fasquoika
fasquoika on Hacker News
Personally nearly every nice thing in my life either is a human or was made by one
Reinventing polari is certainly one way to make yourself less understood...
>There’s a well-established effect, common enough at this point to where some academic has probably given it a name like “The Twitter Dilemma” or something, that describes how a lie can be much more potent and contagious with exponentially fewer words than are necessary to effectively refute it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Posted by
fasquoika on Tuesday August 08, 2023 @08:43PM
from the macworld.com dept.
>A safe alternative is to use indexes instead of references.
struct ParsedFile {
contents: Vec<u8>,
words: Vec<(usize, usize)>
}
>This works well, and you can make it ergonomic by wrapping the index pair in a new type
You should probably just use the std::ops::Range type for this. It's what's created by the `..` syntax
Posted by
fasquoika on Saturday April 23, 2022 @03:04PM
from the www2.eecs.berkeley.edu dept.
Well, you didn't just find a cave, it was made for you by other people. Interdependence is a hallmark of social species such as Homo Sapiens. Even your caveman ancestors were probably reliant on one another in many ways.
>It seems that someone asked the great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “What is the first sign you look for to tell of an ancient civilization?” The interviewer had in mind a tool or article of clothing. Ms. Mead surprised him by answering, “a healed femur (thigh bone)”. When someone breaks a femur, they can’t survive to hunt, fish or escape enemies unless they have help from someone else. Thus, a healed femur indicates that someone else helped that person, rather than abandoning them and saving only themselves.
>It really clued me into how the language got such a following in HR/Finance applications. You got an array of everyones hours per day. Weekly total hours, pay, tax, medicare, etc, were all broken out in little calculative statements based on the array of hours.
Yeah I guess APL is kind of 'spreadsheets as a Real Programming Language', isn't it?
Posted by
fasquoika on Friday July 16, 2021 @03:43PM
from the pine64.org dept.
>I was at a talk that had something to do with Unix. Fortunately, I’ve succeeded in repressing all but the speaker’s opening remark:
>I’m rather surprised that the author of sendmail is still walking around alive.
>The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert Morris, author of “the Internet Worm” in jail was all the sysadmins’ time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead.
- The Unix Haters Handbook
I'm guessing this is referring to the fact that early versions of Fortran stored return addresses in specific memory locations (at the end of the function definition IIRC) instead of on a call stack. This is why those versions of Fortran couldn't do recursion, because the new return address would overwrite the old one.
Posted by
fasquoika on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:28PM
from the matrix.org dept.
> Perhaps it relates to using 36-bit words?
Yep, before ASCII was standardized it was common for machines to be built with word-addressable memory and words that were multiples of six bits. Two octal digits easily represent a six-bit byte, just as two hexadecimal digits easily represent an eight-bit byte
Posted by
fasquoika on Monday April 12, 2021 @03:34PM
from the git.alexwennerberg.com dept.
This is how both TeX and m4 do quoting by default so presumably common when they were created (mid-eighties and early seventies respectively IIRC)
>My guess is that Microsoft has a secret new OS (written from scratch) that's super modern and efficient and they're just waiting for the market opportunity to finally ditch Windows and bring out that new thing. I doubt it'll ever happen though because for "new" stuff (where you have to write all your stuff from scratch all over again) everyone expects the OS to be free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
>(now I know where it comes from)
Both Julia and Ruby got this from Scheme and it might be even older than that.
Alan Kay has asserted repeatedly that there's no place like Xerox Parc in the modern world. Not necessarily authoritative, but something to think about.
> Further, when a variable is evaluated, you get both its value and a reference to it. This allows variables to be evaluated before being assigned to in assignments. This sounds weird, but it works with the above. You can make a "set" function which does the same thing as assignment
Have you read Strachey's "Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages"[1]? You seem to have rediscovered lvalues.
[1] https://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2009/fundamental-1967.pdf
"There's more than one way to name it"
>Lisp (or Scheme, in this case) is a very simple language that gets essentially everything right.
I have to wonder if you actually know all that much about Scheme. Undelimited continuations, for example, are pretty much strictly broken. I like Scheme, but to claim it's flawless is kinda ridiculous.