News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

camperman

Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley on Monday August 07, 2017 @06:32PM (#14951832)
More than a third of respondents to his survey either strongly or almost agreed with the documents point of view.
Not realizing that the mind is supreme and the mind is fallible.
Re:Sir Roger Moore, James Bond actor, dies aged 89 on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @11:41AM (#14402134)
I loved Dalton. He was such a hard bastard.
Re:How a 64k intro is made on Monday May 22, 2017 @11:29AM (#14394360)
Indeed - I used to write them when I was young and had more time :)
Re:How a 64k intro is made on Monday May 22, 2017 @10:45AM (#14393977)
Quite true. I personally don't have a problem that PC 64k intros today will leverage the GPU as much as possible, with all the help from the driver code that that implies. It's how they stay current and awesome. Of course anyone writing a 64k intro with no help at all from the GPU except perhaps context creation and teardown is just giving themselves more creative limitations that I would respect.
Re:Poisoning Daddy (1996) on Saturday May 20, 2017 @05:54PM (#14384563)
Claudius's confession of murder in Hamlet comes right after Hamlet has put on a play to prick his conscience. This girl's confession comes right after her friend reads Claudius's prayer.

Quite extraordinary that after centuries, Shakespeare's words could still prick consciences in almost exactly the same way and for the same reasons.

Re:The Typefaces of W.A. Dwiggins on Friday May 19, 2017 @03:30PM (#14378709)
Aldine Cursive reminded me immediately of Operator's monospaced italic font.
It's criss-crossed with fiber, the ICT policy is very open and the leadership friendly. Also it's a small country.
Re:The Man Trap on Sunday May 14, 2017 @05:44PM (#14337728)
Huh? If you could point out the uncivil bits, that would be helpful.
Sheer volume is meaningless unless we know how many times it's been successfully summitted. Mont Blanc is dangerous because it's easily accessible to lay people and despite being advertised as a 'long walk' can turn deadly very quickly.

Annapurna on the other hand has been climbed less than two hundred times in history, all of those people were elite mountaineers and further third of them didn't make it back.

Just a nitpick on an otherwise excellent piece: Annapurna is actually the most lethal mountain in the world, just ahead of K2. It claims 34 deaths per 100 safe returns over K2's 29.

To climb K2 in winter is extraordinarily dangerous. It's dangerous enough in season. But the Poles are the hardest of hard men in these situations - good luck to them!

Re:Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe (2008) on Monday May 08, 2017 @03:23PM (#14294724)
Several times a month.
Re:Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe (2008) on Monday May 08, 2017 @07:57AM (#14290818)
I've been using this recipe for a good seven or eight years now and it has never let me down. But you really do need an oven that is capable of 800F. I eventually knuckled down and bought a small dedicated pizza oven with a thermometer.
Re:LuaJIT 2.0.5 and 2.1.0-beta3 released on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:40PM (#14242779)
Because it's so easy. From the manual:

So here's something to pop up a message box on Windows:

    local ffi = require("ffi")

    ffi.cdef[[

        int MessageBoxA(void *w, const char *txt, const char *cap, int type);

    ]]

    ffi.C.MessageBoxA(nil, "Hello world!", "Test", 0)

Bing! Again, that was far too easy, no?

Compare this with the effort required to bind that function using the classic Lua/C API: create an extra C file, add a C function that retrieves and checks the argument types passed from Lua and calls the actual C function, add a list of module functions and their names, add a luaopen_* function and register all module functions, compile and link it into a shared library (DLL), move it to the proper path, add Lua code that loads the module aaaand ... finally call the binding function. Phew!

Re:Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @08:25AM (#14192786)
I guess it's my personality type too which is INTP, the classical deconstructionist. What does this do? How does it do it? Why isn't it working?
Re:Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @08:24AM (#14192777)
Aaaah, this makes so much sense. Thanks for the reminder. Here's the para in question:

"Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned."

Re:Robert M. Pirsig has died on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @07:22AM (#14192469)
Whoops - you're quite right. QWAN is Christopher Alexander.
Re:Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014) on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @04:51AM (#14191803)
I KNOW I'm better at debugging than at programming. My own working code is terribly simple and straightforward but I've fixed kernel sound drivers, buggy firmwares and complex interrupt-driven music players. Perhaps I find it easier to construct a mental model when presented with a finished system rather than when starting from scratch.
Re:Robert M. Pirsig has died on Tuesday April 25, 2017 @04:08AM (#14191627)
Amen brother. This right here:

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

Re:Robert M. Pirsig has died on Monday April 24, 2017 @10:03PM (#14190177)
My introduction to Quality Without a Name and motorcycling. I still ride and still appreciate engineering that somehow manages to be greater than just the sum of its parts: the Leica M3, the Blackbird SR71, the HP 12C.
Re:“Ghost in the Shell - Remake” on Monday April 24, 2017 @05:23AM (#14182918)
Spooky!
"The movie also has the distinction of branding the character in an explicitly homophobic light by heightening the Baron’s actions and displaying them all at once:"

Hmmm. I don't think you've read the book.

Re:What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @05:04PM (#14142907)
Lenny!
Re:Serious Jolt [audio] on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @06:30AM (#14137629)
Very cool story. When I was in Turkey I asked my guide where the country grew its coffee. I was surprised to hear that it didn't - it's always got it from Yemen. Turns out that Turkey getting coffee from Yemen has always been a thing going back thousands of years, perhaps the longest continuous trade arrangement in history.
Re:Lies About Logs on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @05:27AM (#14137417)
The log itself was a 2.7Gb file sitting on a slow SD card on a Raspberry Pi.
Re:Lies About Logs on Monday April 17, 2017 @09:55AM (#14130855)
“They’re just logs, they can’t possibly impact my code efficiency.” More bad news: oh yes they can, particularly in the critical execution path. Lots of people seem to think that there is no cost to dropping DEBUG statements around their code willy-nilly. This is usually true on your laptop,

Haha - this happened to me last week and I found out the hard way. My log had grown so quickly that the code was taking 15 seconds just to append to it.

Re:A Competitive Programmer's Handbook on Friday April 14, 2017 @04:35PM (#14117113)
Not only is this an excellent introduction to competitive programming, it's also a very nice overview of some of the nuts and bolts of C++. I recently have had to deal with a large C++ codebase and this is a really good little refresher.
Aha - yes, I can imagine how it would.
One of the reasons Threads worked because it felt like a documentary about ordinary people. That bloody voiceover with its calm measured tones describing the absolute horror that was unfolding...brrr.
Re:Drupal Confessions – An Open Letter on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @05:30PM (#14101952)
Sssh - nothing to see here. Whatever you do, don't go looking for evidence or anything. Keep consuming and obeying.

Older »