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jvanenkon Trouble at the Koolaid Point

You should really really REALLY read the article.

jvanenkon Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

It's also doesn't work well for hyphenated words: 'step-by-step' and 'hastily-implemented' are flashed up all at once.

(Regardless of whether or not those are properly hyphenated.)

Edit: But this is still very cool.

jvanenkon The Unpaid Bill that Launched a Thousand Starships

as meaningless as most works of science fiction.

jvanenkon Printable True Bugs Wait Posters

If you have clang available, the -fsanitize flag is also incredibly helpful for runtime analysis.

jvanenkon Evil people at mozilla

Based on the post's content, I have no idea what the complaint is. Can some one provide some more context?

jvanenkon My Hardest Bug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jnCABBaeY

Overly enthusiastic video demonstrating the issue for those who are curious. :)

jvanenkon On programming without malloc

A friend of mine wrote something up on this technique a while ago: http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/11/01/hey-c-is-a-functiona...

jvanenkon Because it needs to be said

Because of the timing, it's unlikely this was done in response to this incident, but CodeMash did update its code of conduct on September 26th.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/codemash/abX4UEL4vG4/e...

jvanenkon Humanity or gtfo

Or the circle you're working in is comprised of people from varying languages, countries, and backgrounds to whom "guys" might be at best ambiguous.

jvanenkon Coroutines in one page of C

I'm reminded of protothreads (http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/). I used protothreads some time ago on an embedded project to implement a (very small) HTTP server in only a few KB or RAM.

jvanenkon Don't Even Think of Using Encryption Software to Escape NSA Scrutiny

What your parent comment described is steganography. It's not strictly limited to images or videos.

    (1,2) (3,4) (10,7) (11,1) (12, 2)

jvanenkon Stop Using Linked Lists

Stop Using Linked-Lists (in areas where linked-lists are the wrong structure to use)

Edit: I should note this article's advice is really good advice if your focus is performance.

jvanenkon A New Approach to Databases — Simulating 10Ks of Spaceships on my laptop

Haskell has marvelous concurrent constructs. It's actually one of the few places where I end up thinking "wow, I'm glad I get to use threads here" and I'm not thinking it sarcastically.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/4.6.0.1/doc...

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/stm/2.4.2/doc/ht...

jvanenkon Tor exit node operator raided in Austria

Ah, I have no rights to encryption either then since ... you know ... child porn.

Or UPS for that matter.

jvanenkon Nexus 4 oversold, Google places many on back order

It's a full two days after the original order went through. Couldn't they know this information earlier?

jvanenkon Hey, C Is a Functional Language Too

> It's a cute example, but I can't see any scenario where its better or safer than heap use.

The author does explicitly point this out: "While I find this style strangely addictive, I don’t think I would advocate its general use."

jvanenkon 9/11 tragedy pager intercepts

> it amounts to an advertisement of a free service available

No it doesn't. Especially if it's unintentional.

jvanenkon How Stereotype Threat keeps women from working in SW — and how we can fight it

A paraphrasing of "other people have it off worse, so stop complaining" isn't an argument.

jvanenkon How Stereotype Threat keeps women from working in SW — and how we can fight it

That's a pretty strong claim to make without citing sources.

jvanenkon Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

I actually have some experience with GoogCustSvc now.

I bought a Nexus 7. It has touch-screen problems. They provided a way to contact them here (http://support.google.com/nexus/bin/request.py?contact_type=...).

I talked to the rep (after waiting about 30 minutes). They were helpful, direct, competent, and provided a way for me to contact the person I talked to via e-mail after the call was ended.

They organized a replacement device and even worked through the fact that I'd purchased the tablet from my brother-in-law.

If their future customer service offerings are the same as what I experienced last night, I have no concerns.

jvanenkon What’s to love about C?

> most people recognize that there is a place where C is really your only choice

But should it be?

jvanenkon OpenShift by Red Hat

last I checked, Heroku does have a free offering.

jvanenkon What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?

> That is the absolute major issue with doing safety-critical development right: it has a cost, that cost is very, very high, and few want to pay it.

This is absolutely true. The costs to manage complexity now seem high when software is being built. The costs of managing that complexity in the future are far higher and may have to be paid in lives.

jvanenkon What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?

My experience in aerospace has been that people still distrust optimizers. Generally, they are turned off. Same thing for things like CPU cache.

Not exactly relevant to this discussion, but good to keep in mind.

jvanenkon What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?

> Overall though, I think the most important thing is to have skilled developers who understand the tools, libraries and languages that they're using.

I work with C every day as an embedded developer. I've done a lot of safety critical work. By far the worst aspect of safety critical development is the complete inadequacy of many programmers who work on it.

The level of complexity that shows up in these system scares me. Even when introducing languages like Ada, people find a way to abuse them. Budgets get tight, schedules slip, and verification gets lax. These programmers are then the only people capable of dealing with the massively complex system they've built and the cycle repeats itself.

Ada's a great language, but it's not a panacea. I'm working on a language for embedded systems as well, but it's not going to ever fix the 'bad programmer' problem. The best I can hope to do is find ways to reduce the complexity of these systems through language features.

jvanenkon Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay

i buy lots of things i can just pirate.

jvanenkon GHC 7.4.1 is out. Now with kind polymorphism. Here's the release notes

Constraint synonyms are a welcome addition as well. Will really help clean up some messy signatures.

jvanenkon Designers are more valuable than programmers

eventually, at the top of the stack, there's some one who asked the question: "how are people going to interact with this?"

my hash table is useless if the users can't tickle the UI in such a way as to use the hash table.

jvanenkon Barnes & Noble pummels Microsoft patents with prior art

This is along the lines of what I was thinking. B&N is at the point where they have to make a last stand.

They really have little to lose by pursuing this case which really frees up their legal team politically.

jvanenkon [dead]

Friends in both Grand Rapids and Holland also felt it.