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gHosts

556 karma · joined March 5, 2018

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gHosts··on 1989 California Medfly Attack
I note they never caught them.

Here is a scum bag ostensibly protesting an aerial pest control program that was caught......

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

....but read to the end to see the real reasons.

gHosts··on Pelorus Jack
Almost more interesting than Pelorus Jack, and is currently observable is French Pass, the hazard he helped them navigate through...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Aumiti_/_French_Pass

> The pass is 500 metres (1,600 ft) across, but the main navigation channel (the "throat" or "narrows") contracts down to only 100 metres (330 ft) with a 20-metre (66 ft) deep shoaling region. Most of the rest of the pass is broken reef.[8]

> On one side is Cook Strait with a tidal range up to 2 metres (6.6 ft), and on the other side is Tasman Bay with a tidal range up to 4 metres (13 ft).[9] This can result in substantial pressure gradients across the pass, complicated by a phase or time difference of about 25 minutes between the high tides on either side. Peak flow in the throat of the pass is around 4 metres per second (13 ft/s).[10]

> Near to the pass are deep holes where strong vertical flows can occur.[11] In 2000, student divers taking part in a drift dive during the local ebb flow were separated from their surface float and caught in a whirlpool. This dragged them into "Jacob's Hole", a 68-metre (223 ft)[12] deep depression south west of the pass. The depth of this descent resulted in multiple fatalities. The group appears to have been drawn deep into the hole and then returned to the surface again. A dive computer record of one of the survivors show a depth of up to 89-metre (292 ft). According to the coroner's report, the accident occurred on a falling tide, so the current was flowing from the south west to the north east.[13][14]

gHosts··on The Liskov Substitution Principle (2019)
In fact, skip all the natter about subtypes and the like and think _purely_ in terms of class invariants.

A class invariant holds at the end of the constructor and the start of the destructor and at the start and end of every public method.

A class invariant check for the child class _must_ invoke the class invariant check of the parent class up the class hierarchy.

And that is the point and the whole point of the exercise.

You can utterly rely every on instance of the parent class or any descendent class obeying the class invariant for the parent class.

This allows you to reason about a broader group of types without getting bogged down by concrete details.

gHosts··on The Mainframe Is a Modern Platform
Sooo... one of these is going to cost me how much?

Just asking.

gHosts··on Ask HN: Now we're staying inside with Wi-Fi, have you changed your cell plan?
No, but I have given my microwave a tin foil hat.

If the wife makes tea, it fries my wifi connection.

gHosts··on New Zealand eliminates Covid-19
Today's numbers if anyone cares

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/gfjby8/coronavi...

gHosts··on What concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? Kayfabe (2011)
I'm astonished that a search of the comments here produces no hits for that master of modern Kayfabe... Trump.
gHosts··on Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics
Reminder for those in despair...

It is merely enough to make the r0 after containment measures less than 1.

Then the problem will eventually go away.

As someone said, social distancing measures to work must be done when it seems to be overreacting.

And if they work, it will seem as if we overreacted.

gHosts··on BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
Change the colour to red and we're getting close to the Umbrella Corp logo.
gHosts··on The human body’s remarkable ability to adapt to the cold
That stuff actually works... basically if, like me, you're overweight... you've got a ruddy big log to burn strapped to your middle.

The trick is to get enough air in and bump your metabolism to start burning it.

gHosts··on Think you want to die at home? You might want to think twice about that
I don't think there is a euthanasia bill passed or even on the table in the entire planet where "we start killing people because you" is acceptable.

That's just plain FUD.

They are all, "The patient, being of sound mind, jumps through a large bunch of legal hurdles to be permitted to exit peacefully and painlessly."

> "Most people with something terribly wrong are holding out hope"

We're talking about people inches from death here. If they had hope they would be in hospital. They no longer have hope, only pain.

> A lot of people can't quite commit to euthanasia because "what if they find a cure a week later?"

A lot of people want euthanasia as a barrier against fear... "There have been some terrible days, and I'm certain I'm dying, and as I die, it will get worse. If it gets intolerable, I can opt out... it's not intolerable today, so I can hold on another day."

gHosts··on Gray Goo
Arguably you're just a great big pile of grey goo.

ie. It's not an argument against grey goo, it's an argument the grey goo catastrophe rules everywhere and has done so for eons.

gHosts··on Reducing risk of automotive death
Watch the front wheels.... The car will go where they are pointing, and you will spot movement sooner.

That said, please remember your own turn signals are to announce your intention, not applaud your action.

gHosts··on Actions needed to address cybersecurity risks facing the electric grid (2019) [pdf]
Sadly it looks like they have won so comprehensively.... they have stopped boasting...

https://cybersquirrel1.com/

The cybersquirrels have won.

gHosts··on Can software leaders use metrics without damaging culture?
When someone asks me to measure something.... I instantly say the answer is 42.... what are you going to do about it?
gHosts··on Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak
My brain couldn't tell me where Sverdlovsk was.... so I look it up....

Then my brain went "Wut!? What's that! Why is that?"

https://www.google.co.nz/maps/place/Ozero+Uklonskoye/@58.662...

gHosts··on The Rust Compilation Model Calamity
Walter Bright has said on several occasions that compilation speed was one of his design goals for D.
gHosts··on It is now 100 seconds to midnight
> pointless relic of the cold war, extremely obsolete

So you're saying the nukes are gone, the arms limitation treaties are rock solid and working, and no new threats are emerging.....

Oh wait, none of that is true.

gHosts··on NOBUS (Nobody but Us)
Sort like the short bus, but shorter.
gHosts··on Impossible Pork
Wake me up when the prices at the supermarket are comparable with actual pork...
gHosts··on The Higher States of Bromine
> ...and you will at all times want to be suited up like you’re going to going to spay a velociraptor.

Brand new sentence...

PS: If you must do battle with the likes of strcpy(), avoid strncpy() and strlcpy() and head straight for strscpy()

gHosts··on Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors
A colleague points out that the COB rather than SMD based lights have a better spectrum.
gHosts··on Ask HN: What has made you a better problem solver in software engineering?
You need to start from both ends...

TDD to get the chunks of functionality you add rock solid..

A Walking Skeleton to guide your vision of where you're going... https://wiki.c2.com/?WalkingSkeleton

Each part you add must be rock solid before you move on to the next that depends on it.

That doesn't mean you have to do everything... merely make it solid and reliable.

Say you plan to depend on a subsystem that is going to do something wonderful and flashy.... but you don't need it right now, you just need to build the place where it's going slot in....

Then don't put your sketch of the wonderful shiny thing into your dependency tree, put a mock that might do nothing, but does nothing utterly reliably.

If you have something flaky firing bullshit events and rubbish into your whole system while you're trying to get the rest going... you're just going to hurt yourself.

You can add a feature toggle or chicken bit to switch the new shiny/flaky stuff in when you want to contemplate it, and switch it out when you're working on the rest of the stuff.

gHosts··on Ask HN: What has made you a better problem solver in software engineering?
Start at the bottom, make your bottom layers solid first.

You can't reliably deduced anything about what your current problem is, if the things it depends on are flaky.

Design by Contract. Understand it. Used it. Turn your asserts on always.

Turn on all warnings that don't give false positives that your compiler / tools provide.

Fix them don't mute them.

Run around your code base and find every damn place where some damn fool has discarded an error code and check and report all failures.

You'd be flabberghasted by how many "it's impossible" bugs I have found and fixed by that one simple action alone!

gHosts··on Ask HN: What has made you a better problem solver in software engineering?
I will add one precursor for those stuck in analysis paralysis....

Make it.

You can't make it work if you haven't made anything.

gHosts··on Debuggers Suck
I once thought I could do better than gdb....

So I dug down into the bowels to see why it's so lame......

Oh my.

The hideous complexity imposed by (multiple) CPU designs, OS interfaces, the vast mismatch between the code as written and the code as compiled. The complexity of the DWARF standard....

Sigh! Sorry gdb dev's... I'm sorry I ever thought bad of you guys...

You guys are doing way better than I'd ever do.

gHosts··on An Interview with Zlatan Todoric, Open-Source Developer and Former Purism CTO
Where does say Binary Blob end and Compiled to Silicon begin?

For example most CPU's are written in something like verilog or vhdl and include internal ram on the chip and include a prom with a little bit of code that handles start up tasks.

From what I can see Librem 5 is a general purpose computer with 2 sealed black box modem modules.

Yes, there can be any level of proprietary evil inside those seal boxes... and inside your disk drive controller of your PC.

The question then really is can that proprietary evil control the functions of your computer.

With the disk drive controller, probably pretty hard, with intel ME, probably pretty easy, with the Librem modems? My guess is probably pretty hard.

gHosts··on Ask HN: What's your worst undefined C story?
A colleague wrote this code...

func( a=1, a++);

Sadness ensued until I disassembled it.

gHosts··on Ask HN: What's your worst undefined C story?
I hope those nasal daemons are friendly.
gHosts··on Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Universe_and...
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