kutkloon7

Funny that these things are mostly referred to as 'emulator bugs'. It would be more accurate to call them bugs in the game.

It's a bit like the situation with C, where some code depends on a specific outcome of undefined behavior.

With this, I don't mean that the programmer of the game is to blame. If you are developing for a single system, it is reasonable to use some of the properties of this system. In this specific situation, it might even be of interest for Nintendo, since it makes it harder to pirate games.

If one would like to avoid a situation like this, it seems best to develop for an emulator with unreliable properties (the principle of fail-fast: crash and let the developer know that he makes an assumption that is not guaranteed to hold), but which implements the ISA faithfully.

Not sure why this is being downvoted?

From the page which the top comment from two years [1] ago linked to: "This statement is based upon a terrible misunderstand of Postel's robustness principle. I knew Jon Postel. He was quite unhappy with how his robustness principle was abused to cover up non-compliant behavior, and to criticize compliant software.

Jon's principle could perhaps be more accurately stated as 'In general, only a subset of a protocol is actually used in real life. So, you should be conservative and only generate that subset. However, you should also be liberal and accept everything that the protocol permits, even if it appears that nobody will ever use it.'"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9827669

Nice post. It really surprises me that someone who writes assembly for fun doesn't know that dividing by constants can be done faster, nor that dividing/multiplying by powers of two can be done even faster.

On the topic of hand-optimizing or not: There always seem to be two camps. The first say: "Never bother with assembly. Let the compiler do optimizing. If anything, try to write code that the compiler can optimize.".

The second camp always states something like "It is not that hard to outperform the compiler.".

I guess the complicated pipeline models are mostly the reason for the complexity. I'm not sure how much compilers do to avoid pipeline stalls though. For example, how detailed the execution model that they use is. It shouldn't be too complicated, since most compilers (as far as I know) don't differentiate between different processors, while different processors have a different execution model.

This is downvoted, but actually a legitimate question. Often, counterfeits do work, but just don't match the specifications with respect to voltage rating, durability, etc.

Ken Shirriff is amazing. His blog entries are really worth reading.

Well, maybe 'toxicity' is a stupid concept. Is the previous phrase, for example, toxic? The examples don't seem to distinguish between 'hateful' and 'not socially accepted'.

Also, a lot of these depend so much on context that it's not even possible to classify.

"What's up, niggers?" Can be either classified as extremely racist (when a white supremacist uses this language, for example), or as colloquial language used in Afro-American culture.

Same thing with calling people chinks, crackers, etc. It is all much more acceptable when you're using a derogatory term for your own race.

"What's up, bitches?" Is about the same. Pretty much accepted in colloquial use, but not so much when it is used by a men to address women (this is not a complaint - I agree mostly that it is mostly a misogynistic term in this specific context).

> I don't know whether you are some miserable provocateur or just an idiot.

I like to think of myself of neither of those, but if I have to choose I'd rather be a happy idiot than a miserable provocateur.

> I see that you maybe were alluding to the fact that blind people can't SEE the page, but you ignore that they can READ it with assistance of software/hardware in a variety of ways. The article goes in detail about that.

I noticed that, yeah.

The point that I failed to get across (OK, maybe I was being a provocateur - or maybe I was just too lazy to properly make my point, I don't remember) was that I think that blind people should have a better alternative than a website which was primarily designed as a visual thing, but then made accessible for them as an afterthought.

When you are making a site accessible for blind people, do it well and provide a separate page for them, without the visual and textual cruft. For governmental websites, it might be even appropriate to have a dedicated phone number.

Those filenames look terrible to me.

BRAFWTNEGASSAY doesnt make any sense. To distinguish between the filenames you actually have to read the full filename, and with such long filenames chances are they won't fully be displayed, so that you have 2013-06-26_BRAFWTNEGASSAY_Plasmid-Cellline-100-1MutantFrac... For the first four files.

Keeping cruft out of your filenames seems like a much, much better way to name files. Also, most systems keep track of the creation data, no need to keep it in the filename. I think it's better to give files an id.

I don't really think that calling the right-wing 'nazis' is appropriate in most of the cases, but I still found this to be pretty funny.

I actually think it was written really well. It could have been better, of course. But I probably would have done a worse job at it.

Making websites for the blind sounds a lot like 'making music for the deaf'. It can be done and people are doing it, but it just seems like the most inefficient thing to do.

This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen).

Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

Well, one could argue that this is how competition works. If someone else can manufacture the same thing at lower cost, they deserve the market advantage.

Of course, this idea doesn't give credit to the inventors and benefits copycats. I just wanted to mention the idea.

Good for them. I never understood why people are paying Elsevier anyway. It seems like everything they do can be done for free.

Well, I don't agree with the author of the article in that I do think that Latex does offer an advantage in many of the use cases. In any case, any student in STEM is supposed to write some reports, and LaTeX is the only choice that makes sense, since there are not many other options with the same support for mathematical typesetting.

However, you're twisting his words a bit. He says that it's not good to learn a new tool if you have an old one which can do the job. Not that you should avoid things for which you need new tools.

I'm all for learning new skills and ideas. However, I hate learning new tools. The ideas in web development are not hard at all. However, there is an idiotic amount of trendy tools and programming languages, and that is something I would object to, because it costs a lot of people a lot of effort.

Actually, all offers for entry level programming, devops, or IT consultant jobs were 2.5k at 40 hours/week. I have the feeling that a lot of them just hire anyone who graduated in a STEM field, either graduate or undergraduate.

Now, I can probably make a more as a financial consultant, but I don't have an interest in this (and the thread is about programmer salaries).

Salaries in the US seem really high compared to those in the Netherlands. I have 2 bachelor and 2 master degrees in STEM. I made €10/hour (about $12) giving private math and programming lessons, while I earn roughly €13/hour (about $15) at my entry level job (after tax deduction).

I would expect my salary to grow at my current job. I also feel that I would have been hired at my current job if I just had my bachelor degree.

Funny how a lot of people have a strong and exotic opinion about the best way to use a mouse/keyboard, but I've never seen anyone actually use a dvorak or any other exotic layout. My personal fetish is to use a standard US keyboard with a trackpoint. The only thing I hate is that I have to move my hands to get to the arrows, home, end, delete, page up and page down keys.

I will probably get downvoted, but I find it annoying that articles which are relevant only in the US omit this simple fact in the title. The US is an important country, but only about 5% of the world population lives there.

I don't know if I'm in an especially good mood today, but it's quite a while ago I read something that I found as amusing as this.

I'm actually really impressed by the phishing approach.

Isn't impersonating someone illegal, just like publishing a response in a private email conversation?

It's not bad, there are just some gaps. I expect a follow-up paper which explains everything thoroughly. I feel like my masters thesis should have started after that paper.

My masters thesis is based on a single arXiv paper. I didn't know that arXiv had this questionable reputation, but it sure explains a lot.

The project is to make an FPGA implementation of a technique presented in an arXiv paper. The paper had some big gaps, so I had to spend a lot of time researching the technique, and I had very little time to spend on the actual implementation.

Even during my masters I have always felt that it was not done or at least questionable to cite wikipedia. However, wikipedia is often an excellent source for a first read on a new topic. The next step should then be to read wikipedia's sources, and slowly expand your view on the subject.

However, sometimes it happens that you read first about a topic on wikipedia, and worked something out on the information you found there, before you had time to consult wikipedia's sources. In this case you definitely should cite wikipedia.

I remember a recruiter that tried to convince me some job would be interesting for me: "It's really complicated work. We use algorithms." after which she dropped a dramatic pause to let me recover from that shock.

While I was typing this comment ghostly pointed out some great blog entries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901602

I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand.

There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code.

Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what compression ratios you get on 'apps'), and it should be possible to cut it down to a few MB.

What I Didn't Learn So Far as a Programmer: - How to properly encode text

As a layman, I am skeptical. This is very similar to the promises that were made regarding 3d printing of other materials, and those weren't quite fulfilled.

Like many hyped new techniques, they end up as techniques that are almost good enough to be practical.