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koenigdavidmjon Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust

If I recall correctly, they did a machine-assisted conversion of the Go compiler from C to Go using a similar technique. They wrote a compiler for C to Go, only bothering to handle the particulars of that one codebase, and changing the C if required. This emitted very un-idiomatic Go code, which they could then clean up as required.

What they got immediately was a few classes of bug gone. No more memory leaks, and NPEs and out-of-bounds errors are now defined to fail in a nicer way. Then they could spend time making their new code more idiomatic.

koenigdavidmjon Casio F-91W: The strangely ubiquitous watch (2011)

Can someone recommend something close to this but with a countdown timer? I use that a hell of a lot more than a stopwatch.

koenigdavidmjon Ask HN: Why Isn't Open Source Voting Software Mandated?

Parent could be talking about the scanning and tabulation. In theory, there shouldn’t be anything problematic with “you vote on paper, and then slide it through a scanner, from whence it goes into a sealed bin”. Then you can still hand-recount.

koenigdavidmjon CISA: The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history

I’m in Kansas—we had a mark-and-scan thing this year. Maybe it’s not that way statewide?

koenigdavidmjon American Airlines Is Quietly Bringing Back the 737Max

Alaska isn’t exclusively Boeing ever since they bought out Virgin America and its A320 fleet.

koenigdavidmjon EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media

Sort of off topic, but I recall a DOS game my dad played that was kind of like a Roguelike but with rudimentary top-down graphics, where you explored a castle. Anyone know what it is?

koenigdavidmjon Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

ZH was talking about coronavirus way earlier than anyone else, which is bound to happen if you don’t validate as well—sometimes you do strike gold.

A comment I saw once about them was “ZH has reported five of the last three catastrophes”.

koenigdavidmjon Charles Lindbergh is the reason the U.S. doesn't have cameras in the courtroom

Insufficient evidence to convict someone else is not sufficient evidence to convict you. They’d still have to convict a jury of your peers that you did so.

koenigdavidmjon Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

It is a legitimate improvement to see everything that happened when you were offline. At that point you're not supporting XMPP; you're supporting "XMPP with some pixie dust to save that and let it be viewed, which is in a totally different place than your live chats".

Slack is a not-great implementation of a good idea, including a use case that IRC and XMPP don't meet. Tulip is a better implementation of that good idea, plus yet another good idea.

koenigdavidmjon Graalphp: An Efficient PHP Implementation Built on GraalVM

So I work at Oracle, but as an engineer. These are of course my own thoughts and I’m not representing OCI.

As far as I know, there’s no difference between any of the clouds as far as basic payment structure. If you don’t want to be locked in on a contract, you just give a credit card and pay the publicly posted rate. Exactly how are you a hostage in that position?

koenigdavidmjon St Helena laws for inhabitants 1672

https://apnews.com/83d5e39462164327a861ba34dcb3752c

A slightly more modern example—Iceland had a problem with misbehaving youth that they essentially solved by eliminating opportunities for idleness and strongly encouraging them to be in structured activity at most possible times.

koenigdavidmjon Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014)

If you know that a method isn't virtual, calling that method is just a function call with an extra argument for 'this'. If it's virtual, you have to look it up in a vtable, probably dereferencing two pointers in the process and making it harder on your instruction fetcher.

Java makes a lot of common classes final (e.g. String and Optional) so that it can avoid this. As I understand it, it's also got a lot of pixie dust to predict this some of the time, but then you can't rely on it.

koenigdavidmjon Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps

Their money-making model is that the low-effort listicles pay for the real journalists.

koenigdavidmjon NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975

The alternative is a private security force having arrest power or otherwise using force over this public area. That’s not necessarily a win.

koenigdavidmjon Student group leader arrested on suspicion of inciting secession in HK

The Northern Ireland approach would work if China had any sense of shame. The UK rules of engagement were tied to the idea that some atrocities would be embarrassing if they were in the morning paper the next day.

It helps if the area to be governed is full of sympathetic, English-speaking westerners with a lot of family ties back to the oppressing nation. That’s why this would never work in Xinjiang. It’s slightly less unlikely in HK.

koenigdavidmjon Schemastore.org – schemas for all commonly known JSON file formats

SQLite is the place that (to my knowledge) was the first to do these "railroad diagrams". Here are all of theirs (though they're also available inside the documentation): https://sqlite.org/syntaxdiagrams.html

koenigdavidmjon Realtime Starlink Satellite Map

That's a v2 feature.

koenigdavidmjon First photo of HS2 tunnel boring machines

Demonym

koenigdavidmjon Thousands are monitoring police scanners during the George Floyd protests

Incidentally, the use of radios is unsporting in Kansas, and therefore forbidden (unless you’re hunting coyotes—they’re considered a pest, so you can pretty much do whatever you want).

koenigdavidmjon Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?

People like us are tempted to take intro classes on pure ego. It doesn’t get you as far as you think. Rule of thumb: study for two hours per credit-hour in class.

koenigdavidmjon Supreme Court says state may enforce some restrictions on religious gatherings [pdf]

> Allah = Christian God = Yahweh

There is no consensus on this, either among Muslims or Trinitarians.

koenigdavidmjon SCI Runs OpenVMS on x86-64

There is this:

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/solutions/hpc.html

There’s a set of shell scripts linked in there to demo this all, but it uses some feature sets that I haven’t heard of at all.

Disclosure: I’m also an OCI employee, but this post is my own opinion.

koenigdavidmjon China signals plan to take full control of Hong Kong

Apples to apples--I'm comparing Hong Kong in 1995 to the rest of the mostly-self-governing British territories in 1995. I'm not comparing them to India in the 1940s (as the most obvious example of the Brits' abuse of other peoples they ruled).

koenigdavidmjon China signals plan to take full control of Hong Kong

Sure, I'm not saying it's "free and fair elections", but it had a functioning, western-style court system, a level of free speech recognizable to any part of the west, things like that.

And given that the UK itself has most of these things, I highly doubt they'd arbitrarily deny them to a dependent territory without good reason (especially when their other territories all have some measure of representative government). Other comments describing Chinese threats provide one possible good reason.

koenigdavidmjon China signals plan to take full control of Hong Kong

They've been able to get away with whatever they wanted in Xinjiang because it has no bearing on their economy. But HK has ties to the west, and enough people old enough to remember something resembling liberal government.

HK's only play at this point seems to be the Northern Ireland strategy--be as ungovernable as possible, and rely on China having a bit of shame. I don't see that working, though--the UK in Northern Ireland had a reputation to maintain. I fear that turning HK into a prison camp would do to China's reputation exactly what they want it to do.

koenigdavidmjon China signals plan to take full control of Hong Kong

Yes, and we all knew this was coming...then. In the events of the past few months, however, the UK appealed to China to keep their word, and the response that this was no longer a British concern. So we know they intend to do whatever they can.

koenigdavidmjon France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours

Modern racism probably is focused much more on cultural attributes, perceived to be universal or common among certain people, than melanin level. That makes your test useless for the most obvious thing a hate speech law would seek to protect.

koenigdavidmjon France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours

To use a US example, I doubt there are many perjury charges prosecuted related to DMCA takedowns.

koenigdavidmjon Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down stay-at-home order that closed businesses

I think we all believe that there are rights that should Never Ever be done away with, no matter what the cost. And if the government asked to violate it, that's a sign that they are inherently being untrustworthy. Suppose that a government said that it was necessary to knowingly inflict a cruel and unusual punishment in a particularly egregious circumstance. I think you'd agree that it is insufficient to let the government do this, and let the courts sort it out in a few years, well after the fact.

koenigdavidmjon Update to L.A.'s stay-at-home orders

I can see this easily. Unemployment is insurance—it’s not designed for more than a small number of people actually using it at once. Once that money is gone, and the federal unemployment backup fund is gone, and the food bank has to turn people away, a good number of them will steal in order to eat.