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std_throwawayon Total Nightmare: USB-C and Thunderbolt 3

> I have not seen a display or beamer that will accept DisplayPort input. Does such a thing even exist?

Highend displays with display port definitively exist. I'm not sure about beamers, though.

std_throwawayon A defense of C's null-terminated strings

I think it depends on the use case. In embedded systems bits consume energy and therefore increase cost. The battery of a satellite is much more expensive than a Chinese coal power plant.

Yes, "size_t" should be just about right for everybody except the guys who _need_ to program in C/C++ and Assembler due to the hard requirements of their systems. Not very many people but very important systems.

std_throwawayon A defense of C's null-terminated strings

But you start with a constant cost of 8 bits.

For 255 characters you lose 9.4 bits which is bigger than the cost of an 8 bit size field.

For 65535 characters you lose 378 bits which is much bigger than the cost of a 16 bit size field.

On the other hand you have only one string type for arbitrarily sized strings and most strings are short.

What would really be needed to be more space efficient for short and long strings is a size field with a variable length encoding. E.g. 1 byte for string lengths up to 64, 2 bytes for string lengths up to 8k, etc.

std_throwawayon A defense of C's null-terminated strings

Zero terminated strings make a lot of sense when programming 8 bit microcontrollers:

1) No protection exists there.

2) Abstraction costs too much.

3) Store it in Flash.

4) Be happy your characters may even use the 8th bit.

std_throwawayon Agromafia

Then why are they investigating foreign products?

std_throwawayon IncludeOS roadmap: tiny Node.js-style web services in highly efficient C++

At first it seemed strange that a Node.js-replacement needs a full IP stack including DHCP.

As far as I understood this, they are building a whole operating system to be run in a VM like QEMU which then acts like a Node.js-instance - except that it's programmed in C++ and linked as one whole exeutable which also is a complete OS.

I wonder how this compares to Docker or Sandstorm where the existing kernel API is used in a virtualized container instead of emulating a whole machine.

std_throwawayon Retina Macbook 2015 Teardown

Usually yes. There is even a little PCB between the mainboard and the chip to get enough area for the thousands of pins.

But this is not the case if they stack the flash chips with the controller chips. Then only a few external pins are needed for communication and power. But the flash chips actually need the silicon area for all those tiny flash cells.

std_throwawayon The Photoshop of Sound

People are already carrying their personal mobile surveillance devices everywhere they go.

std_throwawayon Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down

Bank money is also just a sequence of ones and zeroes when it is stored on the computers.

"Stealing" happens when the ownership of the money gets transferred to a third party without consent of the lawful owner.

This is what happens when bitcoins get stolen. They get transferred to somebody else and the global blockchain takes note of this. Yes you still have "your bits" but they are now worthless because nobody will accept them anymore.

std_throwawayon A/A testing

Your example shows that simple statistical tests aren't always that simple. Especially when talking about small effects.

What you really want are confidence intervals which show what would be a significant change. You can calculate that from your A-data and from your B-data. If they overlap you probably aren't quite there yet.

Comparing A/A vs. B or A/A/...A/A vs. B/B/...B/B is a poor man's approach to visualize the distribution of the mean values.

Things get further complicated when doing a lot of tests. If you do hundreds of A/B-Tests and a handful show a weakly significant result that may actually be a statistical fluke. The likelyhood that a wrong seemingly significant result is present when doing hundreds of tests can actually be pretty high. You should rerun these tests with fresh data and check for consistency, which in itself is some kind of A/A/B/B-test.

std_throwawayon How startup Fab died

Ebay works like this (and to a much lesser extent Amazon). Yet we still go to ebay to discover products and many people buy them on site.

std_throwawayon Introduction to the Common Language Runtime (2007)

I'm wondering how this relates to LLVM or JAVA bytecode.

std_throwawayon Writing Multithreaded Applications in C++

In that case you don't want to sleep. You want to wait until a condition (new data) or a timeout (100ms) occurs.

The reasoning is that you don't know how much data will arrive in the next 100ms and if you sleep either a buffer could overrun or something else could block. Therefore you need to flush the buffer either when enough data has accumulated or if a timeout has occured.