formats (i.e., programmer culture). There was such a disconnect between the two cultures that it was hard for me to come up with responses to these sorts of “why use X rather than Y” questions without sounding either incomprehensible or patronizing."

1. Is he seriously implying that version control is just some arcane thing that Unix programmers do, and that it's bull shit that students have to learn it? 2. If you can't answer students' questions about why these CLI tools are needed, then that does not mean there are no good reasons--it means you don't know, because you don't understand yourself.

"It's comically absurd that the most sophisticated computer programmers nowadays are still using an interface that's remained unchanged since before humans landed on the moon. What the duck?!?"

"Students are starting to grow suspicious: These instructors are supposed to be expert programmers, but their tools look pretty primitive to me."

This is a problem of perception, both on the students and on the professor's part, not a problem of reality. Do you think there's a reason that programmers still use these interfaces decades later? I'll give you a hint: it's not because they don't like change.

dead10ckon The Derivative of a Number

Ahh, I see. That makes more sense.

However, I'm not sure I understand how the definition extends to all numbers. Edit: nvm, I'm dumb.

dead10ckon The Derivative of a Number

I feel like I'm missing something. Isn't the derivative of a constant just defined to be 0? Why does the definition in the article restrict it to primes?

dead10ckon Show HN: Try/Catch/Finally experiment in Go

I'm truly not trying to be rude, but if you agree with the above point, then why did you make it publicly available? Only two outcomes can come of this:

1. Nobody uses it, for the reasons posted above.

2. People actually use it, which is bad, for the reasons posted above.

What you were trying to learn from this "experiment"? And what did you actually learn that is valuable to other people?

dead10ckon Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

I've only just started learning Rust, but from what I understand, the trade-off is that the type system in Rust is much more complicated, and thus harder to learn. Pointers have a concept of "ownership" and "borrowing", which can be more difficult to reason about, whereas in Go, you don't have to think about it as much--pointers are just pointers. It also makes the Rust compiler more complicated, which mean slow compile times. One of the main design goals in Go was blazing fast compile times.

dead10ckon Malicious SHA-1

This is what confuses me. How would an attacker use these results against a target? Wouldn't they need to get the modified SHA-1 library onto the target's systems?

dead10ckon Goop – Dependency Manager for Go

Why would you want to use an older version of a package? Just to ensure compatibility by using a version known to work?

dead10ckon Goop – Dependency Manager for Go

I'm curious why so many of these Go dependency managers are popping up. Doesn't go get download all dependencies automatically? Why are these third-party dependency managers necessary?

dead10ckon Sel4: We’re going open source

This means that the C code only exhibits behaviours that are also exhibited by the high-level specification. The high-level specification (by construction) doesn't have certain bad behaviours that you often see in C programs: NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overruns, signed integer overflow, etc. Thus this class of bugs is proven to be absent.

The problem I take with the literature is that it does not say that it is free of certain classes of bugs. The wording implies that it is completely bug-free. As any software developer knows, bug-free software does not exist.

Furthermore,

You need to assume something. Every operating system kernel makes these assumptions: seL4 is just explicit about them.

they claim they have proven that their kernel is completely bug-free. They say they have proved this under the assumption that the assembly code was written correctly. It seems that what they have claimed is: we have proven our kernel is correct with a proof that assumes that the code is written correctly. The logical flaw in this is obvious.

I don't take issue with claims of correctness, given that they are precise about what they have proven. I do take issue with inflated claims ("bug-free" vs. "free of bugs from this specific class of bugs") for marketing purposes.

dead10ckon Sel4: We’re going open source

"In short, the implementation is proved to be bug-free."

This reeks of bull shit.

"We still assume correctness of hand- written assembly code, boot code, management of caches, and the hardware"

Sorry, I don't think you can claim you have a mathematical proof of the correctness of your kernel when you assume this much.

And where is this proof? I can't seem to find it anywhere on their web site. The only thing I can find is the publication

"seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel" http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4.verified/pubs.pml

which looks like it just talks about the proof, rather than providing it. Am I just blind?

This looks interesting, but the confidence which they espouse is very suspicious.

dead10ckon Syncthing: Open Source Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync Replacement

This looks very promising. And it's written in Go! The only major feature I think it's missing is file versioning.

I am curious, though: what do people use to get their files remotely? And what's the cheapest solution for hosting your own central server? Would a simple AWS instance work fine?