Hacker News: eeereerews

New comment by eeereerews in "Just Too Efficient"

eeereerews — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 08:28:41 +0000

Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is taken from.

New comment by eeereerews in "LibreOffice: The Next Five Years"

eeereerews — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 10:35:36 +0000

> Another pathology is that there are companies who ship LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free.

Lmao... but thinking again, given the average user's bug-filing abilities, a professional bug-filer might actually be useful.

New comment by eeereerews in "Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome"

eeereerews — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 14:20:19 +0000

But once you've accepted unchecked exceptions (and paid the cost of the having them), it just doesn't make sense to only use them only for bugs. For example, it is better to

  try:
    x = json['foo']['bar'][i]
  catch OOB:
    handle error

than to

  if not (json is a dict and
          'foo' in json and
          json['foo'] is a dict and
          ...):
    handle error
  x = json['foo']['bar'][i]

even though in the former, unchecked exceptions are used for non-bugs.

New comment by eeereerews in "Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome"

eeereerews — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:18:41 +0000

How do you propose handling an OOB index in an array?

New comment by eeereerews in "Rust for JavaScript Developers – Functions and Control Flow"

eeereerews — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:47:00 +0000

It might be interesting to compare them if you'd care to share.

New comment by eeereerews in "Bible API"

eeereerews — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:32:44 +0000

Here is a typical example (from Genesis Rabbah)

> And Cain rose up against his brother Abel. [...] With what did he kill him? R. Simeon said: He killed him with a staff: And a young man for my bruising (Gen 4:23) implies a weapon which inflicts a bruise. The Rabbis said: He killed him with a stone: For I have slain a man for wounding me (ibid) indicates a weapon which inflicts wounds. R. 'Azariah and R. Jonathan in R. Isaac's name said: Cain had closely observed where his father slew the bullock [which he sacrificed, as it is written], And it shall please the Lord better than a bullock (Ps 69:31), and there he killed him: by the throat and its organs.

From a Christian perspective, a more interesting example might be the Gospel's atomization/recontextualizations of text as Messianic prophecy ("out of Egypt I have called my son", "behold, a virgin shall be with child").

New comment by eeereerews in "Bible API"

eeereerews — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 15:25:42 +0000

> That hermeneutic - texts are collections of independent logical propositions - was essentially unknown in the ancient world

On the contrary, the atomization and recombination of the text into new meanings is highly characteristic of Midrash. Of course, this isn't the same as the "prooftext" hermeneutic I think you're criticizing.

New comment by eeereerews in "Windows98 Running in the Browser"

eeereerews — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 09:44:56 +0000

Firefox/Linux: the cursor constantly tracks to the left. You have to push the mouse to the right to keep it still.

Works in Chromium though.

New comment by eeereerews in "Xi-Editor Retrospective"

eeereerews — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 22:38:05 +0000

No, where does it go? Are the big editors unsuccessful?

New comment by eeereerews in "Dynamic linking"

eeereerews — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 08:38:30 +0000

Ugly maybe, but they're do kinda combine the advantages of both. They have the portability and reproducibility advantages of static linking, while still letting you take them apart and change the dependencies like with dynamic linking if you really want to.

New comment by eeereerews in "Dynamic linking"

eeereerews — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:09:26 +0000

What do you mean by "source-based distribution"?

New comment by eeereerews in "Dynamic linking"

eeereerews — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:08:37 +0000

It can also cut the other way though. Bugs can be introduced, compatibility can be broken, users can not find the library in their package manager, or they may find too new of a version. The danger of this is smaller for popular libraries, but goes up as you move to the long tail.

New comment by eeereerews in "Dynamic linking"

eeereerews — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 19:20:28 +0000

>Do your installed programs share dynamic libraries?

>Findings: not really

>Over half of your libraries are used by fewer than 0.1% of your executables.

Findings: Yes, lots, but mostly the most common ones. Dynamically linking against something in the long tail is pretty pointless though.

New comment by eeereerews in "Functional Language Features: Iterators and Closures"

eeereerews — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 20:26:31 +0000

Historically imperative languages did have tagged unions (Algol, Pascal, Ada, Modula). Their disappearance is mostly because of OOP's takeover I think. It was thought that a tagged union should be replaced by a base class with one derived class per variant.

What they lacked was usually a nice way to operate on tagged unions, ie. pattern matching.

New comment by eeereerews in "Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?"

eeereerews — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 01:11:44 +0000

You can also put a Readme in any folder and it will show up the same way. You usually wouldn't want those up top while browsing the files though. So it's also about consistency.

New comment by eeereerews in "Tiny C Compiler"

eeereerews — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 21:17:23 +0000

> (Nov 18, 2001) TCC version 0.9 is out. First public version.

New comment by eeereerews in "I Am Deleting the Blog"

eeereerews — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:44:31 +0000

Writing, as opposed to speaking, by its nature conveys a degree of anonymity. Historically, anonymous writers are very common.

New comment by eeereerews in "Twenty Proofs of Euler's Formula: V-E+F=2"

eeereerews — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 21:36:28 +0000

To emphasize where the topology comes in since it wasn't clear to me at first: the important bit is the saddles. Just before a saddle goes under, there are two important properties

1. there are land masses on both sides of the saddle. This would not be true if the polytope had holes.

2. if the lakes on either side of the saddle are joined up, the only way they can do that is if the lake circles around and encloses at least one of the two land masses (Jordan curve theorem). Once the saddle point goes under, that land mass is cut off from the "mainland". This would not be true if the polytope had a handle. The lakes could be joined up by going along the handle without enclosing one of the land masses.

https://i.imgur.com/I2FqwWQ.jpg

New comment by eeereerews in "Twenty Proofs of Euler's Formula: V-E+F=2"

eeereerews — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 10:06:46 +0000

I like Noah's Ark a lot.

New comment by eeereerews in "Modularizing SQL? (2007)"

eeereerews — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:23:58 +0000

It's slowed down a lot. There's been a total of 8 posts and 50 comments since 2019. There were 32 posts just in 2017.