Viewing profile — wpollock

Just because the cave is sealed now, does not mean it has been sealed for millions of years. Even for geology, 5.5M years is a long time. I don't understand how they can claim it n…

> He thinks everyone needs manpages. I told him I never look at any local man page ever; I only look online for help... Everyone's workflow is different. Your's obviously works for…

I think you have mixed up ordered and unordered lists? But a fun sounding project, good luck!

In 1982 I purchased a GE analog alarm clock which plugs into an electric socket, has a gentle backlight and a snooze button. It cost 4-5 dollars. This clock still sits on my nights…

The title of this post reminds me of a favorite quote "Write code as if the next person to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live!"

Car: You look tired. There's a motel in 3 miles. Car: You appear to be suffering from acne. Try Zit-away, available at the convenience store in 2.4 kilometers. Car: Facial recognit…

> Should be using strcpy_s or strncpy_s These functions are optional in the C standard and not always present. AFAIK, they are not included in glibc as of 2025.

TIL! Thanks!

Stéphane (not "M") Chazelas is a genius. I have written him several times over the past 30 years, encouraging him to write a book about shell, POSIX, and other topics that he is an…

This article is a bit misleading. Linux kernel programming uses C, but not the C standard library and never has. The string functions discussed here are "helper" functions included…

One point of clarification: with git, "global" means per-user, not "machine-wide. (I never understood why "--global" wasn't better named, maybe "--user".) That's why these pathname…

> There are laws in place forbidding government agencies from merging together datasets. This is an excellent point. In my opinion, such laws are a good idea. Most of the time, pol…

> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the …

The Sahara desert. It's not only repetitive but it repeats itself too as well. These gems are brought to you by the department of redundancy department.

One of several reasons to partition a large volume into smaller ones. At least, back then.

For what it's worth, in the U.S. at least you can connect to your local library with an app named "libby". I used this frequently on my Android phone to download books and magazine…

I wonder how many readers realized your joke here. For the ones who didn't, the 4-byte "magic number" that identifies Java .class files, in hex, spell "CAFEBABE".

This. Today, well-meaning doctors cannot spend more than 5-10 minutes between seeing patients. Medical shows on TV show teams of physicians working on one or two patients per week.…

> Do you know how to operate a punch card? I remember! You created a control card, with tab stops and other controls, wrapped it around a control drum, and then had an easy time pu…

Very nice write up! I am a fan of Rust and have little exposure to Go. That said, a couple of very minor points: cargo audit is not built-in, it is 3rd party. (The comparison table…

> Typescript is only a linter... I never thought of Typescript (TS) that way. I believe TS is a language addition that enabled smarter JavaScript linters; TS is not a linter progra…

> Theres no reason to ship TS to an end user browser. As things are now, developers write code in TypeScript, then debug and update code in Javascript. It might not be much of a re…

> Because "it doesn't exist". It's just a layer on top of js, ... C++ was originally a layer on top of C. The first C++ compiler, "cfront" was actually a transpiler to C. There is …

Long ago, I had the insight that not all users are equally technically proficient. Some had the chops to fix some problems if given sufficient information. Other users would be con…