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ghswa

437 karma · joined May 23, 2013

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ghswa··on Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia: Remembering NASA’s Lost Astronauts (2016)
At Christmas they put white lights on all of the trees except for Pete Conrad's which gets red lights. At his funeral his crew mate Alan Beam said "Pete says that while he was here he was always the shortest astronaut, but he doesn't want his tree to be the smallest tree. Pete wants his tree to be special the most colorful tree because his motto is, When you can't be good, be colorful."

I also think it would be respectful to the women who died in the space programmes to edit "his life" to "their life".

ghswa··on Launchaco – Instantly generate a responsive, free, website
These are the first groups that came to mind. They may not all seem applicable all of the time but I would argue that making your site accessible to as many of these people as possible would improve the experience of all of your users.

- Partially sighted users that are not technically literate enough to use assistive technologies.

- People with physical impairments that affect their ability to use input devices and may also dictate the types of device they can use.

- People with low levels of technical literacy.

- People with poor literacy in the language of the site.

- People with dyslexia, not forgetting those with poor working memory or slow processing speed.

- People with dementia.

- People with a host of other mental and cognitive disorders.

ghswa··on Sky to block pornography by default
The online version of page 3 will remain unchanged.
ghswa··on Security: OpenBSD vs. FreeBSD
Are you referring to discussions on their mailing lists? If so, could you link to them?
ghswa··on OpenBSD's kernel gets W^X treatment
According to [1] it's W xor X. Interpreting that literally suggests that read only memory is disallowed as well. I'd be surprised if that's actually the case.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/33.html

ghswa··on We're making hackable, open-source sex toys (NSFW)
I think you'd be surprised; this gave my wife some interesting ideas ... for work.

For what it's worth she's an academic in computing.

ghswa··on What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior (2011)
I don't think that's particularly wishful thinking, however, your alternative phrasing could be seen as equally, if not more, leading.

When quizzed on the behaviour of a C program I would expect a careful and experienced C programmer to consider the behaviour described by the standard (which standard?); unspecified and implementation defined behaviours; and deviations from the standard in both the compiler and the environment. Often I'd expect the answer to be "it depends".

ghswa··on Tips for Intermediate Git Users
It's a gotcha for anybody, like me, that expects a branch name to be 'just' a string.
ghswa··on How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire
If you're that worried why not cut it short to "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of <some key area>." There can't be any risk there, surely?
ghswa··on Questions for Donald Knuth
"I did write a compiler manual in 1958, which by chance was actually used as the textbook for one of my classes in 1959(!)"

How many people in the world could claim something similar?

ghswa··on Stalked by an online supermarket that wants a 'relationship'
Even worse when it's not even a politician from your own country. I'm looking at you Rand Paul.
ghswa··on "But It Doesn't Mean Anything" – A demonstration of the value of computer code
It's important to remember that the "year of code" initiative is not related to the new curriculum coming into force in September 2014. My wife is writing a book for the new curriculum and, from what she's told me, it sounds quite good.

At Key Stage 1 (ages 5 to 7) children are taught about algorithms, that they are a way of breaking tasks into a sequence of steps that can be reused to solve problems.

They will also be taught about the pervasiveness of software - about the different kinds of devices and appliances that rely on software.

Finally, they will be taught about privacy. I'm not sure of the content but I assume it'll be about managing information about themselves.

ghswa··on Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain
Reading about suicide in the news is incomparable to the kind of direct intervention I'm talking about. As john_fushi commented[1], the best thing you can do is talk about it and his suggestion of calling your local suicide helpline for advice is an excellent one.

On a personal level, I've found that talking frankly about suicide greatly reduces my desire to act on any suicidal feelings. This effect is greatest when talking face to face with somebody I know and trust.

However, worrying about whether or not somebody trusts you should NOT stop you from intervening. If somebody shows a desire to listen and help my in such a situation I'll have a much greater level of trust in them than I did before, even if they were previously a complete stranger or somebody I dislike.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7228997

ghswa··on Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain
I'll chime in here, if you don't mind - I'm bipolar[1].

My health often deteriorates for short periods of time, perhaps a day or two, sometimes a week or so. In these situations there is often some trigger - high workload, poor sleep hygiene etc. My mood doesn't usually reach such an extreme that it causes any significant difficulty day to day.

Episodes of illness that have a significant detrimental impact on day to day life seem to build up slowly. They start out like the episodes described above but they just keep on going until my mood is so extreme that day to day life becomes very difficult to deal with.

My most recent episode of this nature was probably caused by the stress of a couple of deaths in the family, a daughter who doesn't want to sleep, a wife commuting across country to work, a high workload myself and (frustratingly) mental health services not providing care when I could see my health was deteriorating.

It's been around 6 years between my last two episodes of that nature.

Poor sleep hygiene is by far the biggest risk for me and it becomes a vicious cycle if I'm in a manic phase. Other than that, continued high levels of stress are a problem but only really if I'm dealing with multiple stressors.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder

ghswa··on Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain
As somebody who's been there (on both sides) I don't believe that anybody who might act on suicidal ideation would not have already considered suicide as an option.

I'd say that, if you're worried, starting a conversation about it (in person) is just about the best thing you could do. A "missed diagnosis" is far worse than a "misdiagnosis".

Sorry for the pun.

ghswa··on Tell HN: My Brother Died Last Week. His Death Will Not Be In Vain
So sorry for your loss EMRo.

If I were anywhere nearby I'd have come along to the memorial service but the Atlantic is quite big... I hope the service goes well for you all.

Sadly the troll(s) in this thread are demonstrating the kind of prejudice that can make it difficult to have a serious discussion about the more immediate problems faced by people suffering from mental health problems.

ghswa··on Guide to Advanced Programming in C
Does gcc make any kind of assumptions about signed-overflow? For example, would it eliminate the comparison in this code:

  int8_t i;

  /* ... */

  i += 1;

  if (i == 0) {
    /* ... */
  }
ghswa··on Guide to Advanced Programming in C
I'm enjoying this so far although a couple of things have made me scratch my head in the example code allocating a vector.

  int create_vector(struct vector *vc, int size) {

    vc->data = 0;
    vc->size = 0;

    if (vc == NULL) {
      return VECTOR_NULL_ERROR;
    }

    /* check for integer and SIZE_MAX overflow */
    if (size == 0 || size > SIZE_MAX) {
      errno = ENOMEM;
      return VECTOR_SIZE_ERROR;
    }
Accessing the fields of vc before the NULL check seems like an error. Also, would it not be simpler to change type of the size parameter to size_t so that it's the same type as the size field of the vector struct?
ghswa··on LaTeX was not built for the web
"No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug."

Absolutely agree but, as far as I'm aware, this "more modern alternative" does not exist.

ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
Regulation 5b allows the Secretary of State for Health to disclose confidential patient information for any medical purpose. No need for a national emergency.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/1438/regulation/5/ma...

:edit: gohrt pointed out that I'd overlooked the restriction to medical purposes in regulation 5, thanks.

ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
I live in Bristol. I wonder how quickly I can move to Cardiff?
ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
That's an opt out for the summary care record which is a different centralised system. We're talking about care.data here.
ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
Not exactly licensing terms but page 3 of the price list states that extracts subject to an annual fee will continue to be charged that fee until it is certified that all hard and soft copies of the data have been destroyed.

Other than that I'm guessing they will enforce some pretty draconian restrictions on publishing and sharing the data since doing so would undermine their ability to sell the data.

ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
Try talking to your practice manager - mine is very helpful and (s)he'll hopefully be much more clued up about this than the reception staff.
ghswa··on The NHS is selling your private data – here's the price list [pdf]
A good explanation of the scheme, from Dr Neil Bhatia can be found at http://care-data.info/

It includes details of how to opt-out.

ghswa··on Mathematics self-proves its own Consistency (contra Gödel et. al.)
Hewitt posted it himself.
ghswa··on Wine 1.6 Released With 10,000 Changes
Sticking to LTS releases was actually the worst way to do this as it meant catching 10.04 which was effectively a "one off" UI, resulting in two changes to the UI rather than one big overhaul.

My mother started off on 8.04 LTS. When upgrading to 10.04 LTS the window buttons changed sides and there was a new theme (this is enough to throw many users). When upgrading to 12.04 LTS there was a change from Gnome to Unity.

My mother now chooses to use a Mac because she was fed up with her computer "changing" each time I updated it. I doubt I could convince her to try any Linux distribution again - there are no perceivable benefits for her.

ghswa··on Wine 1.6 Released With 10,000 Changes
I gave up on Ubuntu when I could no longer have faith that my environment would be recognisable from one release to the next. For me, and my mother, that's a very important part of "just works".
ghswa··on Ask HN: I'm quadriplegic – can you help me with my security?
This certainly seems to be allowed: http://stackoverflow.com/a/39247
ghswa··on Ask HN: I'm quadriplegic – can you help me with my security?
That won't work since escapologybb can't type a password at the OS X lock screen.
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