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mahmudon Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

Wouldn't trade Aus for the anywhere in the world, mate. I'm home.

mahmudon Arrested by Undercover Officers After Trying to Sell His Laptop Online

Australia is corrupt? Compared to where?

I immigrated here from the U.S. and the only contact I have with the "government" is my annual tax filing.

Where previously I had nearly 6-monthly encounters with police just for (I guess) being a black/Muslim man. "Random" traffic stops escalating to inquiries into everything about my life.

Long live Australia.

[Edit: I DO routinely run into my neighborhood Australian police on Fridays, that's because we frequent the same local bar and catch up for drinks and games of pool.]

mahmudon Economist Removed from Plane for Algebra

Indeed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh

mahmudon The Startup Zeitgeist

Of course Google Trends lags behind, it tracks waves of trends as they ripple through the public consciousness. YC applicants are a small, and a very technically advanced, minority of the larger population.

mahmudon Why I am betting on Julia (2014)

You can externalize Common Lisp type specialization with its own platform-specific file full of DEFTYPE and/or declaim forms.

Read Henry Baker's paper on the CL-84 type inference engine. The intellectual ancestor of all modern dynamic PL optimization.

mahmudon Why I am betting on Julia (2014)

[Edit: Julia prides itself in being a fully generic language. From its paper:

"Generic functions have appeared in several object systems in the past, notably CLOS [15] and Dylan [28]. Julia is distinguished from these in that it uses generic functions as its primary abstraction mechanism, putting it in the company of research languages like Diesel [10] and Cecil [9]." :-) ]

Behold!

  CL-USER> (defun f (x) (declare (single-float x)) (* x x))
  
  F
  CL-USER> (compile 'f)
  
  F
  NIL
  NIL
  CL-USER> (disassemble 'f)
  
  ; disassembly for F
  ; Size: 37 bytes. Origin: #x10048EACEC
  ; CEC:       498B4C2460       MOV RCX, [R12+96]               ; thread.binding-stack-pointer
                                                                ; no-arg-parsing entry point
  ; CF1:       48894DF8         MOV [RBP-8], RCX
  ; CF5:       0F28D1           MOVAPS XMM2, XMM1
  ; CF8:       F30F59D1         MULSS XMM2, XMM1
  ; CFC:       660F7ED2         MOVD EDX, XMM2
  ; D00:       48C1E220         SHL RDX, 32
  ; D04:       4883CA19         OR RDX, 25
  ; D08:       488BE5           MOV RSP, RBP
  ; D0B:       F8               CLC
  ; D0C:       5D               POP RBP
  ; D0D:       C3               RET
  ; D0E:       0F0B10           BREAK 16                        ; Invalid argument count trap
  NIL

mahmudon Why I am betting on Julia (2014)

  CL-USER> (defun f (x) (* x x))
  
  F
  CL-USER> (f 2.0)

  4.0
  CL-USER> (disassemble 'f)
  
  ; disassembly for F
  ; Size: 37 bytes. Origin: #x1002B10BDC
  ; BDC:       498B4C2460       MOV RCX, [R12+96]               ; thread.binding-stack-pointer
                                                                ; no-arg-parsing entry point
  ; BE1:       48894DF8         MOV [RBP-8], RCX
  ; BE5:       488BD3           MOV RDX, RBX
  ; BE8:       488BFB           MOV RDI, RBX
  ; BEB:       41BBB0020020     MOV R11D, 536871600             ; GENERIC-*
  ; BF1:       41FFD3           CALL R11
  ; BF4:       488B5DF0         MOV RBX, [RBP-16]
  ; BF8:       488BE5           MOV RSP, RBP
  ; BFB:       F8               CLC
  ; BFC:       5D               POP RBP
  ; BFD:       C3               RET
  ; BFE:       0F0B10           BREAK 16                        ; Invalid argument count trap
  NIL
  *

mahmudon Humanae

Way too cute.

mahmudon For Some Men, Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lifestyle Guru

This is a very cynical view to take. Much of your life is shaped by emulating people you have never known directly. And for the better.

Every time you read a book, you're engaging in a dialogue with someone you have likely never known personally. Be it the author, or the characters of fictional works.

Your heroes span time and space, find them everywhere, even among billionaires.

mahmudon For Some Men, Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lifestyle Guru

That is not what I got from the article at all. It's about people being inspired to live a fuller life by someone they look up to. Setting time aside for reflection, self-improvement, and giving back.

mahmudon A hunt for the government's oldest computer

Unix the kernel is from the 70s. Unix the userland is from today. Unix the API is eternal! :-)

mahmudon A hunt for the government's oldest computer

What you consider today "Windows" is actually Windows NT. Dave Cuttler was a lead architect of both NT and VMS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Cuttler and a core of VMS team exited en masse to work on NT. In fact, he coined the term "WNT" as a play on "VMS", each letter is a successor to the corresponding one. (c.f. IBM <==> HAL)

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

mahmudon Engineers of Jihad: Connection between Violent Extremism and Education

This is the best explanation.

Besides engineering, the is another field that offers similar opportunities for upward mobility: medicine.

But medicine has a humanizing nature, just by virtue of having the betterment of the human condition as its main concern.

There are, of course, exceptions, like Ayman Alzawahiri.

mahmudon Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

mahmudon Clojure Compilation: Parenthetical Prose to Bewildering Bytecode (2014)

This is insensitive and rude.

1) His comment is already dead'ed.

2) Do you think he _chooses_ to write like that? You already know he has a mental condition that he can't help. The onus is on you to either ignore him, or extend to him some human charity and focus on the bits that "make sense" to you.

mahmudon Show HN: I've been writing daily TILs for a year

I use a Google Drive directory full of markdown notes for this purpose. Edit with Writeily, the amazing Android markdown editory, or Macdown on desktop. Done.

mahmudon Love Resembles Addiction

We didn't. I met a girl overseas and within 24 hours we moved in together. Obsessive, all encompassing, "can't take my eyes off you" love.

I moved continents to be with her; 8 years together, married for 4.

Then suddenly, early last year, it all fell apart as quickly as it started. Finalizing divorce next month.

It was crazy, but I feel blessed to have experienced it. We're still good friends, but the thrill is gone, well and truly. I was actually relieved when she said she was having an affair. Good, I thought, better you than me; now let's end this.

mahmudon Code.google.com was shut down, Go packaging is broken

How long have you been in the software industry? Github would be lucky to be half its current size in 5 years, if it's not entirely gone by then.

mahmudon Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error

Right, meant to say "the platform that powers this site".

Arc itself is an interpreter written in Racket. The site runs on racket.

mahmudon Herbie: Automatically rewrites expressions to minimize floating point error

The language that this site is written in.

mahmudon Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

Good on ya, Jacques.

mahmudon Peter Naur has died

The Wikipedia page does a good enough job. It shouldn't take more than 1-3 pages, it's a fairly simple concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form#Examp...

I stumbled into compilers by accidentally buying the Dragon book as a teen. BNF part I got through fairly quickly.

mahmudon Modern Perl 4th Edition is out, ebook version is free

Or you can edit it yourself.

mahmudon Modern Perl 4th Edition is out, ebook version is free

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatic_%28programmer%29

It's fairly common in hacker culture to use pseudonyms.

mahmudon Objects All the Way Down

> At some level you need to add actual integers together. For that you need to access the internal representation of both integers at once

Not necessarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding

mahmudon Kashmir: A statically typed Lispy language compiling to Go

Not really.

I have been to Kashmir. All I associate with it is sheer beauty. Just ignore the two big babies with the big guns, fighting over it.

mahmudon FastMail under DDoS Attack

Hang in there, mate. Love your work :-)

mahmudon Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

Since when is content theft "hacking"?

mahmudon Cars That Talk to Each Other Are Much Easier to Spy On

Yes, but it's not a constant, but more of a configurable option; change can be made trivially, and as often as needed.

Unix init scripts for networking can do MAC changes for you every time an interface goes up.

mahmudon Cars That Talk to Each Other Are Much Easier to Spy On

MAC address can be easily changed, with ifconfig(8). Nearly every Unix has an ioctl(2) request for this. So does NT.

But on mobile you might need a "rooted" device.

I have the following script in my OS X toolbox to allow me to connect to public WiFis for longer than allowed time.

  #!/bin/bash

  sudo ifconfig en1 ether `openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'`