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GrumpySlothon Ask HN: Why do companies pay new hires more than long time employees?

Except tomatoes are more than 4 times as expensive as potatoes. :D

GrumpySlothon Why do we need for an Undefined Behavior Annex to C++

Pedantic note: compiler doesn’t elide bounds checks in code using iterators. They’re not there to begin with. Iterators in the standard library are implemented using unsafe code, which calls non-bounds-checking variants of functions getting elements from collections. There is nothing for the compiler left to do here regarding bounds-checking.

GrumpySlothon Memory Safe TLS Library Now Has AWS Crypto and FIPS

There is also the compiler. A language may claim to be implemented without any unsafe code in the standard library, but all that happened is the unsafe code got hidden in the compiler, in how it generates code, in intrinsics etc.

GrumpySlothon Memory Safe TLS Library Now Has AWS Crypto and FIPS

I’ve had rustc turn my branchless code consisting purely of bitwise operations into branching code. There was probably nothing rustc-specific about it. Just LLVM estimating that branches would be faster in that case.

GrumpySlothon Selfish reasons to want more humans

Industrial revolution was the key to Europe’s current prosperity. Without it, it was going in the direction of mass starvation, because old farming methods weren’t able to sustain the growing population. The increased population would have been a disaster without the industrial revolution.

It’s the reason England crushed China, even though England’s population has always been microscopic in comparison to that of China.

GrumpySlothon The Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) – Step-by-Step from 71s to 1.7s

My bad. That’s not been an issue in my code, as I use arenas to manage memory and never put an owning container as key in a HashMap.

GrumpySlothon The Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) – Step-by-Step from 71s to 1.7s

You can.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/hash_map/enum.Entr...

GrumpySlothon Use of decimal point is 1.5 centuries older than historians thought

Maths is typically written fast, so subtle spacing is too weak a signal to distinguish meanings. Where I studied maths, we even crossed our zeds horizontally to make it easier to distinguish from carelessly written 2s. Similarly, even though the country uses commas, the uni uses periods, for the benefit of clarity. Almost noone uses semicolons in function application in writing.

GrumpySlothon Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

In this case though the comment starts with a categorical negation of something that was said in a tongue-in-cheek way in the comment being replied to. It suggests a counterpoint is made. Yet it’s not.

GrumpySlothon Use of decimal point is 1.5 centuries older than historians thought

It’s not so arbitrary. I’ve grown up in a country which uses commas, but it’s still really confusing even to me, when writing e.g. f(1,2). Is that function applied to 2 arguments or 1? For this reason I always use period as decimal point.

GrumpySlothon Google to pause Gemini image generation of people after issues

I think you two are agreeing.

GrumpySlothon Useful Uses of cat

Pipelines are executed in parallel.

GrumpySlothon Useful Uses of cat

The Schrödinger’s cat.

GrumpySlothon The Oxford Comma and the Internet (2013)

Blaise Pascal, several centuries earlier.

GrumpySlothon Porting to GCC 14: C language issues

It doesn’t matter what someone in the past thought they were for. That’s what they are for in practice, names are irrelevant here, yes, they are quite bad. But the ones in stdint.h are just typedefs for those, so that’s what we are left with.

GrumpySlothon Porting to GCC 14: C language issues

No. It’s for tightly packing data in data structures. Bitwidth is exactly what’s important here.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

So you’re fine with software provided as opaque binaries without source code or only as SaaS? Because without copyright you’re going to get more of that and no licence is going to stop that.

GrumpySlothon Considerations for a long-running Raspberry Pi

During installation the guide tells you to run a program, which generates an fstab based on current mounts. So by default it will configure /tmp the same way it’s configured in the live cd.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

> You and the author appear to be the same guy.

We are not. We’re not even on the same continent.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

> What many free software advocates actually want is a world without copyright on software.

Some of them sure. The subset of them who are GPL advocates are simply confused though. GPL is not possible in a world without copyright. In a world without copyright I can release software, which can be written from the ground up or be based on something open source, doesn’t matter, and not share the code with anyone. Just the binary. I can also create AWS based on open source software and nothing like AGPL will stop me from providing proprietary services based on it.

If you want to see an argument from someone who opposes copyright, but has more consistent views on the matter, I recommend this piece: <https://github.com/BurntSushi/notes/blob/master/2020-10-29_l...>

And the reason I pointed to the fallacy is that multiple people in this thread suggest that making a proprietary product based on open source software constitutes taking something away from users of this software. This is illogical. They still have the original. The only person who loses in this situation is the original author, not the users.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

> It is setting up a situation where users will not be free.

No. It is setting up a situation where users can choose between a free option A and a proprietary option B based on A. Being sad about A being too liberal is suggesting it’s more important for you that B doesn’t exist than that A exists.

> If you expect people to treat MIT licensed software as GPL licensed software,

I don’t. Contrary to GNU and FSF websites, GPL is not a synonym for freedom. Most people, outside of GNU-centric places like this post about Emacs, prefer more liberal licences.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

The poster I replied to complained about someone choosing MIT over GPL, not a proprietary licence over GPL. Noone is blocked from contributing for legal reasons. Quite the opposite.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

Yeah. I can get this angle. This is why we don’t have small independent companies making C and C++ compilers today. Only BigCorps which fund this development with money made from less honourable business.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

This and similar arguments in this thread work on the same logic that frames software piracy as theft. It’s the fallacy of treating software as a tangible thing that, when copied, is taken away from someone and altered irreversibly.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

MIT doesn’t give anyone the ability to restrict the freedom of others. When you fork a project and use a difference licence for it, the original project remains under MIT.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

That analogy would make sense only if cutting trees left the trees intact and didn’t annoy people in the park with noise etc. Alas, it’s nonsense.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

I can understand wanting to restrict use of something a person created using a restrictive licence. I can’t understand being sad about someone else not restricting what they created. To me it looks like someone being sad after seeing someone else giving out free ice cream, even though the person being sad didn’t contribute to making the ice cream.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

Yeah. It uses VP9.

GrumpySlothon The Emacsen family, the design of an Emacs and the importance of Lisp (2023)

Yup. I’ve downloaded the Webm file and iOS doesn’t know what to do with it, which is odd, since Apple allegedly added support for Webm in iOS 15. I’m on iOS 17.

GrumpySlothon Kagi Changelog 2/13: Faster and more accurate instant answers and Wikipedia page

I’ve used it, but it often failed to redirect my searches. It was hit-and-miss. xxSearch works better.