Viewing profile — dandotway

> The most philosophically and mathematically consistent interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is that there are "many worlds". Why is "many worlds" the most mathematically consisten…

Atheists: "We have faith natural selection at a cosmic level makes life way more likely." Christians: "We have faith supernatural selection at a cosmic level makes afterlife way mo…

Question for JIT experts: JS and Python are extremely hard to optimize because they both allow redefining anything at any time, yet V8 crushes Python by an order of magnitude in ma…

Big Endian POWER isn't bug-for-bug compatible with buggy Javascript usage of typed arrays that assumes little endianness, and thus browsers/nodejs/deno on POWER will be exposed to …

> [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortran programs Anyone have a PDF link to a paper about this Fortran analyzer?

While faster-than-light (FTL) travel is impossible through spacetime as PhD physicists know it (i.e. as "Relativity-confirming experiments reveal it"), there are forms of apparent …

Individuals and small business owners don't have time to learn patent law, nor do they have money to have dedicated legal departments like rich corporations. If I was sued I would …

- never talk to cops - never read a patent - never read proprietary source code I need a nice printable version of this to post on my wall.

Clearly you've never been sued by a patent troll. The patent system only benefits (1.) rich corporations that can afford the millions of dollars in lawyer fees to litigate patent c…

+NaN For comments that make me laugh out loud for duration T>2.0 seconds, I wish HN provided a way to transmute/sacrifice one's past karma points into additional +1 mod points.

So whenever I have to study someone else's 'dynamic' python I encounter this sort of thing: def foo(bar, baz): bar(baz) ... What the heck is 'bar' and 'baz'? I deduce no more than …

https://archive.ph/uEt1V

> I like the idea of a small, performant language So the earliest C compilers were under 5000 lines of C+asm: https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc If you want a minimal "standard …

"Another programming language" cannot even meaningfully exist if all programming languages are forced to have the same feature set. Should Python get C-like low-level pointer manip…

Features that seem like a good idea at the time often don't stand the test of time 20-30 years in the future. In the mid-90s Object-Oriented Programming was super-hyped so a bunch …

> The two reactors at Torness have a combined electricity output of 1200 MW If they bumped 1200 MW to 1210 MW they'd have the 1.21 GW they need to operate a Flux Capacitor. https:/…

As long as Apple gets its 30% cut, why is Apple incentivized to hire a bunch more staff with healthcare, vacation, and pension benefits who are paid to crack down on this? "Dear AA…

If you have a second, I'm curious to learn more about your head scratching experiences with JVM. I want to make a program that I can trust will still run the exact same (bug-for-bu…

Having learned a number of Lisp systems in the past, I wouldn't necessarily recommend ANSI Common Lisp as a first choice for a Lisp unless your needs are very particular, because i…

> I said that multiple cursors are a gimmick which is less efficient My Dear Dude, you are surely aware that computer editors are Religion among programmers, that vi vs. emacs, tab…

In my undergrad computer science program, I implemented the rudiments of a very simple CPU using AND, OR, and NOT logic gates. I learned how to program microprocessors in assembly …

> In reality, you would think about and act upon each in turn Here's a real example from real coding I was doing, then: color.r = 42; color.g = 42; color.b = 42; I want to bump the…

Ancient FORTRAN, as opposed to complicated modern Fortran/C++/Rust, has a huge advantage if you ever crash your spaceship on a resource rich alien world and have to build a program…

> Please do look into vim's regular expressions So here's an editing task. Given the following in your editing buffer, signed char foo; /* ... 10 more lines ... */ unsigned short b…