Viewing profile — bitofhope

This site seems to be made by Drew DeVault who also runs sourcehut.

Sounds like you're suggesting a causal relationship the other way, though. As per this explanation, putting effort into debugging edge cases will statistically cause the comments t…

Rorschach test for programmers: give your confident gut feeling explanation for this phenomenon. I'll do mine: there's likely a correlation between needing to maintain a profession…

I believe "go bananas" is a bit of metonymy from "go ape", possibly through "go apeshit", with the idea that bananas are something of a precursor to primate excrement.

Paying my respects to a pioneer. I started a project to implement a LZ77 decoder in Game Boy assembly to see if it could compress the sprites in Pokémon Red and Blue versions bette…

Just a security patch, but I like seeing NetHack featured. Looking forward to 3.7 where they finally address a glaring omission where up until now deities have been weirdly indiffe…

The expression ((INT32_MAX / 0x1ff) The original code was like this: if (x = 0 && i (x * 0x1ff / 0xffff) can only be negative if (x = 0) check because the only way it's false is if…

AltGr+8 is reasonable enough that I don't feel like learning a new layout. Ctrl+AltGr+8 is involved enough that I might as well press Esc. A lot of software developers are unaware …

I'll argue for it not being cheating in this case. Consider this C quine: #include int main(int c,char** v){char*s="#include %cint main(int c,char** v){char*s=%c%s%c;printf(s,10,34…

Anyone know any good articles, tutorials or books about ABI design? How did we end up with what we have now, what lessons are there to learn? How would you go about designing a new…

I yearn for a world where hard disk partitions are a memory of primitive times past confined to the minds of retrocomputing enthusiasts. I want my system board to have a firmware t…

OCR hardly needed. Just read /dev/text. I don't think the mouse chording is that essential to Plan 9. It's how rio and acme work, but those programs can be replaced without throwin…

There are workloads where shell scripts are the so-called right tool for a job . All too often I see people writing scripts in "proper" languages and calling os.system() on every o…

Likewise, I was filling out the survey while not on my work machine where I use emacs.

It did get me thinking about something here. The deal with patents is that you make the way your invention works public knowledge. You document the principle and in exchange you ge…

Free Software vs Open Source is not about copyleft vs permissive. The GPL is both a Free and an Open Source license. The MIT license also counts as both Free and Open Source. Most …

I don't think I've seen anyone bring up patents. Those are a different matter altogether. "Copyrighted algorigthm implementations" is a little trickier, since any program code is e…

You can technically pipe to streams other than &1 and &2, so you could use printf "WARNING: %s" "$warn_msg" >&3 But of course, nonstandard.

If a book on writing portable shell scripts across *nix platforms depends on commands not specified by POSIX, I don't think those books are doing their job very well.

>I'm definitely not in favor of fossilizing Unix, but there's a difference between avoiding fossilization and the kind of minimal, mathematical purity that we see GNU Grep trying t…

Consider a number line: ┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼─┼ ... 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... Any point on the line can be described by a single coordinate, so the line is one-dimensional. We could also…

Most laws are at least somewhat ambiguous and unreadable for the layperson. The gist of the GDPR is not particularly hard to understand and a lot of the complexity comes from cover…

This breaks multiple desirable uses of cookies, unless they're explicitly allowed on a per-site basis. It doesn't help if a site uses cookies for both desirable and undesirable pur…

In this case the problem with GDPR is not how it's written but how it's enforced (or rather, how little it's enforced). Most of the cookie popups that appear while browsing are alr…