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unsignedqwordon Why don't companies use FreeBSD as much in production as Linux?

I'm confused by what you mean by "more portable." Do you mean that it runs on more CPU architectures and platforms? Or do you mean more driver support, etc.? BSD can run a rather diverse set of platforms: http://www.netbsd.org/ports/

unsignedqwordon Ask HN: What's on your RSS reader?

Thunderbird

unsignedqwordon How to Write Unmaintainable Code

There's a lengthy section in here on Hungarian notation and there's a statement in here that caught my eye:

"Flagrantly violate the Hungarian-esque concept that function parameters and other high visibility symbols must be given meaningful names, but that Hungarian type warts all by themselves make excellent temporary variable names."

A common mini-"Hungarianism" in most people's code is the naming convention of boolean variables and functions, usually by prefixing the name with 'is' + 'has' + 'can' and/or suffixing the name with a question mark (if the language allows it). I thought this was a near universal convention but every once in a while I come across code that doesn't follow this rule, to which I go - "Really?" (Although I will say that combining true Hungarian notation with that - e.g. bIsAbleToDoThing - seems too redundant.)

On a semi-related note, I wonder why such seemingly little slip-ups (not even the worst examples in the article, which are unlikely to find in the wild anyway) in the mere naming and formatting of things can become so irritating to us programmers. Why do things like Hungarian notation seem to hurt the readability of a program, despite usually just being the addition of just one letter to an identifier? You would think that we should just easily be able to ignore and look past these little things, but it's difficult not to notice them, even if you kind of get used to working on shitty code.

unsignedqwordon Windows 10 “Developer Mode”

I understand that you don't think computers should be effectively reduced to becoming 'black boxes' to most people, but I wouldn't necessarily agree that the simplification and abstraction of operating systems to average joes isn't exactly a bad thing. It's been happening for a very long time and I would think some of those advancements - inteded for the convenience of these 'average joes' - ended up gladly used by developers anyway. I feel it would be wrongful to call the wider audience 'idiots,' - these average joes might not be so average after all and have special understanding in fields that I don't.

Another thing is not just handling adults, but younger people. Of course there are some kids that may take a keen interest in OS internals, but then there are those who will keenly take advice they see on the internet to delete System32, so there's the need for some degree of 'safety'. Although I suppose I'm extrapolating a little, as it's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot in most OSes nowadays anyway, in spite of the default protections Windows/macOS offers.

unsignedqwordon What are your rabbit holes on the internet? (For instance, HN one we all share)

Twitter is a big one. Sometimes you just find that someone retweeted somebody else or that someone replied to them so you just peek into their page and you scroll down and occasionally find something interesting or funny; repeat until I'm tired of it.

unsignedqwordon Learn Vim by watching gifs

Didn't know that you could just use 'A' to append to the end of a line instead of doing '$a'. Neat!

unsignedqwordon Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming

The thing is that the tone of the article seems to suggest taking such an extreme: I mean, an "anti-if" campaign? There's like, only one sentence of concession near the end towards those unconvinced by the argument.

unsignedqwordon Hammerspoon – Powerful automation of OS X with Lua

AHK is a terribly designed language, but holy hell, you can do some nifty stuff with it. For instance, I like to download music from YouTube and SoundCloud using youtube-dl but I disliked having to open up and manually copy and pasting the URL, etc. I found an AHK script that gets the URL name of the current active Firefox window, edited it a little so that it pipes that URL into a batch file, and now if I find a song I like, all I have to do is hit a hotkey chord and after about 30 seconds, it's in my Music folder. It is a total hack - the kind of thing AHK was made for - but somehow it works!

unsignedqwordon C++14 for the Commodore 64 [video]

Well, you said it yourself: it's more readable; not to mention more easily maintainable and extensible. If we all sought to create the most terse code possible with no regard to any of the other important factors in creating 'good code', then we all might as well be writing everything in Pyth or APL.

EDIT: I wouldn't say that all assembly is unreadable or anything like that (for instance, I find inline assembly easier and more readable than using compiler intrinsics for stuff like AMD64 SIMD instructions). I'm just saying that having more code around isn't exactly always a bad thing.

unsignedqwordon Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

Intel SGX worries me much more than Denuvo.

unsignedqwordon The Renewed Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer: Avoiding ISA Bloat

Is there even any point of referring to an ISA as distinctly 'RISC' or 'CISC' anymore? Modern AMD64 'CISC' (and even some ARM machines, despite being considered 'RISC') machines are held together behind the scenes by a microcode with a much smaller arsenal of instructions, and then you have stuff like this where a RISC-V ISA chip might fuse ops together in a very CISC-like abstraction.

unsignedqwordon Felix: A compiled (to C++) scripting language

IMO lack of initialization in a language should be explicit, not implicit, e.g. DLang:

  import std.array : uninitializedArray;

  int a;                                   /+ defaults to '0' +/
  int b = void;                            /+ not initialized +/
  bool[5] c;                               /+ defaults to array of 'false' +/
  auto d = uninitializedArray!(bool[])(5); /+ not initialized +/

unsignedqwordon PowerNex: a kernel written in the D Programming Language

http://vibed.org/

Facebook uses D a lot internally IIRC, although I'm not sure if many of the tools they made have been open-sourced.

unsignedqwordon PowerNex: a kernel written in the D Programming Language

Personally I find D a much more comfortable option. I tried Rust a few times, and it contains a few nice features ('match', expressional if-else, built-in tuples/multiple return) which would be cool to see in something like D, but I found the overt emphasis in Rust on safety to be entirely too aggravating to work with. Perhaps I might try it again in the future, though, who knows.

To any Rust pros here, I'm curious: how long did it take for you to really get to grips with the language, coming from say, a C/C++ background?

unsignedqwordon How Do I Learn Some Functional Programming?

Considering the popularity of JS and Ruby as a first language for many new programmers, I could see the argument that it would be useful in the sense of getting them to understand basic functional concepts in a more familiar environment.

Although, I agree with you: a Lisp (probably Racket or Scheme) is a much better bet for learning the functional style.

unsignedqwordon Systems Programming in C# by Joe Duffy

Dlang is a much better fit if you want some high level-ish conveniences (e.g. opt-out GC, lazy evaluation) in a systems programming languages without too much trouble.

unsignedqwordon Inline C/Assembler in Bash

Godel, Escher, Bash?

unsignedqwordon Inline C/Assembler in Bash

The insane things people do in Bash sometimes...although I don't think anything can top the x86 Assembler that was written entirely in Bash:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2001-02/msg00054....

unsignedqwordon Show HN: My own C compiler (just for fun)

Not everyone wants to write the most idiomatic C++, so writing variably C-ish code in C++ isn't really all that uncommon nowadays. If you're a C programmer but you notice C++ has a convenient feature (or features) that you might find useful in a pinch, hell, maybe it's worth it to bite the bullet (although that's not to say that using C++ in lieu of C can have its drawbacks, though)

unsignedqwordon P4: open-source programming language for high-performance packet switching

Not a great choice in name, considering "P4" is the command line utility/common abbreviation for Perforce SCM

unsignedqwordon Humans Who See Time (2010)

I did some googling out of curiosity and was actually kind of surprised to find out that, statistically, synesthesia affects about 3-5% of the population. Certainly uncommon, but not as rare as I expected.

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf

http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html

Unfortunately, couldn't find that much data on the specific kind of "time-space" synesthesia that was mentioned in the article. Bummer.

unsignedqwordon Experience Longhorn – A look at a defining Microsoft project

Vista was not a very well-received release, but I remember using 64-bit Vista way back when. Maybe my memory is failing me a little, but I don't really recall Vista being that bad or unstable. UAC, of course, was a little annoying then, but 7 felt a little more unstable and crash-prone than Vista.

My dad still uses a Vista desktop regularly (a 2007 install) and as far as I can tell it still works perfectly fine for him. I suppose he's probably leaving far too much to chance, but still.

unsignedqwordon Spectre.css – a lightweight, responsive and modern CSS framework

Is it me, or is every CSS framework nowadays advertised as being either 'light,' 'responsive,' or 'modern?'

http://danmalarkey.github.io/schema/ http://responsivebp.com/ http://getbase.org/ http://getskeleton.com/ https://www.myresponsee.com/ http://html5-ninja.com/icecream/ http://www.fitgrd.com/ http://lightuikit.in/ http://bulma.io/

unsignedqwordon The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites

Honestly, the new DLang forum design is probably one of the best looking online forums out there. Also IIRC the backend was written in D from scratch; certainly gives the language lot of credit given its speed

unsignedqwordon The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites

Perhaps one or two small changes like changing the line height and a comment de-scope button would be nice for usability.

It's important not to go down the slippery slope of adding too much functionality, in my opinion - look at Reddit, for instance. Structurally, very similar to HN, but I'd say it adds a little too much control and detail to the end user. Do I need to know a comment's exact karma rating, the ammount of users online in a subreddit? Does there need to be two different submit buttons? It goes on and on...

unsignedqwordon The hottest trend in web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites

Some of those websites are intentionally obtuse to use by design, but I'm not so sure 'web brutalism' is inherently associated with being "difficult." HN is cited as an example: is there anything particularly wrong with HN's interface? Many modern websites nowadays feel over-designed and intimidating. If anything, this new (if you can call it new) brutalist trend potentially could bring about increased usability and a better overall experience.

unsignedqwordon Tis-interpreter – find subtle bugs in programs written in standard C

Both standards have many of the same problems.

unsignedqwordon Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust

Apparently not http://www.redox-os.org/book/book/introduction/what_is_redox...

unsignedqwordon Major sites including New York Times and BBC hit by 'ransomware' malvertising

If you're on Windows, having EMET and/or MBAE are also good ideas.