billpg

Essentially.I imagined this hypothetical happening decades ago when there were still a few /8s unallocated. I suggested that those would be set aside for IPv4x only.

"IPv6 does that."

Are you sure about that? Until a few years ago my residential ISP was IPv4 only. I definitely couldn't connect to an IPv6-only service back then.

No, in this hypothetical, routers that don't know about IPv4x will still route based on the top 32 bits of the address which is still in the same place for IPv4 packets. If your machine on your desk and the other machine across the internet both understand IPv4x, but no other machines in the middle do, you'll still get your packets across.

Could this be a the basis of an independent implementation of AmigaOS? At the moment, (I think) you still need a licensed copy of Commodore's OS to run an emulator.

What's the use case of a stream cipher when AES can be turned into a stream with a little XOR-ing?

Let's stop calling it "JavaScript" entirely. "JS" is right there.

I once (legally) bought a second hand laptop with a big anti-theft sticker on it. The sticker warned that removing it would leave a big "STOLEN!" mark, which it did. I covered it up with a new sticker.

Thank you. I've written back.

(Short version of email: Yes please!)

I was once on a bus and I could hear some teenagers talking. One asked a girl for her phone number and she told him a number starting with 07709, the UK's "555". I only knew that because a Doctor Who episode had recently used the same prefix.

If I end up going to London myself, my intention was to scan Wilf's column of those eight issues for archive-org. Two other HN users have offered to go look for me and I can't really ask them to do extra work to do if they're already doing me a favour.

Thanks very much. That’s a generous offer. If you do find time to check, I’d be grateful. I’ve narrowed it down to eight issues that aren’t in the archive.org scans. My submission was mentioned near the end of Wilf’s column, just before the usual sign-off and the postal address in Bath.

(You might meet PaulRobinson while you're there, looking for the same issues!)

Thanks again for even considering it. Much appreciated! My email address is my HN username at gmail.

Hello there! I had sent this HN submission in a few weeks ago and I thought it had disappeared off the "new" page with only one comment. I came back on today and happened to notice some activity and HN had reposted my piece five days ago.

I have since contacted the British Library and they have the eight issues I was looking for, but I live way up north and it would take a little planning and spending whole day to get there, but if you'd be willing to do that, yes please. I've narrowed it down to these eight which are in the right timeframe and are missing from the archive.org collection. I do remember my mention was right at the end of that month's column, right before the usual sign-off and the address in Bath to send in contributions.

My email address is my HN username at gmail.

PS. Link to the scans: https://archive.org/details/wpw-1991-1992-1993/WPW-1991-01/

I wonder if the language could support a tagged pointer type, where you ask the compiler for n extra bits along with the pointer. If the pointer's internal structure has space for those bits, it uses them, otherwise the compiler allocates space for the pointer and the tag as a larger structure.

I they had stuck with LiveScript, we'd be using LSON ("Ell-Son") as a data format.

I kinda want Oracle to go further and insist that no-one can call it "JavaScript" any more. Let's all it "JS" and completely break from Java.

"What does JS stand for?" "It stands for itself."

"Would you like to leave a tip for your server?" "20%."

"And the cook?" "What?"

"The cook wants in on the no-tax-on-tips so we're asking how much you'd like to tip him. We're also going to ask for the cleaner and the guy who delivered the ingredients earlier this morning."

You could say that for almost all of most language's standard libraries.

Imagine you ad a standard library string-to-integer parser that didn't know about minus signs. Sure, you could write your own function that wrapped the parser to allow for negative numbers, but wouldn't it be better if the standard library one did it?

"The job of a parser is to perform the opposite of stringification as precisely as possible."

Is it though? String-to-float parsers are quite flexible in the range of inputs they allow. "1000", "1E3", "10E2", "0.1E4", "1000.0", "00000001000.00000000000000" all return the same float value. https://dotnetfiddle.net/K08vk5

(See also sibling comment by "someone".)

If your question is "Is this string the canonical representation of some number?" then a parser function on its own is the wrong tool.

Keeping it simple. Once you've got the mantissa and exponent out, you can check your number is in range by a simple check that the exponent is within range.

For a 32 bit signed integer the limit is 2E9. This means that the exponent is fine 0-8, or if the exponent is 9, then only if the mantissa is 1 or 2. This only works with a single digit mantissa.

For adding more digits to the mantissa, while a robust range check can be done, it gets more complicated. String-to-Integer functions are very conservatively written pieces of code designed to be quick.

How does that work in practice?

Suppose the Table family type their son Bobby's name into a form. The Perl program now has a "tainted" string in memory - "Robert'; DROP TABLE Students --".

The Perl code passes this string through a regex that checks the name is valid. Names can include apostrophes (Miles O'Brien) and hyphens (Jean-Luc Picard) along with spaces and normal ASCII letters, so the regex passes and the string is now untainted.

Or any reason to actually free the hostages.

I wonder if an American friend could set it up for me. My gmail mailbox but their US phone number. (Thanks for the recommendation!)

Who do y'all use for a dialable USA phone number these days? (I'm in England.)

I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.

We use unskilled labour (cows) to perform the necessary chemical reactions to convert grass and water into milk. The milk needs to be pasteurised before it is fit to use and the cows produce a significant amount of manure.

I think we can do better by building vats to perform the same chemical reactions those cows perform.

Most (all?) SQL client libraries will allow you indicate a parameter placeholder and supply that parameter value separately.

I was going to buy a domain back in my student days, but I stopped when I realised I didn't have a phone number. I used the public phone-box on the corner whenever I needed to actually call anyone. It was a little annoying to have to register a phone number when I didn't actually want anyone to call me.

Thank you. I read that the tunnel "will link Denmark and Germany" and I had to check a map to confirm that yes, they are already linked. By land. By a lot of land. You're not experiencing memory loss.

It's (channel-name)@gmail.com

I'll take a cheque.

But why?