jwhite

4 ms·

1.
by jwhite 3y ago
For anyone interested in the "critical" aspect mentioned by h0l0cube, please consider also reading "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate" by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe. Peter Sutton is an anthropologist an
2.
by jwhite 3y ago
Maybe watch the video. Artists have to eat, and they relied on patronage and commissions. The church and the nobles were the only ones with the free cash and the motivation to fund artists and their creations for much of the Christian age
3.
by jwhite 4y ago
Postponed to 1944, in 1943 it would have failed.
4.
by jwhite 4y ago
Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not the only one.
5.
by jwhite 6y ago
I think SK's numbers are becoming more reliable by the day though. The new case rate has stabilised to a small number in the range of 50 to 150 per day and the active case count is dropping at a rate of over 200 per day. The daily de
6.
by jwhite 7y ago
s/Nullabor/Nullarbor/ (no trees). The Nullarbor is a vast, arid, unpopulated plain over 1000km wide. I think the comment was meant to suggest that infrastructure projects like this are challenging in Australia, because the d
7.
by jwhite 7y ago
I don't disagree with the general realpolitik you describe, but it's not clear that damaging Huawei isn't damaging the USA as well. American companies supply Huawei, and their business is being harmed; and American consumers
8.
by jwhite 8y ago
I agree. Something that might be worth noting: two minutes of googling didn't turn up the author's age, but I recall seeing this photo on his website when I bought it some time after it was published in 2008: https://hc
9.
by jwhite 8y ago
On your first point: I seem to remember plenty of companies that failed that were not telecom. In fact when I went looking just now I found a bunch of listicles about retail startups that failed. The telecom bubble and crash was almost a s
10.
by jwhite 8y ago
I was so hoping the guy's name would turn out to be Richard.
11.
by jwhite 8y ago
Most residential customers don't have static IP addresses -- how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?
12.
by jwhite 9y ago
That's more a matter of experience and attitude -- even simple things like reference types are nice. Also, templates offer a lot of abstraction power that can be used to model the hardware nicely, without sacrificing efficiency. Many
13.
by jwhite 9y ago
Nothing. I've worked on Cortex-M4 projects in C++. It's nice in many ways. The people working on the project had a much more diverse background than the typical EE who learned C as an undergrad mentioned in another thread.
14.
by jwhite 9y ago
"Real engineering" also runs on a different (slower) cadence, in part due to the longer timescale between inception and realisation of ideas, and due to the costs involved in making physical things.
15.
by jwhite 9y ago
Sorry this comment is so late; ATS is also interesting because it has linear types that allow compile-time resource tracking similar to Rust's ownership and lifetime tracking. If you use linear types you can opt out of the garbage col
16.
by jwhite 9y ago
Well, SBCL does not ship with an interpreter, for example. Expressions entered at the REPL get compiled directly to machine code, so there's no difference in performance for a function entered at the REPL (or via SLIME C-c C-c) and on
17.
by jwhite 9y ago
Interpreted language? Common Lisp is typically compiled. Besides which, why is interpreted a particular advantage? e.g. Python was interpreted 10 years ago when I was using it, but Common Lisp felt far more flexible and powerful, because
18.
by jwhite 9y ago
A little cheesy, but whenever I hear about this sort of thing I always think of this scene from Saving Private Ryan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKbdE5LOGNQ
19.
by jwhite 9y ago
Yes, I've noticed that about myself too. Reading is a high investment / high reward activity, and you have to make an effort to do it. One approach is to set aside a time slot daily where you just read, like the hour before bed
20.
by jwhite 9y ago
Ha! I should have been more precise in my language. I was avoiding learning how to write more substantial shell scripts and programs, not the command line per se. I also got my start on pre-GUI computers (a VIC-20, specifically).
21.
by jwhite 9y ago
Thank you. Looks like you've packed a lot of good stuff in there already. I only skimmed so far, but this quote stuck out: "Programming is fundamentally a way to save human labor, and that includes our own labor." I'm c
22.
by jwhite 9y ago
Thanks for those links, I think I will enjoy them. I was actually thinking about Forth as well when I was writing those comments about functional programming. I'll be interested to read your take on it.
23.
by jwhite 9y ago
Every language has its warts, but C is a pretty small language when it comes down to it. Compare that to just the number of different ways you can expand a parameter in bash: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manu
24.
by jwhite 9y ago
Here are a couple of thoughts: - I used to spend a lot of time stuffing things into variables and then trying to operate on those, which is how you do things in imperative languages. Shell is better thought of in dataflow terms, i.e. pipel
25.
by jwhite 9y ago
Yes, totally agree. But it offers something different to say Python, as the video points out. Some things are more compact in shell than in Python, because it's not the same sort of programming language as Python. And I reach for Py
26.
by jwhite 9y ago
I appreciate your point, but I think the choice to write all or parts of an application in shell depends a lot on what you need to achieve. Writing 100 lines of shell to glue parts of your application together may be the best way to ship s
27.
by jwhite 9y ago
I spent many years avoiding shell, in large part because all the arbitrary-looking syntax and features (like quoting rules) the speaker highlights make it frustrating and difficult to master, and I felt like it was a treacherous enemy to be
28.
by jwhite 9y ago
Agreed! Just being a SoC has another advantage: reduced part count, so you can fit more functionality onto a smaller PCBA. Another commenter mentioned the Cyclone V and Zynq SoCs. My day job is in the telco industry. The equipment vendors
29.
by jwhite 10y ago
I'm not sure failing FizzBuzz means you lied on your CV. I suspect that many programmers go straight into an environment where they never have to think about algorithmic problems (even algorithms as simple as FizzBuzz), because others
30.
by jwhite 10y ago
I work in embedded systems. We mainly write C. We ask candidates to implement strlen() in the phone screen. A surprising number are not able to. It's a very low bar, but still a useful filter.

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