Viewing profile — elwin

That's definitely true, but counting function parameters was only a small part of the difficulty. Weren't most of the problems related to optimization being harder and less effecti…

> But there is a lot of work for the compiler here, wow. Knowing the maximum number of registers that is needed for any function call made within a function? Ouch. That shouldn't b…

That's what I get for citing Wikipedia. But the idea was also brought up by actual southern politicians, particularly in the discussions at the end of the Mexican War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Circle_%28proposed_coun... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29 If you're looking for a more serious reference, Freehling's …

A detector is typically a series of concentric cylinders, with the beam pipe, where the collisions occur, running through the center. The inner layers are tracking chambers, which …

tmux is an OpenBSD-influenced project. Those projects' version numbers often progress from N.9 to N+1.0 without having any special significance.

This site has some useful articles: http://hpdz.net/TechInfo.htm

Signals are too brittle and complex. That's why you have to read three whole manpages to figure out what happens if a process gets the same signal twice in rapid succession. They a…

The current kdbus controversy is unrelated to systemd, as far as I can tell.

There's a lot of good advice already, but here's one tip: Learn how to read documentation. Consult man pages and official documentation before resorting to random people on website…

The point I was trying to make is that production needs to match consumption. Which can be difficult to plan for digital goods.

Yes, more content adds more value. But past a certain point of saturation, it no longer adds enough additional value to compensate its creators. My argument is that we are long pas…

The world probably needs less content creation. We're long past the point where there are too many useful books to read in one lifetime. Even in narrow fields, we're producing come…

> a C to fpga compiler which you would suspect could do some crazy things and took thousands of engineering hours to make work. But instead it just implements a CPU in the FPGA Is …

That's an interesting analogy with nuclear weapons, but I think there's an important difference. Nuclear weapons have a deterrent effect. That's why the American first possession m…

> The various civil rights movements got where they are today through the use of social repercussions. I don't think this was the case. Look at, for example, the abolitionist movem…

I was going to say that social repercussions are prone to be abused, but I think it's more accurate to say that social repercussions are abuse. For every source of bigoted and hate…

DCSS is a remarkable open source project. The game's design is focused and coherent, avoiding "feature creep". Yet the devs are open to community suggestions and stay on good terms…

Historically, debt neither increases forever nor collapses catastrophically. Individual sectors collapse, and new ones develop. In the early modern period, governments would simply…

It would only take a simple addon to add browser support. There are several in the Firefox catalog. Also, browsers tend to have better CSS support than e-readers.

Try looking at the comments from a different angle. Instead of grouping them into "pro-NSA" and "anti-NSA" categories, try checking for technical ignorance. Look for ideas about cy…

I suspect that "cyberweapons", like biological weapons, are almost impossible to use in a way that does not harm civilians. Their development is practically certain to lead to use …

> I actually don't know what you mean with "criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years" in regards to the Linux kernel and the userland. There's a joke from the 90's that goes som…

> In fact the only purpose of an init system is to start executables in a defined order, not more. That's where the disagreement lies. I see the purpose of an init system as being …