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Snarwinon Installing NeoVim caused original Vim undo files to be deleted

Sure. And likewise, users who care about backwards compatibility have no duty to do anything for the Neovim developers--they can simply use a different editor that suits their preferences.

Snarwinon Simple Is Not Small

That's not what the linked article is saying. The point made in the article is that the 'uniq' utility couples together two unrelated concepts--sorting and frequency counting--and this coupling forces you to write more complex code, compared to the version where frequency counting is decoupled from sorting.

All of this is completely correct, but it has nothing to do with bash vs. Clojure. The same decoupling can easily be achieved in either language.

Snarwinon Simple Is Not Small

> There's no native Unix equivalent to frequencies, this sort | uniq -c is the closest we can get. Not only is it less performant (it has to collect the full input into memory before continuing), but it ties aggregation to ordering.

One of the core features of the Unix command-line is that it is user-extensible. If there's no "native" command equivalent to frequencies, you can write your own, and it will be given the same first-class treatment as any other binary in your PATH. This is entirely in keeping with the Unix philosophy of simple implementations.

Snarwinon C++ says “We have try... finally at home”

The oldest defer-like feature I can find reference to is the ON_BLOCK_EXIT macro from this article in the December 2000 issue of the C/C++ Users Journal:

https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/CUJ/2000/cexp1812/a...

A similar macro later (2006) made its way into Boost as BOOST_SCOPE_EXIT:

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/latest/libs/scope_exit/doc/ht...

I can't say for sure whether Go's creators took inspiration from these, but it wouldn't be surprising if they did.

Snarwinon Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

I thought the "free" in "free web" was supposed to mean "free as in freedom," not "free as in beer." Have we really reached the point where the CEO of Mozilla no longer understands or cares about that distinction?

Snarwinon Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)

There's plenty of application-level C and C++ code out there that isn't performance-critical, and would benefit from the safety a garbage collector provides.

Snarwinon It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

Several things:

1) Em-dashes

2) "It's not X, it's Y" sentence structure

3) Comma-separated list that's exactly 3 items long

Snarwinon ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes

It's possible that without the medication, you wouldn't have gotten burned out like this. But it's also possible that you'd have missed out on all of the benefits of being medicated and still gotten burned out anyway.

Snarwinon Partially Matching Zig Enums

  import std.meta: AliasSeq;

  enum E { a, b, c }

  void handle(E e)
  {
      // Need label to break out of 'static foreach'
      Lswitch: final switch (e)
      {
          static foreach (ab; AliasSeq!(E.a, E.b))
          {
              case ab:
                  handleAB();
                  // No comptime switch in D
                  static if (ab == E.a)
                      handleA();
                  else static if (ab == E.b)
                      handleB();
                  else
                      static assert(false, "unreachable");
                  break Lswitch;
          }
          case E.c:
              handleC();
              break;
      }
  }

Snarwinon The hype is the product

> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience

Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.

Snarwinon Piano Keys

It's not actually that much to remember. There are 3 shapes that cover most of the major chords, and 3 special cases (F♯, B♭, and B).

Snarwinon I write type-safe generic data structures in C

You can still write the extension in C++ and expose an extern "C" interface.

Snarwinon 4B If Statements

It looks like bans for odd/even license plates were used in Paris in 2014 [1] and 1997 [2], but not before then. However, a similar scheme was used to ration gasoline in the US during the 70s [3].

The only source I can find for the claim about police confusion is the one cited by Wikipedia [4], whose reliability I'm inclined to doubt based on the 1997/1977 discrepancy.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/03/17/290849704...

[2] https://www.wired.com/1997/09/paris-smog/

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2012/11/10/16479229...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd%E2%80%93even_rationing#D...

Snarwinon Git Branches: Intuition and Reality

It looks like this is what git merge-base --fork-point is supposed to do, although according to the docs it is not 100% reliable.

Snarwinon C uses "&" for the address-operator because 'ampersand sounds like "address"'

Interestingly, C already does this for function calls: "fptr()" is considered equivalent to "(*fptr)()".

Snarwinon NFS > FUSE: Why We Built Our Own NFS Server in Rust

Page is completely unreadable in Firefox for Android.

Snarwinon Show HN: Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter

I'd say C is actually a pretty good choice for an educational project like this. Having to write out all of your data structures by hand and manage your memory manually is a good learning experience, and since you're not writing serious production code, you don't have to worry too much about making mistakes.

Snarwinon Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

I don't think these authors intend for you to interpret their criticism of Audible's business practices as a statement about your moral character. One of their central points is that Audible's business practices have severely limited consumer choice in the audiobook market. You can't be held morally responsible for a choice that's been taken out of your hands.

Snarwinon Open Letter from Security Researchers in Relation to the Online Safety Bill [pdf]

Most likely the intended audience is the press. Now that this letter has been published, journalists can write stories like "Online Safety Bill Under Fire From Security Experts", which make the issue digestible to a lay audience.

Snarwinon Finding the best sine function for Nintendo 64 [video]

> Case in point at 9:30[0] he talks about localised memory patterns as though he's the first to come up with it

This seems like an uncharitable interpretation to me. When he says "I'm not sure if anyone else has ever used this approach," it's pretty clear from context that the "approach" he's referring to is interleaving the sine and cosine tables to improve cache usage. And he doesn't even claim to be the first to come up with it, just to have independently discovered it.

Snarwinon The GTK+3 port of GIMP is officially finished

First result on DDG is a Wikipedia article that says

> The term was coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author of the book and accompanying website Web Pages That Suck.

Snarwinon Shells are two things

A number of command-line programs are actually just wrappers around a more strongly-typed library API. For example, curl and libcurl, or ffmpeg and a whole collection of audio/video libraries. [1]

Of course, in the POSIX world, "library API" means "C API", so if you want to write nice-looking Python code like in the article, there is still some more work to do.

[1] https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Using%20libav*

Snarwinon The concept of class invariant in object-oriented programming

Maybe "decode"? As in "decode a Unicode string", or "decode a JPEG image", or "decode an MP3 audio file."

Snarwinon In praise of MIDI

MuseScore doesn't use MIDI to store sheet music; it only uses it for playback.

Snarwinon Guido was right, there should be no lambda in Python (2018)

And the use of the LAMBDA keyword goes all the way back to John McCarthy's original paper on Lisp from 1960:

https://archive.org/details/recursive-functions-symbolic-exp...

Snarwinon Show HN: Vim Tutorial as RPG

If you want to play an RPG that will get you used to moving around with hjkl, you can also try a traditional roguelike like nethack [1] or dcss [2].

[1] https://www.nethack.org/ [2] https://crawl.develz.org/

Snarwinon Tether ordered to produce documents showing backing of USDT [pdf]

IANAL but it looks like the default is 30 days:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_34

Snarwinon Teaching C (2016)

Someone has uploaded a PDF to github, here:

https://github.com/VernonGrant/gnu-c-language-manual

Snarwinon Using unwrap() in Rust is okay

The problem with this approach is that, when a panic actually happens at runtime, there is no way to tell whether it was caused by an isolated mistake like forgetting to check for zero, or by memory corruption writing garbage all over your data structures. If it's the first, recovering is fine; if it's the second, you risk exposing the user to data loss and security vulnerabilities. So the only safe thing to do is crash.

Now, it may be true that you get better reviews selling software that corrupts data or gets its users hacked than selling software that crashes. But unless you hate your users, those are probably things you want to avoid.

Snarwinon How safe is Zig?

Here's a version with D included:

https://gist.github.com/pbackus/0e9c9d0c83cd7d3a46365c054129...

The only difference in BetterC is that you lose access to the GC, so you have to use RC if you want safe heap allocation.