Viewing profile — nycticorax

Kind of you to engage! Ahh, ok, I misunderstood. Very cool! I think maybe it would have helped me if you had given a one-or-two-sentence description of the "representative change" …

This is interesting, but I think it would be even more interesting to see a comparison of the token cost of adding a new feature, in the original codebase vs the refactored one. Yo…

Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI ( https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ ). I found his general goal for…

OK, I did not know about [saturation arithmetic]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_arithmetic ). Cool! But I can't agree with the claim that "nan is almost always a mistake…

This is only somewhat related, but: Has there ever been a language that adopted IEEE-754-like semantics for integer types? (Yes, I know this would be slow without hardware support.…

The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a …

Middle-click paste is faster than Ctrl-C-then-Ctrl-V. And if you are a developer, you often find yourself copying long strings from one place to another. And it has been a standard…

I'm not surprised that GNOME would contemplate this: it seems like a very GNOME-y thing to do. (And maybe this is a good thing for GNOME users. But this kind of thing is also why I…

Shouldn't the first sentence on that website describe what GNU Unifont actually is ? I guess it's a single copyleft font designed to have coverage of all (or nearly all?) unicode c…

It would help if you would say what exactly you think is wrong with it.

So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community. But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had…

My PhD research was actually studying the leech nervous system. They're still an important 'model' organism in neurobiology. Probably not as important in the field at large as they…

Strongly endorse. That paper is really wonderful. It seems to me that MVS is the solution to the version selection problem, and now we just have to wait for awareness of this to fu…

The post title implies that all French villages have no more drinking water, which is not the case. Sounds like it's 16 villages, all near each other. Still a big deal, but not nea…

DOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012

I don't agree with him 100%, but I always find Drew DeVault to be thoughtful on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936114 https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-dis…

There are certainly some aspects of it that are inelegant, in the interests of backwards compatibility, but otherwise I don't know what you are talking about. Matlab supports >2d a…

HN discussion of a related recent story in Wired magazine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43490290

I'm excited to see KDE promoted to being an "edition", but does anyone know what is behind this decision? It surprises me that Red Hat would take this step, since they are (seeming…

The statement I take issue with is that Sutton "is not to be celebrated or trusted". Which I can only interpret to mean that the speaker does not think that Sutton should be celebr…

But the Turing Award is for his technical work.

This is so silly. Do you imagine temporal difference learning is some kind of human successionist plot?

And of course January 6, a literal coup attempt, was perpetrated by the Rs. Nothing remotely like that on the D side.

Indivisible still exists, and is still active: https://indivisible.org/

This is not quite correct, at least not in most commonly-used languages. The difference comes when a "superclass" method calls self.whatever(), and the whatever() is implemented in…