News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

IvarTJ

Re:What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do? (2018) on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @02:52PM (#42444622)
A motivation for reimplementing System.out.println might be to have it reliably display Unicode characters in Windows terminals, using WriteConsoleW.
I've found a debugger particularly useful when trying to understand details about other people's code, when changing the source code is not necessarily an option. They can quickly give me answer to how the call stack looks like when a function is called, and let me inspect variables in different frames of the stack.
Re:How boring should your team be on Saturday October 15, 2022 @07:11AM (#33213760)
I've encountered a code written in the 12factor style of using environment variables for configuration, and in that particular case there was no validation nor documentation of the configuration options. Is this typical?

For onboarding new members, I would have thought it preferable to have a JSON configuration, where both documentation and validation of configuration options are provided by a JSON Schema file.

Re:Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website? on Monday March 25, 2019 @09:17AM (#19482179)
Check the WCAG success criteria that your jurisdiction requires. One less obvious, and commonly required, criteria (WCAG 2.4.1[1]) is that the site has some mechanism by which a screen reader user can jump from the beginning of the document to the main content, without having to browse through the preceding navigational links and similar.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechan...

xmllint also supports XPath queries.
Re:Best practices for a new Go developer on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @12:32PM (#10160372)
I personally don't see having the version in the package address particularly more nasty than specifying it in the project file, as in Maven, which I have been dealing with lately. One problem I imagine is that when migrating to a new version of a library, the address has to be updated in each file the library is used in, with potentially catastrophic consequences if any one file is forgotten. A grep seems wise in that case.

Would you argue that there are more robust solutions in the Haskell ecosystem? What scheme do you prefer?

Re:A visual timeline of programming languages on Monday July 20, 2015 @01:03PM (#9917355)
In this timeline, Common Lisp first appears when it was standardized. It should probably also mention its predecessor MACLISP.
Re:Why We Use OCaml on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @03:07PM (#8043891)
Could someone comment on what instances you would typically apply lambdas and closures in real-world code?

I figure that they are at least more convenient than callbacks with a *userData parameter like in C.

Re:The Data of Hate on Sunday July 13, 2014 @07:15PM (#8028855)
Your thoughts match up with Anders Breivik living in a part of Oslo, a city with a large portion of early-generation immigrants from non-western areas, which was predominantly white.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_End_and_West_End_of_Oslo

Re:Beginner's guide to OCaml beginner's guides on Thursday July 10, 2014 @06:23PM (#8017737)
You can run Ocaml on the Raspberry Pi for one.
Re:Why Go Is Not Good on Sunday June 29, 2014 @05:40PM (#7962544)
I would not say that I am particularly experienced, but I will tell my point of view from a not particularly sophisticated programmer. I am interested in seeing what objections others may have to what I write.

Compared to other popular programming languages aimed at web programming, such as Python, Ruby and PHP, Go provides more type safety. Comparable to Java's but for less code.

Go's runtime and development tools are very lightweight, which is important to me as I use multiple, often dated computers with limited memory.

It is very easy to learn, a low investment. This means that it is conceivable for a student previously only exposed to Java to get on board on your software project on short-time notice.

Re:What if Quality Journalism Isn't? on Monday June 16, 2014 @07:19AM (#7898365)
Here in Norway newspapers more or less survive, although perhaps not with the younger generations. They are generally the best source if you want to follow up on local events.

How do Americans follow local news?

Re:A Year of Functional Programming on Monday June 09, 2014 @11:07AM (#7868786)
How well does deploying Haskell web applications to a low-memory VPS work? My experience with the Play framework tells me that Scala is out of the question. Presumably using Haskell involves cross-compilation, considering the memory usage of GHC compilation.
It's as if it was only yesterday that we saw Microsoft bragging about IE9 being arguably slightly ahead of the other browsers.
Re:Hey Latex users, I have an idea for you on Sunday December 15, 2013 @05:13PM (#6911174)
HTML?
Re:Swiss forensic report on Arafat's death on Wednesday November 06, 2013 @04:27PM (#6685618)
It has been used successfully before. Just ask Alexander Litvinenko.
Re:On Lisp on Monday August 26, 2013 @03:15AM (#6275625)
Surely expressing personal issues with Lisp's syntax is valid, especially if a possible solution is offered. If you see at least some of the larger codebases written in Lisp, it is natural to be overwhelmed by the level of indentation, which will cause the code to wrap under many editor setups.
I do not believe any large company have economic interest in developing such technologies, in part because they can subvert current business models that are built on centralized identity authorities and communications monitoring, so I rely on independent efforts to see variants of these technologies that can reasonably be adopted by the people I interact with.
As a moderately advanced computer user, I would like to see:

Convenient and standard way to cryptographically identify myself across different mediums.

Convenient variants of communication mediums such as chat rooms and forums that do not rely on or can be controlled by any one third-party server.

Re:Vim and Ctags tips and tricks on Sunday June 23, 2013 @07:53AM (#5927176)
In addition to Ctrl+T to go back from a definition, Ctrl+O also seems to work, which I find more ergonomic on Qwerty.
Re:Networks give you an unfair access to success on Thursday June 06, 2013 @11:25AM (#5832972)
While building respect is a great attitude, it is not the only thing that help you land in networks. The network connections of your family and the posh kids you went to school with also play a role.
Re:Linux users file EU complaint against Microsoft on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @11:00AM (#5449760)
Can someone explain why bricking an infected computer is a good idea?

I might understand it if the boot sequence just gives a warning with information, suggestions and a "Don't warn me again" option, but from what I hear it just makes the machine unusable.

Re:Why Use Nginx? on Sunday March 24, 2013 @06:22PM (#5434048)
For my hobby programming server, I primarily use it to serve different web applications on different domains. The server is a proxy to web applications that listen on different ports on the server. This allows me to multiplex different web servers and relieves me of finding modules that glue together nginx and various programming languages.
Next they could maybe cut down on the UI of Google Books.

http://i.imgur.com/BXvRdwq.png

It is often convenient to have the browser window small when working at something else beside it.

Re:New kernel.org on Sunday March 03, 2013 @04:19PM (#5315278)
> Would you answer this on a bug report?

If I was unable reproduce the bug with the information given, it seems reasonable to mention that. Also, the effort required by the bug reporter to mention basic information on the setup they use is much less than for a web developer to boot up 5 different systems (including iOS and Android) to test out each major browser in them.

I'll have you know that I have been wary of using non-default fonts because of these reports.

Re:New kernel.org on Saturday March 02, 2013 @09:41AM (#5309597)
Here it renders perfectly on Fedora in Firefox, Chrome and Safari on Mac OS X, Firefox and IE9 on Windows Vista.

It would be nice if the people who encounter these text-rendering problems mention what setup they use.

Re:Why code in C anymore? on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @06:39PM (#5289445)
Why code in C++ anymore?

I don't know C++ and its community very well, but here are my suspicions. I'd love for someone to confirm or dispel them.

* Relative to C is obviously that it provides a greater toolbox.

* Relative to Java, it gives more fine-grained control of the target platform, and programs have somewhat better startup speeds (though still often not very good, which I again suspect is because of large binary sizes).

* Relative to Python and Ruby, its static typing gives better guarantees as it allows less to fail at runtime.

* Relative to Go, Rust, D and ML languages, it is more well-established. Especially regarding GUI toolkit libraries.

Re:Why do programming languages use curly braces? on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @11:39AM (#5286623)
Slightly times a lifetime.
Re:How to start working on side projects on Sunday February 24, 2013 @07:41PM (#5276689)
Lately I've found it engaging to try to build up a personal repository of C libraries. Mostly wrappers and reimplementations of well-outlined standards, but still very engaging. It makes me think about API design, learn about the details of a few standards, and simplifies experimentation with things I am interested in.

Is this common?

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