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dretaon Talks that changed the way I think about programming

This is all nonsense. Accessing linear memory in a linear fashion is the way to go. You gain absolutely nothing by staggering memory accesses, because you’re waiting for memory to come into cache while the CPU idles, and since you have little control over how cache is utilised across a span of time, the whole concept of doing this to pre-load anything is just bogus, unless you’re doing specific optimisations for a specific architecture, even then there are cache pre-loading instructions for that.

dretaon What's wrong with Software nowadays and how we can fix it

And that’s just learning how to use the car. We’re talking about building one.

dretaon What's wrong with Software nowadays and how we can fix it

This industry is in its infancy. We have some of the greatest minds working in it, and yet we barely know how to make things work right, and OP’s suggesting we try and design tools that an average person can use to create powerful software. How about we let highly-trained specialists figure out how to write complex software first, before we try to teach average programmers how to do it, and perhaps then we can turn our heads towards the masses.

dretaon Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts

Milo never called raids on Leslie, and Leslie stated on national TV, she’ll send mobs after people who are mean to her, and posted tweets like these https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/755218642674020352

Twitter has a history of banning right-wing accounts for petty tweets, and leaving alone left-wing accounts that spread hashtags like #KillAllMen, and post sexist tweets against men, or racist tweets against white people. Twitter also is notorious for banning anti-muslim tweets, or even accounts ran by activists fighting for women rights in islamic countries.

It’s in their right to do this, but don’t talk about this like Twitter’s doing something warranting a discussion.

dretaon Bernie Sanders: Where the Democrats Go from Here

You don’t need government investment to make that happen. The issue was the lack of money supply, which was solved partially by Roosevelt’s ban on owning gold, but partially by people fleeing Europe, which allowed the federal government to print more.

This has nothing to do with Sanders’ policies though. Sanders’ policies are a continuation of everything wrong with the New Deal, namely things like the minimum wage and government-supported worker unions, which prevent hiring of low-skilled workers, usually from the lower class, and make hiring overall a risky process, leading to less hires, higher unemployment, and corporations outsourcing abroad.

dretaon Bernie Sanders: Where the Democrats Go from Here

It’s not at all agreed upon that the New Deal helped the recovery. It’s just as much argued that it prolonged the Great Depression. It’s baffling to me that you’d state that like it’s a historical fact.

dretaon Bernie Sanders: Where the Democrats Go from Here

Don’t think Trump, or HRC were best choices, but i’d still pick either over Sanders. Sanders presidency would’ve been a disaster to the economy. He would've made starting a business, and employing people even harder than it is now. By rising the minimum wage he would’ve ruined the lower and lower-middle class by the time he’s out of office. Not to mention that Sanders’ gripe with the 1% is more populist than anything Trump or HRC ever said. As soon as he lost to HRC, he bought a 3rd house for $600,000. He sold out to HRC after he got shafted by the DNC. He can talk about the status quo all he wants, but he’s a part of it.

dretaon Trump’s sweep could be a big setback to Tesla and Elon Musk

If Tesla’s not competitive, then it’s not competitive. I’m glad to see the government involvement being reduced. Let the free market handle things.

dretaon Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley

How are these things in danger NOW? Did you sleep through the whole Snowden incident, and everything Assange published in the past decade? Trump can’t take away what you don’t already have.

dretaon So you think you know C?

THIS is why C is bad. It’s not because there are no classes, and you have to manage your own memory, or because it has unsafe pointers. It’s this. And it’s the same reason why C++ is awful even before you get to the "++" part. I wish that by now we had a proper ASM abstraction language that allows the programmer to work with the architecture they’re programming for, instead of all the “undefined behaviour” we have to deal with since the 70s.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

I wasn't talking about that. What i meant was, if i have to implement it myself, that's not a point in favor of Rust. Though the slice does help with rudimentary bounds checking, so that's a start, though i don't see how that differs from a generic accessor method or an overloaded operator.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

Never said any of this.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

I never said i expect Rust to fix any of these problems, i would however expect it to at least try and introduce helpful constructs, instead of the ultimatum approach that every other language takes where you either program as expected or face the consequences.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

The memory safety issues happen inside of “unsafe” code, thus it doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

None of the things you mentioned, other than the slice type, which i don’t see how it would work on raw memory, are a language feature.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

I went through all the Rust features. It doesn’t eliminate memory safety issues at all.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

My point was that i haven’t come across a Rust feature i felt would save me from creating a bug.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

I’m not saying you’re bad. I’m saying there’s always a point where you want to go down to managing your own memory when performance is an issue, and no amount of language features is going to change that.

What i’d want is a generic support for preventing buffer overflows, or bad memory access where i need it. Writing my own growable data type using malloc and free is something i can do once, and i just have it, it’s not something that i have to worry about for more than 5 minutes at the beginning of a project.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

The number of cases where i have to use a generic memory allocator like malloc in a typical project are extremely rare, so no.

I never said that const is like anything, i just used it as an example.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

Alright, thanks for clearing that up. I missed those in the documentation, since it doesn’t specify any of this directly.

Though, still wide registers aren’t a language feature. I don’t care, nor do i think any other seasoned programmer does, about the language “freeing me from the need to deal with raw memory”. It doesn’t. The types of problems you solve by introducing built-in string types and vectors aren’t problems in the first place. The problem is writing custom allocators for the data you have, and needing some basic bounds checking. Problem is working with structures of arrays instead of arrays of structures, because that can get messy and introduce basic typing bugs. I’d love to see any modern programming language at least make an attempt at making working with raw memory easier.

dretaon 2016 Rust Commercial User Survey Results

I’d love to see a survey talking about what bugs get actually solved by using one of these modern languages like Rust or Swift, since i personally never once in my career had a bug that wouldn’t have happened if i used const, let alone any of the many other annoying Rust features.

For a “systems programming language”, Rust doesn’t let you do anything i’d expect, like let you specify whether a signed integer is 2s compliment, and how it behaves when it wraps. Instead the programmer is at the whim of the compiler writer, same as in C, and its “undefined behaviour” which is a source of real, hard to track bugs. Rust doesn’t even have support for modern features like wide registers, or any features that help you deal with raw memory, it just marks it as “unsafe”. There aren’t even any basic meta programming features like struct introspection.

What problems does Rust actually solve that C and its copycats have been suffering from since the 70s.

dretaon You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

"We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game.”

I understand that people here hate technical interviews, but are we going to skip over the fact that the whole premise of this article is that the technical interview is awful for everybody, but minorities are more affected, because their poor little brains can’t figure that out? It’s ridiculous that you’d ever even propose that some "VP of Diversity and Inclusion” has anything to do with hiring of engineers. Why is this garbage being given any thought on HN is baffling to me.

dretaon FBI Reopens Clinton E-Mail Probe Less Than Two Weeks Before Vote

She ran a private e-mail server for top-secret communication while in office. DNC rigged the primary in her favour, and you’re suggesting she had nothing to do with that. Who’s being absurd here.

dretaon How to Make a Computer Operating System

Got another great resource here http://www.brokenthorn.com/Resources/

dretaon Sorry silicon valley liberals, freedom of thought is too important to mess with

Nobody’s mentioning the 1st Amendment here. People are arguing principle, not law. You should let people speak their mind, no matter how offensive it is, or how much you disagree with what’s said, you still should be capable of listening and being able to criticise the content of the speech, not the speaker.

As a side note, it’s easy to argue that the xkcd comic is false, since banning a person from a public forum, effectively takes the person’s ability to speak. If somebody doesn’t want to listen, they don’t have to, but taking someone’s right to communicate their ideas is cowardly and uncivilised.

dretaon Why does the tech world still embrace Peter Thiel?

We all know why he won’t release his tax returns. He knows the system, he can fix it. Hillary can complain about that all she wants, but she didn’t do anything about it while in office. That’s been one of his main campaigning points since the beginning.

Why would you even talk about Trump’s health records as a Clinton supporter. First it’s not pneumonia, then it’s pneumonia. She collapses from it, then hugs a child after it miraculously gets through the Secret Service, even though the disease can be contagious. Pneumonia can cause serious complications, Clinton doesn’t tell you about it, and now you praise her for how strong she is? Why would you do that?

Who cares what Bush did. He’s not running for president, why would that be even remotely relevant to the discussion.

The only bad thing you managed to say about Trump is that he’s a wild card, while completely ignoring, or trying to awkwardly justify, that Clinton committed crimes, and showed utter incompetence while in office.

dretaon Why does the tech world still embrace Peter Thiel?

Most of the negative things you had to say about Trump are a part of being a high-profile entrepreneur. How does any of that come even remotely close to purging a private e-mail server you used for communicating top-secret documents while in office, or collapsing on a warm day is beyond me.

dretaon Why does the tech world still embrace Peter Thiel?

My point is not that these things are or are not true, nor whether they matter or not. My point is that you’re labelling Trump as the worst human being in history based on such minuscule things, but ignore everything remotely questionable about Hillary Clinton.

dretaon Why does the tech world still embrace Peter Thiel?

Who cares who endorses which candidate, that’s out of their control. Hillary was endorsed by the Californian leader of the KKK, if you care, i don’t. I’m not making any assumptions. Hillary’s on tape calling Byrd her “friend and mentor” after his death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryweuBVJMEA&ab_channel=U.S.D...

dretaon Why does the tech world still embrace Peter Thiel?

Sure, whatever helps you justify crucifying a person for their views.