verisimilitudes

So, Firefox operates with yet another third party. I've never used this ''Have I been PWNed?'' drivel and don't intend to start, but I don't usually find myself using a Firefox-brand Firefox, either.

What's so compelling about this website? To me, this looks like yet another silly idea people coalesce around and find important. In having a discussion about this, someone mentioned how it's not that different from Facebook and Cloudflare in managing something technical for those who don't care to, and I find this a rather decent comparison. This is yet another centralized and completely unnecessary entity.

I don't see the appeal and I don't like what I regard as a stupid idea receiving so much attention from so many groups. This isn't surprising coming from Troy Hunt, however, who I best remember as the person bitching about an ad blocker blocking an ad he found acceptable.

>I strongly believe that video games today are comparable to alcohol in the 60's.

Get off it. There's a strong difference between playing a game like ''Super Mario Odyssey'' and the trash Google allows because it makes money on trickery and theft.

>Right now we have people who are facing serious problems with video games, and yet we brush them off casually and callously.

China locks up people who have ''Internet addictions''; they might find ''lies'' about political protests in China, as an example.

>I can't count the number of stories on reddit about playing video games all day and all night, at the expense of one's social life, academic success and even career.

Clearly one's career is said person's most important aspect. They could be working or participating in office politics instead of having fun.

>That's not normal behavior; it's behavior indicative of addiction and dependency. And I'm referring to adults.

Yet, nowhere in your message do you wonder why people would rather play games than do other things. You seem to think games are at fault, rather than the sorry state of society.

>Now, regulating video games like alcohol may not be the best idea.

It's important that every medium be heavily regulated, to prevent the wrong ideas from getting through.

Very few people seem to host their own email infrastructure, even when using their own domain, and I find myself unable to contact businesses and individuals because of gmail's rules that almost never let my messages through.

This isn't even touching on that Amp email garbage that they're pushing.

>Don't other languages still use an entire byte to represent a bool though, since memory access is at the byte level?

While at the discretion of the implementation, Common Lisp is a language that can easily and transparently perform this optimization. Common Lisp even has a specialized array type, BIT-VECTOR, which can only hold values of zero or one, which is more likely to be optimized for size than other types. Ada allows the programmer to specify data structures be optimized for size, which is nice.

Now, representing a lone true or false value is a different matter and I'd expect it to consume an entire register or whatnot under most anything, since you probably wouldn't be able to store anything else with the remaining space.

>Having a bool type in the type system is really a language usability concern, I don't think it's at all a performance optimization.

Ada has a boolean type because there are clearly boolean situations, such as predicates, and having a dedicated type reduces use errors. Programmers are encouraged to define their own boolean types, though, such as (On, Off), say.

>And when you want a bitmap, you can just use an int of the appropriate length and do bitwise operations on it.

That's what I was describing. Why should a high-level language have you making your own arrays? Don't you agree that programs would benefit from a specialized type for this that can more easily be optimized and specialized for the particular machine and whatnot?

The real issue is the C and C++ languages are horrible languages. They're too high-level to correspond to any real machine, yet so low-level so as to make such an abstract machine useful. The C language leaves the precise lengths of types up for grabs, as merely one example. As for Rust, I'd figure it's poor as well, considering it follows in the footsteps of C++.

I can compile an Ada program that has an uninitialized variable and use it, but I get a warning; there's also a Valid attribute that acts as a predicate for whether a scalar value has an acceptable value or not.

To @userbinator , you're mistaken to believe the C has much design behind it. There are many things where one requires a certain range of values and C forces the programmer to use a type that's much larger than necessary and cope with unwanted values. The C language leaves details to the underlying machine, so long as that machine is determined to pretend it's a PDP-11. Most languages that have a standard expect the programmer to follow it; since most C programmers don't know what the standard says, having been lied to about it being a simple and base language, they're offended when they do something they never should've done; they shouldn't be using C anyway, however.

Abstract language details are necessary for a high-level language and can work quite well if the language is designed well; this then leaves high-level features to be implemented in whichever way is best for the machine; the C language doesn't do this well at all, however, and precisely specifies the nature of irrelevant details and so hinders the machine and implementation possibilities.

The C language doesn't even have true boolean values or arrays thereof. You're expected to use an entire integer that's zero or not and you're left to your own devices if you want an array of these values that isn't grotesque in its wastefulness. Meanwhile, most proper languages have the concept of types that only have two values and can easily use an underlying machine representation for efficiently representing these, without involving the programmer.

In closing, you may argue that C is necessary because it permits specifying these low-level details, albeit required in every case instead of only where necessary. To that, I direct you to look at Ada, which permits the programmer to ignore such details wherever unneeded, and so leave them to the compiler’s discretion, but allows size, address, representation, bit-level organization, and more to be specified in those cases where it's truly necessary.

Here's a link others may like for learning more about Ada and the deficiencies of C:

https://annexi-strayline.com/blog

I usually see Hacker News praise African youth for building something, no matter how trivial. I wonder what makes this case different from those others.

In any case, good for them.

>I feel that. But on the other hand, without trying to sound too mean: what exactly does he expect?

It's not unreasonable to expect to be finished with software.

>For better or for worse, this is simply how software works.

This is false. The author has already fallen into this trap by using a programming language which is also subject to this, however.

>Things have to be updated. Unless you want to eschew security updates (which is not smart), there is never such a thing as a fully "finished" product.

There is such a thing as finished software, but I can understand why something such as a WWW framework wouldn't be. The WWW is ugly and misguided and inspires disgusting systems to accomodate it.

>Software maintenance is part of the job responsibilities.

When you have a project with no real design goals, apparently, I agree. Otherwise, you can remark on how a program achieves its goals and so is finished. That doesn't stop minor improvements or reworkings, but those would be entirely unnecessary.

>This post is particularly targeted at Django, but I feel that it applies to almost every web framework or piece of software

I agree, because, again, the WWW is a disgusting tangle of systems that encourages similarly disgusting systems.

One language I enjoy is Common Lisp. The standard hasn't changed in decades and there are many implementations. I can finish a library and then never need to touch it again. Python can't compare.

Oh yes, use DNS over HTTPS for your privacy. Just look at these organizations that oppose it. While I'm at it, you totally can't break into an Apple iPhone™ and all the cool pedophiles should be using that, for safety.

DNS over HTTPS does nothing for privacy and merely takes control from the DNS providers or user. Companies want to be able to run everything over HTTPS so you can't block any of it without blocking all of it. They can go to Hell.

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular.

* It's short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it.

* It's obvious, so that leaves plenty of room for patting oneself on the back.

* It's simple, so one can reference their own writings about a similar topic or related to it in some way.

* It's about a topic that lets the commenter here show off their own website and bloviate about themselves.

This is nothing against the author, but against Hacker News and how so much interesting material fails to ever reach the front page.

>Your blog article doesn't contain any code or empirical data so you can expect it to be rightfully ignored.

That doesn't usually seem to stop them.

>Provide a reference implementation in a widely-used language. I would pick C or Rust. The code should be under a widely used open source license, have high test coverage, and be fuzzed.

I suppose I could go ahead and start writing an initial implementation in Common Lisp; it would likely be under a new article, though. I use the AGPLv3, don't need tests, and don't need fuzzing.

>Provide size and performance benchmarks of real-world datasets. You assert that English words can be encoded compactly so try encoding Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg books, or the text files in the Calgary Corpus.

I prove they can be encoding compactly, but I suppose a more concrete example would help, sure.

>Compare your proposal against state of the art compression algorithms like PPM or LZMA.

I can compare file sizes.

>Fork a text editor application and change it to use your reference implementation. What are the effects on editing latency and RAM usage?

This would be a bit much for me at this stage, and editing text as opposed to reading it is still under consideration; it would likely be implemented with characters and a simple notice when invalid words are created, varying.

>Shared dictionaries were tried in the 1980s (e.g. Spellswell Word Services) but failed in the marketplace. What's different now?

I can't find any information on this, but if it was being sold then I take it that it was proprietary, which would help explain it. Anyway, Microsoft products are dominant, which is evidence that the ''Free Market'' isn't a judge of quality.

In any case, it's nice that something I submitted received any attention whatsoever. Usually, my work goes entirely ignored, but that's hardly the only good work Hacker News doesn't like or understand and so ignores.

>Plenty of people Google "doesn't like" are still in public view. Name one person Google has effectively "disappeared" in this way, and I'll bet they still have a presence elsewhere on the web, still participate in society, still can communicate publicly, be contacted, etc.

Alex Jones was attacked by Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple in a short span of time and this certainly does bring noticeable harm. Your argument that Google isn't a monopoly so much as a participant in an oligopoly is pointless.

>Maybe. But then so could Amazon. So could your ISP. If losing SEO would ruin your business, the problem isn't Google's power, it's your crappy business model.

It's amusing how people raise this same argument about advertising and how newspapers or other publications can die for all they care, but then newspapers are ''important to Democracy'' and shouldn't need to exist like others do and the other publications are just trying to make end's meet and can't do anything else. Maybe letting large businesses buy or crush everything else is a bad idea?

>Really? Do they control you here?

No.

>In your home?

No.

>Do they moderate other sites?

Yes. Large chunks of the WWW contain Google malware or are at the behest of Cloudflare and that makes avoiding these two difficult, as it's likely at least one place one visits is involved with one or the other. I can't even contact some businesses because of Gmail and its strangulation of the email protocols and with ReCaptcha it becomes increasingly harder to do certain things without giving Google free work.

>Almost every part of your comment is falsehood, hyperbole and nonsense.

You're either misguided or purposefully arguing in bad faith.

Some things never change. Is there a single UNIX variant that doesn't fail in some way when it can no longer write to disk? It's unacceptable for most programs to fail if they can no longer write to disk; Firefox also fails, but of course gives no indication as to what's happening.

Now, of course, no UNIX variant I'm aware of has a real notion of system programs and so there's no programs that get special privileges that would protect them from this. It would be preferable for the system to die, rather than permit this debugging nonsense, considering it would perhaps actually be fixed if the machine died in this case.

This is an asinine failure case mired in 1970s malpractice. Don't you agree this is damning and unacceptable? No one has any right to be proud of this mess. There's millions of lines of code and yet basic failure cases aren't truly accounted for or are handled in the most asinine of ways, such as with the ``Out of Memory Killer''.

In my opinion, Python doesn't belong in the same category as Common Lisp and APL.

>There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind).

I already agreed that JavaScript and CSS are good languages for Stack Overflow.

I find it absurd that, in criticizing C, you conflate that with the underlying machine.

But, in a way, sure. There's been plenty of hardware that had safety features and other high-level qualities, but C could never take advantage of them and now there are plenty of stupid RISC machines that resemble a PDP-11 well enough.

So, without C, the common hardware would probably be better, too.

I disagree. The C programming language is directly responsible for countless damning flaws in modern software and can be credited for the existence of the majority of the modern computer security industry.

You can write system software in many languages, including Lisp. For a less outlandish example, Ada is specifically designed for producing reliable systems worked on by teams of people in a way that reduces errors at program run time.

I find it amusing to mention UNIX fundamentals as a reason to learn C, considering UNIX is the only reason C has persisted for so long anyway. Real operating systems focused largely on interoperation between languages, not funnelling everything through a single one; Lisp machines focused on compilation to a single language, but that language was well-designed and well-equipped, unlike C.

>Last but not least, because C is so “low-level”, you can leverage it to write highly performant code to squeeze out CPU when performance is critical in some scenarios.

It’s actually the opposite. The C language is too high-level to correspond to any single machine, yet too low-level for compilers to optimize for the specific machine without gargantuan mechanisms. It’s easier to optimize logical count and bit manipulations in Common Lisp than in C, because Common Lisp actually provides mechanisms for these things; meanwhile, C has no equivalent to logical count and its bit shifting is a poor replacement for field manipulations. Ada permits specifying the bit structures of data types at a very high level, while continuing to use abstract parts, whereas large C projects float in a bog of text-replacement macros.

Those are my thoughts on why C isn’t worth learning, although this is nothing against the author.

>They're absolutely essential to the software dev community

I disagree. I'm of the opinion that it's useful only if you're doing something you've no clue about and also don't want to gain a clue about. It's no surprise, then, that WWW garbage is typical, since it's poorly documented and a ''living standard'' and other nonsense.

If you're like me and use real languages with real standards and good books available, you're probably not going to need something such as this. I've never asked a question there and I've never needed to look at a Common Lisp question and answer; I don't think there are many Common Lisp questions and answers in general, actually. Similarly, I don't see these for APL, either. I don't believe it's a coincidence that these languages are well-documented and encourage understanding to use.

Meanwhile, ''Why does JavaScript do this?'' or ''I can't get my CSS to do this in Safari.'', sure, I can see that.

I'm not going to weep for Wikipedia. The most I really use it for is finding links to real resources and I can do that elsewhere. I've tried to contribute before, but would always have my edits reverted. They also ban Tor, which is unacceptable.

Anyway, democracy is either good or it isn't. I'm of the opinion that it isn't, but it's queer to me that one could champion democratic ideals and then complain about the demographics. I vehemently disagree with the idea that white men are somehow incapable of cataloguing the world's knowledge, purely because they're not black or Chinese or women or something else, for obvious reasons.

It's interesting that this seems to be connected to the usual group of troublemakers, people who are easily offended, but we'll see where this leads.

Not every chip mimics a PDP-11 or can be made to resemble one. Chuck Moore's GA144 is an array of his F18A Forth chips, which are all rather small and simple stack machines that support such fine grained operations as looping the instructions that share a machine word.

Given that this is a heavily segmented machine, with very different primitive operations than a PDP-11, and also has a word size of eighteen, I don't imagine C would run very well on it at all, if you even wanted to try.

So, there you have it.

It's odd to me that Emacs wasn't mentioned at all. I use it for most of my computing (email, music, file management, etc.) and it works well enough in the terminal if the Meta-key works properly, as opposed to needing to use Escape.

>Luckily, people were emailing each other from UNIX/Linux machines long before modern graphical email clients (or webmail) even existed.

I suppose this is technically true, due to the use of ''modern'' here, but I find it important to note that graphical interfaces for things such as email have existed for decades. Using terminals shouldn't be an ideal.

I find the native terminal emulation provided by the Linux kernel and OpenBSD to be lacking. There's not much of a good reason to query terminfo or termcap when every terminal you're reasonably going to use supports a superset of ECMA-48. However, I've found that even basic sequences such as SCROLL UP and SCROLL DOWN aren't supported in the native terminals. So, you get the choice between your program not working in those, making it inefficient and jittery for every terminal, or building a querying infrastructure; the first option is what I've chosen. If I'm wrong or anyone has any advice for this, I'd be interested in it.

I wouldn't be writing a terminal program in this age if the GUI facilities of modern systems were decent and I could build up my own abstraction for that, but the terminal, with all of its added faults, is at least the simpler option. It would be nice to have facilities GUIs enjoy that let me express simple concepts such as ''The interface must be at least this large.'', though.

Entirely disregarding how it is browsing with Tor and finding ReCAPTCHA so often due to Cloudflare, it's a bother even on a website I regularly use over my normal connection.

Bandcamp is an online music store and I'm prompted for a Google ReCAPTCHA every time I try to log in, which really causes me to do it less often than I normally would, as I must permit Google JavaScript for it to succeed.

I've wanted to send a complaint about this to Bandcamp, but their email is hosted by gmail and none of my messages get to them because I host my own email. Adding reverse DNS and SPF is enough for many email servers, but not Google.

I find it a bad situation that my experience with a business is worse, due to Google, and I can't even contact them to let them know, due to Google.

>You can hardly blame anyone for blocking Tor traffic.

Yes I can and do. It's bad enough that some websites won't let you do certain things over Tor, but preventing access to the website entirely is unacceptable. I made this account and comment entirely over Tor.

I don't see how it's okay to block Tor. That generic claim is made, but how are your spam measures doing if you couldn't handle Tor spam?

>You might not be using it for abuse but a large volume of abuse originates from it.

There is infinitely more ''abuse'' coming from Google, and yet it seems most every page I visit contains Google malware.

On principle, I hold the idea that Tor should be a first-class citizen and not disadvantaged in any way. Notice that Google's ''HTTP/3'' is over UDP, which Tor doesn't work with; I don't find that a coincidence.

The Nintendo Switch does have a WWW browser, solely for permitting access to Internet connection points that require loading a WWW page and performing a certain action as a prerequisite for use.

It's appalling an entire WWW browser would be necessary for connecting to certain Internet access points, but that's the current state of things.

In any case, someone has already achieved arbitrary code execution through it, but it was sandboxed anyway.

There's nothing wrong with referencing documentation, but I do see it reasonable to look down on those who can't program without asking a malicious corporation questions. So, I pride myself on not needing to do this, I suppose.

Of course, I also pride myself on using good tools. My observation of Stack Overflow is that it's an excellent resource if you don't know what you're doing and don't want to learn what you're doing. Unfortunately, that's the only real way to operate some things. The only times I ever really need to use the Internet for such a problem is when it involves some baroque WWW nonsense some idiot caused however many years ago that's still echoing today or it involves some baroque UNIX nonsense some idiot caused however many years ago that's still echoing today.

If you use good languages and good tools, with real standards, (Common Lisp is an example.) you'll find yourself seemingly magically free from all of this stupid and pointless drudgery. Consider giving it a try some time. Imagine not needing to rewrite code constantly because something updated or some external ''API'' changed or other nonsense.

As a closing aside, it's laughable that people are pointing to man pages as examples of good documentation. GNU Info isn't perfect, but it's leagues better than man pages will ever be, if only because it's segmented and hypertextual.

Windows is a bloated mess, so it's obvious there.

As for anything POSIX, it's because UNIX is shitware; it took a long time to boot decades ago and it takes a long time to boot now, because more garbage has been piled on top.

It's possible for a good operating system to boot in less than a second, however. People have simply been conditioned to accept this unacceptable state of affairs, no different than a TV that takes ten seconds to become usable for no reason other than the manufacturer was lazy.

>You can do the same thing in ada.

I wouldn't know how GNAT behaves in this case, but I figure it would at the least be much harder to do by mistake, as has been done with C for years.

>Instead of using the Fortran_Character type defined in Interfaces.Fortran you could just define your own that does not follow Fortran's string calling convention.

The Ada compiler is aware of what's being done when you interface with another language. You must tell it how the procedure is from a different language and you're also able to specify the representation of Ada data types to conform. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that GNAT is capable of checking on the Fortran side of things as well, for interfacing like this.

>Is that a language problem with ada? That's all the C programmers did here.

I don't believe Ada has this issue, but I'd wager it at the least makes it harder to make. In any case, I have no personal experience interfacing Ada with Fortran.

My point, however, is that this is a very common issue with C programming, where people don't know what they're doing and things break constantly. The C language is not designed for interfacing with other languages, in part because it wasn't designed much at all.

>This is not a language issue, but programmers who have made a mistake.

That's always the excuse with C, I know.

>The same thing would happen in most languages if a programmer declared their FFI incorrectly.

If the Ada Interfaces.Fortran didn't work, that would be a compiler issue, but that's only because Ada does things right.

>It boils down to some programmer/s doing the following.

I read the article, you know.

I'm horribly amused by this article. You constantly see C programmers working around that mess of a language like this and so constantly see these glaring flaws appear as if from the ether, almost as if it's a natural consequence of programming.

Meanwhile, Ada has Interfaces.Fortran for actually interfacing with the language and doing it correctly. Fools will tell you C is the backbone of civilization and everything interfaces with it, but this is yet another example of how they're wrong.

I wonder what he thinks of Israel. Is it okay for their soldiers to unload bullets into children? Is it okay that they're just following orders?

Think about it some more. As with many laws, this likely comes from a corporation trying to outlaw its competitors. As the article states, normal cigarettes will still be available. Does that seem reasonable, given the ostensible reason for this ban?

>Conception and putting money on tbe line deserves credit.

I suppose I can agree, but I wouldn't put conception of an idea in the same league as offering money towards it.

>There would be no endeavors if there was no incentive of credit.

You can call this an uncharitable interpretation, but are you arguing that people would never do anything if there weren't wealthy people with money offering it in exchange? That is absurd and provably false, with all of these hobbyist and otherwise unpaid works.