edmccard

>The semantics of Rust guarantee that the input data outlives the period during which the output struct is in scope

To be fair, so does the semantics of every language with garbage collection -- keeping things alive while there are references to them is the bread and butter of GC.

EDIT: I do think it's impressive that Rust can manage this without the overhead of GC. But the sentence from the release notes immediately before 'killercup's quote was: This uniquely Rust-y feature would be impossible or recklessly unsafe in languages other than Rust which struck me as a bit over-hyped.

>Prior to deliberation, isn't a juror's main job to sit still in silence

I think they're also supposed to be paying attention to the proceedings.

>Kind of like how I may have a LEGO star destroyer, but I need to assemble it first.

Or more kind of like how when I push the button on my camera, I have an exposed negative, but I need to develop it first to get a picture.

Except, the act of pushing the camera button is called "taking a picture". So maybe the title is not as misleading as we're making it out to be.

>I know of absolutely no service which failed because it couldn't scale

So what are some examples of services which failed because they tried too hard to scale too early?

For example, when your network could handle 20k users, was there another network that could have already handled 500k, but they failed because they started a month after yours?

>But yes the client still has to know what to do in advance.

According to Roy Fielding[1] (who came up with the concepts of ReST and HATEOAS:

"A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience"

So if an application doesn't rely on "standardized media types", and "the client still has to know what to do in advance", then it seems like whatever you're doing, it isn't HATEOAS after all.

[1] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

>I don't see his conclusion of "you have to get lots of smart immigrants to fill in"

I wouldn't call a point made less than halfway through the article a "conclusion". He seems to place more importance on incarceration rates; from the final few paragraphs:

As we close this letter, I want to highlight that one bolded paragraph again

As we shall see, a single variable -- having a criminal record -- is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations...

If we want to see things began to change, we going to have to deal with this variable. Perhaps we should rethink our concept of incarcerating everyone found guilty of using currently illegal drugs. Maybe we need to rethink about how long felony convictions stay attached to personal records.

If you're wondering what this "dishwasher" (actually a laboratory glassware washer) really looks like, here's its product page:

http://www.miele-pro.com/us/prof/products/14071_16161.htm

>It is astonishing how fast a computer is without the overhead most modern languages bring in.

No kidding! I once implemented Knuth's Dancing Links/Algorithm X[1] in Python, as part of a Sudoku solver. At one step in the algorithm you need to choose from a group of "things to do next"; the C version I was using as a reference just chose "the next item" in the group (it was stored as a linked list). Changing it to the more efficient method of scanning all the items and choosing the one which would more fully constrain the search space made no obvious difference in the time it took to solve a 9x9 Sudoku -- practically instant.

In the Python version, the efficient strategy also solved 9x9's practically instantly; the simpler strategy ended up taking several minutes! I forget exactly how many unnecessary steps the simpler version ending up taking -- hundreds of thousands, maybe -- but the C code just got out of the way and let the processor crunch through them too quickly to care about.

[1] https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jchu/publicportal/sudoku/00110...

>And I think back a few years when people said we'd never be able to fly seamlessly from orbit down to the surface of a procedurally generated planet.

Starflight[1] could do that back in 1986[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFMxNlK8L4g&feature=youtu.be...

>Doesn't this mean you could implement a generic tree type if you fix the underlying data structure to be an array/map?

Nope. There are only a few functions that accept type parameters, and they must be called with concrete types, and they only work with certain aggregate types. For example, "make" can only be used to create slices, maps or channels, so you could create a slice of 10 bytes with "make([]bytes, 10)" but you cannot write "make(T)" or even "make([]T, 10)" where T is a type variable, and you also can't do "make(Tree)" where Tree is, e.g, some struct type.

Or even worse, "h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash..." from people who were used to saying "c-colon-backslash"

>having seen a lot of non-savvy users use Internet, I am firmly with WWW

As an anecdotal counterpoint, at our family Christmas, I mentioned a few different urls, spelling out "www" each time; one of my nieces said "why do you keep saying 'www'", and one of the other kids said "that's how old people find websites." After some discussion, it turned out that nearly everyone over 30 habitually wrote urls with "www" at the front, and everyone under 18 always omitted it.

>But it's nowhere near the level of support artists have had for the last hundred years.

I was thinking about this in the context of the John Wanamaker quote -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".

If online advertising becomes perfectly efficient, that might lead to a 50% (or more) reduction in the amount of funding available for ad-supported content.

>What if the surviving pool killed the other pools?

Well, what if they did?

I think that I have been incorrectly assuming that this subthread was about whether, in 2017, we could tell which of two things had happened -- either "there was a time when there were only 40 pairs of humans on all the earth", or "everyone today is descended from a 40-pair group that may have coexisted with others but for some reason those others died out."

If in fact we're instead talking about whether we can make any distinctions whatever between the two situations, even though we know now that whichever actually occurred, humanity didn't go extinct, then I retract my objections.

>The second situation was never as risky as the first.

But if both situations have the same outcome -- everyone not descended from the 40-pair group is dead -- does it make sense after the fact to distinguish them by "riskiness"? It seems to be a distinction without a difference, as the saying goes.

>If you know of any other effective way of solving problems other than applying broadly understood science and technology

I think it's possible to believe in the efficacy of science and technology, while at the same time doubting that crossing OKCupid with TaskRabbit will usher in "a utopia that would fulfill people's need to be needed by each other" (which is the concept that started this whole subthread)

>So why are you here? To laugh at people looking for solutions to problems using well-defined means...

No, to laugh at people who think that because they have a hammer, that every problem is a nail, and maybe also the people who believe that the analogy is really really true, so long as you're using the magic hammer of technology.

The journals of Fanny Kemble, mentioned in the article, can be found on the Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/details/journalofresiden00kemb_0

and the eyewitness description of the sale, "Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, Georgia", is here:

https://archive.org/details/whatbecameofslav00does

>Licenses don't just grant additional rights; they can also set conditions on the exercise of those rights, such as attribution or copyleft

Usually the right being exercised is that of copying, not merely using; for example, assuming that running a program is a form of use, the GPL does not set conditions on using (or displaying or performing)[1]; are there any copyright licenses that do restrict activities other than distribution?

[1]https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#NoDistributionR...

>You can get an idea of front page by using https://news.ycombinator.com/front

But not to find out what HN was like initially (which was the GP's concern); try a date before 2014-11-11 and you get "We don't have this data before 2014-11-11."

>>"Less than 1 percent of the total crimes committed by refugees are sex crimes"

That seems to mean something different than "less than 1 percent of total sex crimes are committed by refugees".

> if you recently learned/mastered a topic, you're in a far better position to teach that topic than an expert

That can work, assuming that (1) the particular difficulties you encountered will generalize to most other learners and that (2) being good at programming equates to being good at pedagogy.

>I recently read a comment (I think it might have been on HN, but I can't find it)

I think it probably was on HN.

>I really do hope one day to return to the ease of smalltalk without the oddity of the software images it presents.

I've sort of noticed the opposite sentiment -- the things that software images can do (sharable consistent environment, dependencies and tools corralled into one place instead of polluting the host) are considered to be upsides of using docker containers for development; but people seem to prefer using languages and tools they already know inside docker, instead of learning Smalltalk.

In other Weird Al news, there's a Beatles parody ("Pac-Man", based on "Taxman") that he wrote in 1982 that he has just this year received permission to release.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/18/14658500/weird-al-unreleas...

>fair bit of attack surface behind glReadPixels() and the like...

>...you can start looking at parts of the system's memory

I thought the whole point of using glReadPixels(), as opposed to just dereferencing a pointer in the system's address space, was that the framebuffer memory it accesses (whether backed by a texture or a surface or whatever) is GPU memory, and not system memory?

>I thought that was just a sub-plot of Goleneye. Guess some googling is in order...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Cossacks_after...

>How much CO2 could these pump out?

There are around 60-80 volcanic eruptions per year; for a total of about 300 million tons of CO2; so all four together, even if they produce twice as much as an average eruption, would account for about only 3.5 million tons. (Human-produced CO2 is estimated at between 20 to 30 billion tons per year)

>For example, is Facebook a web page or a web app?

Is this a trick question? :) On the scale from pages to apps, where one end is someone's static geocities page about their cats and the other end is, let's say, github: Facebook is definitely an app.

>I don't think primitive data structures like a gap buffer are useful anymore.

Emacs seems to do just fine with gap buffers. And thinking about algorithms with greater complexity as being less primitive can obscure the fact that the complexity isn't always worth the tradeoff; see "Gap Buffers, or, Don't Get Tied Up With Ropes"[1]

[1] http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/02/18/gap-buffers-or-w...

>humanity is the quality of being humane, or benevolence

That's one definition; my dictionary also lists "the human race; mankind; people."