ii41

It's wild that people say this. Japan attacking China (and later the Western colonies, and later the US) knowing that it could not win was one of the most important events in the 20th century. There isn't a country as infamous as Japan for starting wars it cannot win.

Also that attack happened on Sept 18, this very day, in 1931.

Aeroplanes were pretty indeterministic until people made them less so, and yeah, somehow they were indeed more encouraged to fix the randomness to prevent people from getting harmed than oai/anthropic currently are

Well, sorry but not really sorry for that. We all know that literature aka the art of conveying something regardless of what that thing is is an art. We all need to take responsibility for not only what we say but also how we say it.

A lot of Americans do have a policy of "as long as we're comfortable (economically, etc), we'll let the government do whatever they want.", some justifying it by saying "they're doing it for the Middle Eastern people's freedom!"

Well no. This series of events happened exactly because the laws set up by colonial British would let loose a murderer.

Joshua Wong went to the streets for the murderer, not against him, by the way.

And those "Free Hong Kong" protesters were for him, not against him.

> how is an advanced society handling the practical matters of writing contracts and keeping records without it

By "it" I guess you mean grammatical plurals? It's indeed semantically redundant. Say in a context of contracts, how is "3000.00 dollar" in any way more ambiguous than "3000.00 dollars"? The Chinese language indeed has been supporting an advanced society without grammatical plurals for thousands of years.

> disparity between I can’t afford a car, and I will never be able to afford a car is vast

There's no disparity. Either way you're not going to own a car any time soon.

You're not freer when the legal system prevents you to do something because you don't have enough money than when the legal system prevents you from doing that thing for other reasons.

I am using sqlite in my project. It definitely solves problems, but I keep seeing overly arrogant and sometimes even irresponsible statements from their website, and can't really appreciate much of their attitude towards software engineering. The below quote from this CVE page is one more example of such statements.

> All historical vulnerabilities reported against SQLite require at least one of these preconditions:

> 1. ...

> 2. The attacker can submit a maliciously crafted database file to the application that the application will then open and query.

> Few real-world applications meet either of these preconditions, and hence few real-world applications are vulnerable, even if they use older and unpatched versions of SQLite.

This 2. precondition is literally one of the idiomatic usage of sqlite that they've suggested on their site: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

Ai is a she. Ai is a common given name for girls in Japanese.

Rust doesn't require you to think about concurrency if you don't use it either. For global variables you just throw in a thread_local. No unsafe required.

The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.

It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.

Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.

You can't learn these from either Gaza or Ukraine. Neither is over. Not even close to an end. Both are longer and the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.

About the `if else` producing a value matter. Well, if you look at things that way, C can be said to be syntactic sugar of assembly, as for every C program you can write equivalent assembly. `if else` producing value is very useful because it allows you to write if else wherever a value is expected. You can call methods on an `if else` or pass one as an argument of function. When such an expression is sufficiently complex your equivalent code using non-value-producing `if else` would be a lot more verbose and unreadable.

This is equivalent to the `if let` syntax of Rust. In Rust at least this is treated as a special syntax but not a boolean. I once complained it's kinda confusing that it makes one think the `let` pattern matching syntax is a boolean expression which it is not, and the Rust people replied to me saying yeah it can be a boolean maybe at some point in the future. So yeah whether such syntax makes pattern matching a boolean really is just a matter of whether it's said to be one.

Browsers are applications that embed web technologies though?

Trades compression rate for much higher speed. This is really good trade-off for certain applications.

A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.

Nazi Germany had Jewish officials. I'm sure they didn't commit _genocide_ against Jews.

Then you have misunderstandings about urban warfare. Bakhmut is urban warfare. It's actually called an urban meat grinder, the worst form of urban warfare. Civilian casualties at Bakhmut is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than total casualties per different sources and estimates. 80% civilian casualties and 50% being women and children is not "at best urban warfare."

Hard to say. Americas have been far less dense in population than the old world, and colonizers brought old world tech with which they immediately could start to make use of the land, so they face far less scarcity. For any group of people this is hugely beneficial to their development and helpful in solving their conflicts. Yet we still see some of world's the worst slavey and genocides there. Also today's Latin American isn't world famous for high living standards.

I was once forced to use older (but not deprecated) LTS Ubuntu and I hated it. New software come out and you're gonna want to use them (often forced to use them), and they of course use newer dependencies. I had to do the distribution maintainer job and package a bunch of software myself.

Your parent comment labeled themselves off-topic but I'd say they were still pretty on it, but you're like way too off-topic. The point isn't whether some country or some people are real communists or not, but that an individual shouldn't be harassed for maintaining open source software and can somehow be linked to some rival of the West.

> My question to the FOSS community is why Firefox is not used to build more independent browsers the way Chrome is?

I actually looked into this. Say you consider yourself as part of the FOSS community, and want to build a new browser, and you start to look for your options. The only things readily available as libraries are webkit (currently owned and open sourced by Apple) and webkit-gtk (based on the former). Apple is like Apple and doesn't really want you to use their open source lib, so even though webkit-gtk team made it happen anyway, good luck if you want to do it yourself. If you decide to just use webkit-gtk, you've made a decision similar to lots of other members of the FOSS community in this area (luakit, the Rust webview crate, etc.). Another option is Qt WebEngine. It's based on Chromium. It's part of the Qt ecosystem and though I think you can use it as a standalone library, carving it out still requires some engineering. So these are the options that are available as libraries. And where are the Firefox ones? Servo makes it clear at the beginning of The Servo Book that it isn't available as a library yet. And Gecko? Firefox source doesn't even include a directory named gecko. It's so tightly coupled with the other parts that you'll need a lot of engineering to carve it out. And this is in contrast to Blink, the engine of Chromium, which is nicely placed in its own directory, having its own webpage with some learning resources.

I think this solves his problem. He said he wants a read function that turns the unsafe buffer into a safe buffer, and this API does that.

IIRC it's not that hard to convince the compiler to give you a safe buffer from a MaybeUninit. However, this type has really lengthy docs and makes you question everything you do with it. Thinking through all this is painful but it's not like you don't have to it with C.

Before opening up in 70s, China had acquired the ability to build by itself: huge numbers of machine guns and grenades, tanks, fighter planes, rockets and satellites (aka missiles), nukes.

These minus nukes and missiles plus battleships is pre-WWII Japan.

This may be helpful if you're curious why so many countries that choose free market instead of Communism after WWII are still not industrialized today.

Chinese is one of the offical languages of Singapore.

Wait, I have the impression that water torturing is either US or Soviet invention?

If the "just a string" is html, sql, python, etc., the programmer is making a mistake as string interpolation shouldn't be used for those things in the first place, and I really hope < 80% cases of "just a string" are among those.

"just a string" where the string really is just a string is really, really common though. Python is the go-to language for a lot of people (including me) if they just want to bash together a one-time-use script that will never see input from other people, and f-strings are incredibly useful in such cases for generating filenames, debugging messages, etc.