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chon Swift – Why Annoying Is Good

I'm not sure I totally agree. Well I do agree that I tailored the question to suit my point! But to your reply, I think you've changed the semantics of my meaning.

My questions were more from the perspective of the caller, and even then it was a bit abstracted from the actual type and implementation ... just more of a conversational "Does it? Maybe!"

You're rephrasing is still looking at it from the caller, but now takes into account the language semantics (which mine conveniently didn't :) ).

I would rephrase your questions, and look at them from the callee's perspective: "Will I get an argument? Maybe!"

And really, shouldn't we be saying that the function takes Just a to ... and takes Nothing to ... ?

Perhaps this has stretched as far as it might go. Maybe?

chon Swift – Why Annoying Is Good

This is why I appreciate that Haskell calls this type 'Maybe'.

I think this better captures the types semantics. I mean, an 'Option' or and 'Optional' makes it seem like you are given a choice... but a 'Maybe' implies more that what you are declaring exists only with some probability!

Q. Will this function give a result? A. Maybe.

Q. Will this function give a result? A. Option.

The choice is obvious.

chon Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

I don't see how its not a big deal.

If all messages are seen by my phone, just to be inspected and discarded, then my phone is consuming bandwidth and processing cycles on irrelevant data. And unless my phone has free bandwidth, and the processing cycles don't consume power (or it has infinite power), how can it ever not be a factor?

chon Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

It sounds like proof-of-work alone is insufficient. The bit* type systems sound promising but that seems to preclude mobile. Interesting. What a funny problem we have built for ourselves.

Interesting that SMS appears to have simply legislated the problem from existence (or so says the article), I suppose if anyone can connect to a telephony network for cheap the problem would persist there too.

chon Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

Yeah like bitmessage, but the network overhead (all users see all messages) of bitmessage might be prohibitive for battery powered clients, no?

chon Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

Sure but certainly one could still make it costly enough to prohibit mass sending but not too costly to drain a cell battery under casual use. Or am I underestimating the level of complexity needed for a viable proof of work?

chon Modern anti-spam and E2E crypto

Couldn't some form of proof-of-work system be used to increase the cost of sending a message without it having much of an economic impact on a casual sender? Was that what he was alluding to with the "burning bitcoin" reference?

chon Z-Quads, a spatial coordinate system

Very neat. For more on this check out the wikipedia article on Morton order curved (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve))

chon A Rust curiosity: pointers to zero-sized types

My mistake. I clicked through to the docs, and didn't see any annotation.

http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/master/std/mem/fn.transmute....

chon A Rust curiosity: pointers to zero-sized types

> As you might imagine, this operation is HIGHLY DANGEROUS.There’s nothing to stop you from transmuting 0 into a borrow, &T and then trying to dereference it. Voila, null pointer dereferencing in Rust!

Is this right? Why doesn't this function need to be marked unsafe?

chon Pinboard Turns Five

Is that ony a feature if you opt for the full archiving option or is that a basic part of pinboard? That sounds like a very compelling feature.

chon For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story

I'm confused by your post. What makes these royalties valuable is that they are tied to the revenues generated by the sales of the same physical and digital copies of the music that you point out are technically not rare. But without the false scarcity created by copyright and the associated constellation of laws which surround it, these artifacts would not create revenue and then wouldn't the royalties also be worthless?

chon New RFS: One Million Jobs

Curious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs?

I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup.

chon Migrating From AWS to FB

I think this is the biggest takeaway from the article:

Plan to change just the bare minimum needed to support the new environment, and avoid the temptation of “while we’re here.”

Good engineering is knowing how to act with surgical precision when necessary. This is what allows a craft like programming to operate in the confines of a business.

chon Searchcode: A source code search engine

Perhaps simply an info box which points to the implementation, set off from the usage results. No reason to give the results equal screen real-estate.

chon Searchcode: A source code search engine

We'll. They don't break tokens on '_' which is a plus (trend searching for pthread_t), and they seem to prioritize definitions over declarations.

This could become a useful code search option.

I would request that relevancy should take into account provenance. Meaning a search for pthread_t would return pthread implementations over uses.

This obviously can't make use of traditional tfidf for scoring.

chon LocalBitcoins received an attack against the site infrastructure

I'm not referring to just private mail services, but rather if you can implore customer service to remotely administer you servers (even just rebooting) via email they should only act on crypto signed correspondence. Seems this would reduce the success of email social engineering as an attack vector. It might not make sense in all cases but if I am storing monetary value for others it would be a nice extra level to promote.

chon LocalBitcoins received an attack against the site infrastructure

It seems that if a bitcoin site is to use a 3rd party hoster, they would be wise to at least require all email correspondence be cryptographically signed; better still , why not require encrypted email exchanges.

Is there a hosting provider which supports this level of service?

chon Happy ending: @N has been restored to its rightful owner

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)

I don't know why but this comment makes me feel old. I wonder if it would make Kevin Mitnick feel the same.

chon Colorado Pot Tax Proving More Lucrative Than Expected

You know what will happen when the prison industry revenue and budgets get slashed and x number of prison employees are displaced? We will subsidize the industry. I can't substantiate that claim, but it just seems like the way it will go. Still I'd be for any movement which keeps substance a users out of prison if substance abuse was the only 'crime' that put them in prison in the first place.

chon Seven Years Is Too Long

I dress up a work, even going so far as to put on a tie some days. It has been mentioned by other engineers that they don't feel dressing up is the uniform of an engineer. But I say nuts to that, conformist. I dress up because I don't mind the look, I also like to draw a line between my private wardrobe and my professional one, it helps remind me I still work for "the man" and it drives me forward in the right direction. I say this as a counter point. I buy into the notion of wearing a suit (one that fits).

chon SymPy Gamma: an open-source, Python-based alternative to Wolfram Alpha

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed that the first query did not use icons of apples in the Manipulatives illustration section!

chon Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only

This looks rather useful, though man pages should also contain examples, but a desperate command to just reach the examples would be nice. I would have called it "how."

chon Finite State Entropy - A new breed of entropy coder

There is a nice treatment on entropy coders in Managing Gigabytes (http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/mg/). I highly recommend the text as it gives good background on entropy encodings and it also takes a nice engineering approach to implementation.

chon Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage

Considering that a face transplant currently requires a lifetime regimine of immunosuppressives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_transplant#Ethics.2C_Surge...) in order to have post-op acceptance of the transplant by the host, I would expect nothing less in this more extreme form of surgery.

I would hate to be the recipient of this procedure; then fin my body (their body?) rejecting the transplant!

chon Ask HN: What software for diagrams and flowcharts do you use?

sdedit looks like a really useful tool. Thanks for posting this!

chon Non-blocking transactional atomicity

In the mode where a client is responsible to move writes from 'pending' to 'good', it wasn't clear to me what happens if the client dies before contacting all servers in the second pass?

Does the data remain stable, or must some additional work be performed to correct the inconsistent state?

chon Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler on Github

Someone should check that thing for back doors!

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

chon URLs are for People, not Computers

This is the point right here. Google intends these URLs for machine consumption, that you can simulate the work of the computer by hand doesn't change the facts. It also doesn't prevent them from creating another alternative URL scheme which is meant to be entered by humans explicitly.

chon URLs are for People, not Computers

What this boils down to is that there is space on the Web for both human consumable, and machine consumable URLs.

If a URL becomes a popular for human usage, it is a safe bet to keep it as it is, that doesn't mean you cannot have all sorts of gobbledygook URLs which also get you to that same resource.

There is no need to have this be an either-or proposition.