News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

SassyBird

Thanks for taking the most uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote possible. It’s so productive.
Is it standard for people in the Andes to take offence at people taking pictures of them? I don’t know, maybe it is, haven’t been there. It is not in Europe.
If you avoid the slightest possibility of unpleasant and pointless confrontations, then you’re going to lead a very dull life. I sometimes photograph random people. Never has anyone had an issue with that. Sometimes they approach me and we have a chat. That’s all that happens. I’ve had more chances of being hit by a car than anyone having an issue with me taking pictures of them. Boils down not being a dick about it.
Hopefully k is natural. ;)
Re:What makes e natural? (2004) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @10:59AM (#40866598)
It doesn’t matter which definition you pick. I e.g. had it defined axiomatically when I studied, i.e. we were given a list of properties which identify exp unambiguously and then we were given a proof of its existence. The fact that those properties were part of the definition doesn’t take away from their profoundness. The function could still just not exist. Same thing with defining by formulas. The map is not the territory.
Re:What makes e natural? (2004) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @10:52AM (#40866505)
Transcendental numbers like e are a lot more "unnatural" than imaginary numbers.
Re:Sublime Merge on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @04:16AM (#40863847)
Following fashion has nothing to do with hacking.
Re:Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE on Friday June 28, 2024 @09:50AM (#40820593)
It’s great to hear. Thanks.
Re:Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE on Friday June 28, 2024 @06:36AM (#40819320)
It’s Qt: https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/blob/main/src/cpp/desktop...

It seems with some JavaScript generated from Java via Gwt. Regardless, I prefer it over VSCode UI.

Re:Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE on Friday June 28, 2024 @05:53AM (#40819127)
Are they going to drop RStudio? I very much prefer its Qt interface over whatever VSCode invented. It’s fast, has nice keyboard shortcuts, none of that pointless padding and it just feels great to use.
Re:Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE on Friday June 28, 2024 @05:45AM (#40819091)
The base graphics packages make the plots as ugly as the ones generated by gnuplot though. ggplot2 on the other hand has very pretty output. And the concept of grammar of plots just makes so much sense to me.
Re:Flame Graphs: Making the Opaque Obvious (2017) on Thursday June 27, 2024 @06:32PM (#40815905)
> So, what, exactly, am I looking for?

This can’t be answered in general. Flamegraphs are measurements of what happened. But just like a ruler doesn’t tell you whether a given human is atypically short or tall for its species, a flamegraph can’t tell you which portion of the program takes too long a time. You need to have prior knowledge about data structures, algorithms, memory bandwidth etc in order to confront your justified expectations with the reality and be surprised with something. And it will all depend on the particular program you profile.

Re:Structured logs are the way to start on Thursday June 27, 2024 @03:58AM (#40808374)
This has nothing to do with GCC being a first-class citizen in Linux. It’s a kernel feature. The kernel doesn’t care which compiler or debugger you’re using. You can dump core of any process regardless of the language it’s written in. Every modern OS supports that.
You must not have seen Bloomberg Terminal then. Most devs on this forum wouldn’t be even able to build anything this performant and ergonomic.
Re:Formal methods: Just good engineering practice? on Monday June 24, 2024 @05:58AM (#40774143)
> 100% branch coverage means that you've fundamentally covered all potential states your software can enter.

No, it doesn’t.

  bool is_even(int n) {
      return true;
  }

  bool test_is_even() {
      return is_even(2);
  }
100% test coverage. And yet.
Re:Own Constant Folder in C/C++ on Saturday June 22, 2024 @09:37AM (#40759053)
And even if you do know what it does, it’s very impractical given that it’s a global option. Turning it on for selected portions of code would be a completely different game.
Re:Comparing OCaml and Standard ML (2020) on Tuesday June 18, 2024 @05:20AM (#40715617)
> It's still not a feature you can expect all implementations to have, so OCaml is not in a bad position there I think.

The number of SML implementations supporting this feature is greater than the number of OCaml implementations. ;)

Re:'Equals' Has More Than One Meaning in Math on Tuesday June 18, 2024 @01:30AM (#40714337)
> In the first year of the University you write cpngruence with three horizontal lines. In the second, you just use two lines, aka an equal sign.

Obviously in the next step you achieve enlightenment when you then write them as just one horizontal line, but most don’t reach that stage.

Re:Why you shouldn't parse the output of ls(1) on Saturday June 15, 2024 @10:07PM (#40694178)
When would you use it?

Emacs dired works fine on other platforms, which don’t have GNU ls on them, so I’m guessing by default it doesn’t run ls on its own.

You can see part of its black beak on the right hand side.
Without HiDPI (sic!) scaling that means that a correctly-sized display for that resolution would have a 30" diagonal on Windows (standard PPI: 96) and 40" on Mac (standard PPI: 72). If you don’t have HiDPI (sic!) scaling enabled in your system and your display is smaller than that, then you’re basically browsing everything zoomed out.
9pt == 12px on the web. You can check that in Web Inspector in computed styles.

Alternatively:

  1px = (1/96)in
  1pt = (1/72)in = (1/72)*(96/72)*(72/96)in = (96/72)*(1/96)in = (4/3)*1px = (4/3)px
  9pt = 9*1pt = 9*(4/3)px = 12px
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Values_...
It’s the opposite for me. I keep finding dumb bugs in Chromium, when it comes to correct website rendering and event handling (always regressions). Safari and Firefox on the other hand never have those issues.

The only problem is: Safari has piss-poor ad blockers. Firefox blocks custom system-wide keyboard shortcuts (on Mac).

Re:(Debugging Story) Inline Assembly Dangers on Monday June 10, 2024 @08:11AM (#40632721)
I’m not a fan of concatenating strings either. I was thinking about the MSVC/Pascal-style inline assembly here, which isn’t based on strings.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that you can guarantee a routine is constant-time by using intrinsics. You need asm for that. Asm that won’t be changed by the compiler. So you need to write an external asm file for that now, which is fair enough, but I just wouldn’t present intrinsics as all-around superior.

Re:(Debugging Story) Inline Assembly Dangers on Monday June 10, 2024 @02:41AM (#40630858)
It seems that MSVC supports inline assembly only on 32-bit x86. For amd64 and ARM they moved entirely to intrinsics.
Re:Is there a BNF grammar of the TeX language? (2010) on Sunday June 09, 2024 @10:54AM (#40624851)
1. Justified text without hyphenation is a quick recipe for very odd-looking uneven spacing, like in your example.

2. The inset used by the headings is jarringly big.

3. The text is too wide for comfortable reading.

4. The fonts used in the body and in the figures don’t match.

Other than that, it’s probably the best-formatted Word document I’ve seen.

I wouldn’t want to use Word, because in my experience even outside of maths its UI is working against me. In particular it’s hard to recreate the same document in two different major versions of Word. The spacing, the sizes are always off. Moreover, I don’t like how formatting is very sticky based on where you position your text cursor. I constantly need to disable styling copied from some text nearby.

Re:Is there a BNF grammar of the TeX language? (2010) on Sunday June 09, 2024 @10:36AM (#40624713)
> Finally, there's never going to be a readable error message from LaTeX.

FTFY. If you learn TeX from Knuth’s TeX book, along with the typographical concepts it works with, the error messages generated by documents written in raw TeX are understandable.

LaTeX on the other hand is what the metaprogramming-heavy Boost/STL libraries are to C or C++. Abandon all hope.

Re:X has new rules that officially allow porn on Monday June 03, 2024 @02:53PM (#40566092)
You just need a toggle to comply with the rules, so that the user decides what they’ll see. One example is Flickr. Another is Tumblr. They both have toggles for explicit content.
Re:X has new rules that officially allow porn on Monday June 03, 2024 @02:16PM (#40565577)
App Store allows and contains plenty apps with NSFW content.
Re:X has new rules that officially allow porn on Monday June 03, 2024 @02:12PM (#40565524)
What a world we live in that allowing NSFW content is seen as desperation, while monetisation through ads isn’t.

Older »