Viewing profile — holmak

In "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System" by Dennis Ritchie, he writes: > Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name ‘Unix,’ in a som…

It's rather bold for the Atlantic to complain about low quality news when they have clickbait garbage at the bottom of every article.

Why not just design for deep sea exploration or nuclear applications directly? It's a heck of a lot cheaper to test prototypes in the ocean than on Venus.

Silent, deadly electric cars... Joking aside, they've snuck up on me more than once when I'm about to cross the street and they're trying to right-on-red. I'm surprised they don't …

In case you didn't know, "inferior good" is an economics term with a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good

Their market analysis, just like every other discussion of commercial space exploration I've ever seen, is circular. Space solar power, space manufacturing, space mining, space ref…

SDL is written in C, and it has a much more pleasant way of dealing with heterogeneous event types. There is a struct called SDL_Event, which you fill by calling SDL_PollEvent() un…

I don't have any trouble with pointers. I can understand C programs just fine. But Modern C++, as the evangelists love to point out, is specifically about avoiding raw pointers in …

Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I think the original poster was referring to the Plan 9 team's strong preference for C over C++. Plan 9 was written with a modified version of …

I tried to learn "modern" C++ style, and watched many, many videos from cppcon, but I just don't feel like I understand how to do it. I started a C++ project, #included and all the…

Plan 9 was a research OS that was sort of intended to be a "next generation" Unix. The Golang project is led by at least one person who worked on the Plan 9 OS, and overall it seem…

I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone…

Regardless of how you categorize the system, having more money flowing through an organization increases the incentive for the members of that system to do something unethical to t…

I noticed that too. It amuses me that it just takes a couple of tasteful red and blue stripes to make something look official!

I agree that the names are confusing or misleading to modern readers. The strange choice of words in both cases seems to be due to the terms being used in a technical sense with a …

The article suggests that the discussed behavior is a problem because it does show up in code that "regular users" have to look at: > This paper tries to shed some light in the dar…

I have seen it claimed that null-terminated strings were encouraged by the instruction sets of the time -- that some instruction sets make null-terminated sequences easier to handl…

I've been thinking about this lately, and there might be a great advantage to modern democracy even if it is a sham run by oligarchs. Unlike an old-fashioned monarchy or dictatorsh…

The concept presented here of "seeking justice by appeal to the majority" reminds me of the Twitter phenomenon in which people learned that the only way to get customer service fro…

I often think about the strange coincidence that English is the easiest language to represent in a computer. Only 26 characters, with no accents, all independently placed in series…

I agree with your assessment -- utility with respect to time is the first explanation I thought of as well. People (and firms) have a limited ability to anticipate or defer purchas…