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thwd

242 karma · joined January 9, 2015

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thwd··on DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
It's a write-only language.
thwd··on Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?
Agreed. Once long (10+ years) ago, google3 may have been peak codebase. Nowadays, not so much.

Edit: I guess it also depends at what level of abstraction you work. High: can be easy breezy. Low: oh boy.

thwd··on Testing the memory safe Rust implementation of Sudo/Su
Well, I can't speak for you, of course. I also haven't seen that code you reviewed. And I won't try to evangelize you. I'd say, in a nutshell, that Go is readable and reviewable because its grammar consists of the C-style basis that most every imperative language has, and not much more. It's the lack of features that makes it very 'WYSIWYG'.
thwd··on Testing the memory safe Rust implementation of Sudo/Su
Huh? Go has its tradeoffs, some people don't like it and that's fine. But nobody can deny that it is by far one of the most 'readable and reviewable' (the argument in question) mainstream languages.
thwd··on PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement
Merging as a one-keyword feature for all flavors of SQL is almost impossible.

It gets hairy when you have columns with composite types. E.g. depending on database, records can be JSON objects, protobufs, structs, or other composite types, like tuples.

It is possible to define semantics to merge each of these, but they vary and the merge operation becomes verbose to allow to handle each weirdness of each of these underlying types.

Merging is also sensitive to NULL vs 0 vs a DEFAULT, plus in some databases, NULL is still allowed even when a column is marked NOT NULL.

You'd almost need a sub-language for the merging operation, specifying how to handle each corner case.

thwd··on PRQL: a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement
Some databases like ArangoDB (https://www.arangodb.com/) allow you to use Javascript instead of SQL.

However, using a type-unsafe (read weak typing), turing-complete language introduces the usual problems we know and love, such as infinite loops, runtime type errors, exceptions, and the like.

Personally, I'm looking forward to a WASM runtime for databases -- so we can run webassembly on the database. This COULD be carefully designed to be statically checked and, possibly, make it really hard to write runaway loops.

thwd··on I stopped working on black hole information loss
Gravity is infinite at the singularity (the middle of the black hole). Everything gravitates towards that point. Our best understanding is that no information can exist here.

Black holes "evaporate" over time -- by emitting Hawking radiation. This is probably where the information goes, in my layman understanding.

thwd··on Cdecl: C Gibberish ↔ English
Go solves 99% of the problem quite nicely. You don't often deref pointers in Go, because of auto-addressing. E.g. there's no arrow operator as in C, the dot derefs when necessary.

I would say `v := (p.)` could've been the deref operator, but what do I know.

thwd··on All Horses Are the Same Color
I understand and agree but read carefully. The assumption _is_ the (entire) hypothesis. It is not existentially quantified or set in the base-case. It is the entire hypothesis.
thwd··on All Horses Are the Same Color
> We will show, by induction, that [for all sets] of n horses, every horse in [each] set has the same color.

> Now [assume that] for all sets of n horses, every horse in [each] set has the same color.

QED.

This is just tautology. No further analysis needed, really.

(If your proof includes your hypothesis as an assumption, then it must be a proof by contradiction.)

EDIT: Before you refute, read again carefully. The assumption _is_ the hypothesis. It is not existentially quantified or set in the base case. It is the entire, universally quantified hypothesis.

thwd··on Facebook Recruiter Correspondence
That's only if you equate the recruiter to a minimum wage worker and yourself to their customer. There's a superiority bias in that rhetoric. The recruiter is a well-employed tech worker. And you're not their client or superior.
thwd··on Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
Personal opinion: Google carefully treads the gray lines of legality and morals/ethics. Facebook leadership, on the other hand, decided a long time ago that they care about legality only. They seem very proud of that decision, too.
thwd··on Sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation
You have a box with random garbage in it. I have a box with a football in it. We entangle the football and the garbage. You stand far away from me. If you randomly open your box now, you may either see a football or random garbage. If I call you on the phone (classically) and tell you to open the box tonight at precisely 8:12pm, you're guaranteed to find a football then and hence, I will have the garbage.

There's no parsing; it's all or nothing.

thwd··on A Bank Behind the Fintech Boom
"The Bank Behind High-Interest Loan Apps"
thwd··on Clear is better than clever
Good prose often involves misdirection. Making the reader believe something to be one way, while it was something else all along. Then, in a built up climax, undo the knot in a single pull to blow the reader's mind. That, to me, is the antithesis of the article's argument.
thwd··on We Can Do Better Than SQL
They're saying that both of those expressions are valid, not equivalent.

SELECT count(star) FROM table

and

SELECT star FROM table

Are both valid, not equivalent.

Furthermore, listing any kind of set depends on some ordering, be it random.

thwd··on A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions
It's much easier! Just call ethereum's `crypto.ToECDSA` [1] with a big-endian encoded 256-bit unsigned integer of interest, e.g. 0x1 or 0x100, as described in the article. Try the resulting private key.

[1] https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/crypto#ToE...

thwd··on Fast Directory Listing on Linux
But why? Why create a tool that does `git status` 10x faster?
thwd··on Systemd is bad parsing
Array-indexing in C and C++ _is_ pointer arithmetic! It's syntactic sugar. Array-indexing in safe languages is bound checked iff the compiler can't prove the index value to always be in-bounds.
thwd··on Systemd is bad parsing
Pointer arithmetic is abstracted away for _safety_, not convenience. You can read about in e.g. Go's FAQ.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32700999/pointer-arithme...

thwd··on gRPC-Web is going GA
HTTP/2 is only necessary if you want to stream, most of gRPC can be implemented over traditional request/response cycles.
thwd··on gRPC-Web is going GA
Note that trailers have existed since HTTP 1.1.
thwd··on Up to Two-Thirds of Bitcoin Transactions Have No Economic Value
In the comparison with Ethereum: invoking a smart contract function does not require value transfer beyond gas (transaction cost). Most such calls carry no ether attached, this is how it's supposed to be.
thwd··on Crypto Coin Tether Defies Logic on Kraken’s Market, Raising Red Flags
AFAIK Tether is always liquid because the coins are minted on-demand. There is never scarcity. No incentive to provide immediacy.
thwd··on Crypto Coin Tether Defies Logic on Kraken’s Market, Raising Red Flags
This! Nobody that uses Tether wants it to be more or less than exactly 1 USD. Its value (its utility, its function) is to equal 1 USD. Anyone placing an order way above or below 1 USD can expect it to never fille and even if it did, the market would correct immediately because it is in the interest of the majority to be tethered to the dollar.
thwd··on Crypto Coin Tether Defies Logic on Kraken’s Market, Raising Red Flags
Darkpool orders don't show while pending but once filled they show in the historical trades dataset.
thwd··on Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware
It's 'Tensor Processing Unit' as far as I know.
thwd··on Elite Dating Apps Threaten to Make America’s Wealth Gap Worse
This. And it's written in a cancerous SEO-advertising prose, spelling out "The League" verbatim once every paragraph.

> But the med student says he prefers Tinder, a site with a reputation for facilitating hookups, and the League.

That suffixed ", and the League".

thwd··on Anna: A Fast, Scalable, Flexibly Consistent Key-Value Store
http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/jmh/papers/anna_ieee18.pdf
thwd··on 132 year old message in a bottle found on West Australian beach
This looks like the work of a schizophrenic. It sounds demeaning but I've seen similarly "encoded" messages, often around some common item (like a cigarette pack). They write them during psychosis and later find them and obsess over their decryption.
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