Hacker News: karatinversion

New comment by karatinversion in "U.K. demand for a back door to Apple data threatens Americans, lawmakers say"

karatinversion — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:44:46 +0000

The people in the UK actually go to prison though

New comment by karatinversion in "Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years"

karatinversion — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 11:58:41 +0000

There's also the fact that common methods threw exception types that were not final, and in fact overly generic. If I call a method that declares itself to throw NoSuchFileException or DirectoryNotEmptyException, I can have a pretty good idea what I might do about it. If it throws IOException without elaboration, on the other hand...

New comment by karatinversion in "Oh Shit, Git?"

karatinversion — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:26:23 +0000

I just tested it by creating a repo with two branches without a common ancestor, and I was able to move a branch pointer to either history with update-ref, so no, I don't think so

New comment by karatinversion in "Oh Shit, Git?"

karatinversion — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:44:53 +0000

You are looking for

  git update-ref

New comment by karatinversion in "No Calls"

karatinversion — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 16:03:38 +0000

> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries

The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.

New comment by karatinversion in "Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not speaking Spanish"

karatinversion — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:54:13 +0000

I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation - and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words, except for nominative plurals.

New comment by karatinversion in "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)"

karatinversion — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:53:10 +0000

To say of that which is, that is is, or of that which is not, that it is not

New comment by karatinversion in "No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)"

karatinversion — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:42:10 +0000

Luckily, the link provides just this information:

35-44: 62% 45-54: 70% 55-64: 75% 65+: 79%

New comment by karatinversion in "The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science"

karatinversion — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:54:04 +0000

To tie this back to TFA, even before we knew that the Halting problem was uncomputable, we could have defined

  f(n) = { 1 if there is a Turing machine with at most n states that solves the Halting problem;
           0 otherwise }

and we can easily show that f(n) is computable without proving that the Halting problem is undecideable. Viz., f is either constant 0; or equal to a function of the form

  g_k(n) = { 1 if n >= k;
             0 if n < k },

and both the constant 0 function, and all the g_k functions, are computable; thus f is computable.

New comment by karatinversion in "The Byte Order Fiasco (2021)"

karatinversion — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 22:56:57 +0000

As I understand it, the C spec defines what are valid programs, and for valid programs, either specifies what their observable side effects must be, or leaves them either unspecified or implementation defined. Importantly, programs with undefined behaviour are excluded from the class of valid programs; thus the spec imposes no requirement on the resulting behaviour. To quote,

> Permissible undefined behavior ranges from ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable results, to […]

And I think this is where “can’t happen” comes in: in the case of undefined behaviour, the compiler is free to emit whatever it pleases, including pretending it cannot happen!

New comment by karatinversion in "Let's stop counting centuries"

karatinversion — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:53:18 +0000

Do you also count the first decade of your life from January 1st of the year before you were born?

New comment by karatinversion in "Let's stop counting centuries"

karatinversion — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:51:15 +0000

And also, the system is a direct descendant of regnal numbering, where zero wouldn’t have made sense even if invented (there is no zeroth year of Joe Biden’s term of office).

New comment by karatinversion in "The Byte Order Fiasco (2021)"

karatinversion — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 21:35:11 +0000

I always thought the problem with this was that the compilers do loads of these optimisations in very mundane ways. Eg if I have a

  #define FOO 17
  void bar(int x, int y) {
    if (x + y >= FOO) {
      //do stuff
    }
  }
  void baz(int x) {
    bar(x, FOO);
  }

the compiler can inline the call to bar in baz, and then optimise the condition to (x>=0)… because signed integer overflow is undefined, so can’t happen, so the two conditions are equivalent.

The countless messages about optimisations like that would swamp ones about real dangerous optimisations.

New comment by karatinversion in "Google Maps is killing Timeline for Web"

karatinversion — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:10:38 +0000

Only if the interfaces the underlying implementations provide remain stable

New comment by karatinversion in "Three Laws of Software Complexity"

karatinversion — Wed, 29 May 2024 12:30:09 +0000

Doesn’t the fact you do use it mean the customer (the one who chooses the vendor) did not care, though?

New comment by karatinversion in "The problem with new URL(), and how URL.parse() fixes that"

karatinversion — Mon, 20 May 2024 16:10:31 +0000

On top of all the other problems pointed out, java's checked exceptions don't even do a good job of indicating possible failure conditions. The standard library set the tone on this with exception like IOException, which has an enormous amount of subclasses represting different IOExceptions, and is thrown by anything related to IO. So I still need to rely on documenation or code inspection to understand what exceptions might actually be thrown and what they mean, if I want to recover from errors.

The classic case of this is that the compiler cannot tell that

    new StringReader("Example").read()

doesn't throw an SSLException.

New comment by karatinversion in "Sleeping Tesla driver caught on Swedish highway – after 25 miles"

karatinversion — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 13:04:33 +0000

The iPhone launched 17 years ago. The correct rough approximation is now "20 years ago" :)

New comment by karatinversion in "Where do non-primitive recursive functions come up naturally?"

karatinversion — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 15:59:12 +0000

I always write a negative “is empty” check as “size > 0” for this reason

New comment by karatinversion in "Stuxnet Source Code"

karatinversion — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 14:00:20 +0000

There’s always movfuscator [1]

[1] https://github.com/Battelle/movfuscator

New comment by karatinversion in "Git Branches: Intuition and Reality"

karatinversion — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 18:54:41 +0000

No, that’s not right. If you did that, you would need to force push to get the result pushed to the remote.