markrages

I think that's brain damage from years of embedded C.

Poe's law demonstrated.

Python doesn't have a do..while loop, so when you want to do a thing at least once, the simplest replacement is starting the loop with "while 1:" and ending the loop with "if ... break".

I disapprove of any linter that flags this idiom.

"The difference between underengineering and overengineering is that underengineering can be fixed."

I was actually looking into that this week due to chip shortages... it is not cost effective, but if the alternative is sitting and waiting a year for the specialized switch controller to become available again, that NRE doesn't look too bad.

Does "-5e4" really evaluate to "-5000" in this language?

I notice you consistently spell it "enineering", without the first "g" that everybody else uses. Is there a reason for this?

Parent comment is evergreen. It could have been written in 1996.

I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart history, the whole of software development is moving toward the largest sizes the technology will allow.

I can't find any definition of inheritent. What do you mean by this word?

Controversy: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...

I'd much rather watch Uncle Doug resurrect old guitar amps.

I wish he would do more troubleshooting. He replaces all the tubes, all the caps, all the resistors, and now the radio magically works!

Carbon brushes are normal motor design. Replacements are available at real hardware stores that haven't completely devolved to housewares.

> At one point I was interested to know if there were versions of the paging technology (for some critical application?) that tried to solve this by issuing multiple redundant messages over some amount of time, and the pager ignoring the redundant ones after the 1st one had been received?

This is in fact how pagers work.

NAPA filters are rebranded Wix filters. Quite good, actually.

That's technician stuff and won't be taught as engineering.

Maybe a BSEET degree would cover it.

Same with Firefox on Ubuntu 18.04. Completely different tech stack, same result. Must be standards-compliant jittering!

My mouse has no scroll wheel (it's a trackball) and there are some websites that I basically cannot use.

What does "serie" mean? It's not an English word.

Monks copying texts would be a lot more interruptible than the kind of creative intellectual work that programmers do.

It is a funny spin on that aphorism.

Consistency doesn't always serve readability.

In written English, you can convey the same basic facts with a hundred different sentences. A good author will choose the one that best conveys emphasis and subtle gradations of meaning to the attentive reader.

Code is also written for humans to read, so the best written code will use all the available facilities of the language to convey meaning to the reader.

> As an aside, who exactly was the target viewing demographic for Garfield? Garfield was never funny for me as a kid. Never.

Garfield is Jay Leno in comics form. More about good cheer than actual humor.

It's easier to follow a program's execution when you can be sure the whitespace will never lie to you.

You can never have a "goto fail" kind of bug.

For the sealed-bottle experience, you can buy the commercially supported Black Magic Probe hardware. Still open-source and better integrated into gdb than Segger etc.

If you're strapped for cash you can run Blackmagic Probe firmware on a $2 bluepill board for JTAG with a fully open-soure tool set. (I run it on a $2 esp8266 for wireless JTAG. Open-source gives many options!)

Free as in speech, almost free as in beer. Less than a single (good) beer.

Why are comments enabled on that web page? What possible good could come from it?

You can't distinguish between freshly-brewed coffee and microwaved instant coffee?

RFC 2324

Do you consider spreading to other more vulnerable people as a bad COVID outcome?