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Re:Just Too Efficient on Sunday July 12, 2020 @04:28AM (#23809838)
Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is taken from.
Re:LibreOffice: The Next Five Years on Friday July 10, 2020 @06:35AM (#23790030)
> Another pathology is that there are companies who ship LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free.

Lmao... but thinking again, given the average user's bug-filing abilities, a professional bug-filer might actually be useful.

Re:Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @10:20AM (#23759544)
But once you've accepted unchecked exceptions (and paid the cost of the having them), it just doesn't make sense to only use them only for bugs. For example, it is better to

  try:
    x = json['foo']['bar'][i]
  catch OOB:
    handle error
than to

  if not (json is a dict and
          'foo' in json and
          json['foo'] is a dict and
          ...):
    handle error
  x = json['foo']['bar'][i]
even though in the former, unchecked exceptions are used for non-bugs.
Re:Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @09:18AM (#23758897)
How do you propose handling an OOB index in an array?
It might be interesting to compare them if you'd care to share.
Re:Bible API on Sunday July 05, 2020 @12:32PM (#23739885)
Here is a typical example (from Genesis Rabbah)

> And Cain rose up against his brother Abel. [...] With what did he kill him? R. Simeon said: He killed him with a staff: And a young man for my bruising (Gen 4:23) implies a weapon which inflicts a bruise. The Rabbis said: He killed him with a stone: For I have slain a man for wounding me (ibid) indicates a weapon which inflicts wounds. R. 'Azariah and R. Jonathan in R. Isaac's name said: Cain had closely observed where his father slew the bullock [which he sacrificed, as it is written], And it shall please the Lord better than a bullock (Ps 69:31), and there he killed him: by the throat and its organs.

From a Christian perspective, a more interesting example might be the Gospel's atomization/recontextualizations of text as Messianic prophecy ("out of Egypt I have called my son", "behold, a virgin shall be with child").

Re:Bible API on Sunday July 05, 2020 @11:25AM (#23739374)
> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world

On the contrary, the atomization and recombination of the text into new meanings is highly characteristic of Midrash. Of course, this isn't the same as the "prooftext" hermeneutic I think you're criticizing.

Re:Windows98 Running in the Browser on Monday June 29, 2020 @05:44AM (#23675947)
Firefox/Linux: the cursor constantly tracks to the left. You have to push the mouse to the right to keep it still.

Works in Chromium though.

Re:Xi-Editor Retrospective on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:38PM (#23665244)
No, where does it go? Are the big editors unsuccessful?
Re:Dynamic linking on Saturday June 27, 2020 @04:38AM (#23660396)
Ugly maybe, but they're do kinda combine the advantages of both. They have the portability and reproducibility advantages of static linking, while still letting you take them apart and change the dependencies like with dynamic linking if you really want to.
Re:Dynamic linking on Friday June 26, 2020 @04:09PM (#23656395)
What do you mean by "source-based distribution"?
Re:Dynamic linking on Friday June 26, 2020 @04:08PM (#23656387)
It can also cut the other way though. Bugs can be introduced, compatibility can be broken, users can not find the library in their package manager, or they may find too new of a version. The danger of this is smaller for popular libraries, but goes up as you move to the long tail.
Re:Dynamic linking on Friday June 26, 2020 @03:20PM (#23655875)
>Do your installed programs share dynamic libraries?

>Findings: not really

>Over half of your libraries are used by fewer than 0.1% of your executables.

Findings: Yes, lots, but mostly the most common ones. Dynamically linking against something in the long tail is pretty pointless though.

Re:Functional Language Features: Iterators and Closures on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @04:26PM (#23633435)
Historically imperative languages did have tagged unions (Algol, Pascal, Ada, Modula). Their disappearance is mostly because of OOP's takeover I think. It was thought that a tagged union should be replaced by a base class with one derived class per variant.

What they lacked was usually a nice way to operate on tagged unions, ie. pattern matching.

Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout? on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @09:11PM (#23622729)
You can also put a Readme in any folder and it will show up the same way. You usually wouldn't want those up top while browsing the files though. So it's also about consistency.
Re:Tiny C Compiler on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @05:17PM (#23620422)
> (Nov 18, 2001) TCC version 0.9 is out. First public version.
Re:I Am Deleting the Blog on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:44PM (#23619999)
Writing, as opposed to speaking, by its nature conveys a degree of anonymity. Historically, anonymous writers are very common.
Re:Twenty Proofs of Euler's Formula: V-E+F=2 on Sunday June 21, 2020 @05:36PM (#23595611)
To emphasize where the topology comes in since it wasn't clear to me at first: the important bit is the saddles. Just before a saddle goes under, there are two important properties

1. there are land masses on both sides of the saddle. This would not be true if the polytope had holes.

2. if the lakes on either side of the saddle are joined up, the only way they can do that is if the lake circles around and encloses at least one of the two land masses (Jordan curve theorem). Once the saddle point goes under, that land mass is cut off from the "mainland". This would not be true if the polytope had a handle. The lakes could be joined up by going along the handle without enclosing one of the land masses.

https://i.imgur.com/I2FqwWQ.jpg

Re:Twenty Proofs of Euler's Formula: V-E+F=2 on Sunday June 21, 2020 @06:06AM (#23591084)
I like Noah's Ark a lot.
Re:Modularizing SQL? (2007) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @06:23AM (#23561693)
It's slowed down a lot. There's been a total of 8 posts and 50 comments since 2019. There were 32 posts just in 2017.
Re:Modularizing SQL? (2007) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:15AM (#23561301)
Not really on topic, but what happened to LtU anyway?
Re:Generics and Compile-Time in Rust on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @06:17AM (#23537490)
One way is that it can handle functions like return : Monad m => a -> m a where m occurs only in the outputs. There's no input arg you could hang a vtable off of.
I've thought about this too, but keeping positional args. The basic data type would be a "blob", consisting of a struct part and a tuple part.
It doesn't.

  isOdd('') => false
  isOdd(null) => false
  isOdd(2n) => TypeError: Cannot convert a BigInt value to a number
But even if it did, the same line of reasoning leads to the absurd conclusion we should have an addOne function.
Re:The American Press Is Destroying Itself on Saturday June 13, 2020 @11:31AM (#23510124)
> Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
Re:Ruby vs. Crystal Performance on Friday June 05, 2020 @03:27PM (#23432781)
Recursive fibonacci is highly artificial, but the fact that a compiler can greatly transform the program is an important advantage of compilers over interpreters.
Re:Pinebook Pro, First Impressions on Sunday May 31, 2020 @05:52PM (#23373112)
> a barrel connector power supply

What's wrong with this?

Re:Reflections on Rust, and the Sand Castle Metaphor on Friday April 27, 2018 @01:29PM (#16942565)
> But that doesn't explain why I can't add two `String`s together using +.

Because that would consume both Strings, which doesn't make sense. The impl that exists only consumes the left string, reusing its buffer.

This seems like an odd thing to complain about since if you try it the compiler will tell you exactly what you should do instead.

Re:The “Run Less Software” philosophy on Monday March 26, 2018 @01:47AM (#16676888)
You've missed out on a charming popup bubble offering you a... customer retention start kit, was it?

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