HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

howtofly

168 karma · joined September 9, 2019

submissionscomments
howtofly··on Problems with C++ exceptions
All this hassle can be avoided by using `cleanup` compiler attribute.

Manage classical C resources by auto-cleanup variables and do error-handling the normal way. If everything is OK, pass the ownership of these resources from auto-cleanup variables to C++ ctor.

Note this approach plays nicely with C++ exception, and will enter C standard in the form of `defer`.

howtofly··on Ghosts of Unix Past: a historical search for design patterns (2010)
Note that these books were written when design pattern was still a buzzword.
howtofly··on AI is different
The real issue is determining how much non-renewable resource consumption is justified for these "valuable" things? Note that we are always inclined to value ourselves too much.

I agree the things you mentioned are valuable in the very common sense and I deliberately assign them no value to the avoid the above issue.

howtofly··on An argument for increasing TCP's initial congestion window (2024)
IIRC, all latency-driven congestion control algorithms suffer from violent rtt variance, which happens frequently in wireless networks. How does BBR perform under such circumstances?
howtofly··on AI is different
It's all about human technology, which enables massive resource consumption.

I should really say humans never truly produce anything in the realm of technology industry.

howtofly··on AI is different
> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system).

Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongly doubt that AI will contribute to a better economic system.

howtofly··on Ada Continues to Climb in June Tiobe Index and PYPL
I just checked it for Rust:

"18 17 change Rust page Rust 0.97% -0.20%"

howtofly··on Show HN: Open-source P2P file transfer
Should users trust the signaling server? IIRC, the signaling server can easily intervene SDP offer/answer so that it can intercept user files or instruct users to send files wherever it wants.
howtofly··on Show HN: Open-source P2P file transfer
My understanding is that the signaling server could be used as the perfect place to perform MITM attack. The README does not mention how berb addresses this concern at all.
howtofly··on You do not need NixOS on the desktop
> If I work on a repo, all I have to do is enter my dev distrobox, SSH in from my IDE, and work within that environment - no devcontainer or flake.nix required.

With Ubuntu 24.04 and vagrant virtual machines, you could have even less hassle than with Bluefin.

howtofly··on The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
Serious software development is rarely an individual endeavor; most issues should be resolved through collaboration. In other words, they should be addressed through management. What the author needs to overcome, in my view, is essentially a form of extreme individualism.
howtofly··on Complex Buggy Pthread_rwlock_t in Glibc
I should mention that Drepper's old implementation and thus uclibc/uclibc-ng's implementations are much simpler and do not have this bug. The musl libc does not have this issue because it puts an upper limit on the number of user-space spins in one try. Unlimited spin should NEVER appear in user space!

I cannot believe that such a highly-reproducible bug is left untouched for nearly a year.

PS: All versions of glibc since 2.25 are affected.

howtofly··on The two factions of C++
> Python doesn't have a language package manager, you're free to use pip or poetry or uv or whatever, but it does have PEP 517/518, which allow all Python package managers to interact with a common package ecosystem which encompasses polyglot codebases.

This is a long-standing pain point. LWN has a series of reports covering this, one of which is: https://lwn.net/Articles/920832/

howtofly··on Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux
> I wonder what makes our experiences so different? Do you unit test a lot? Particularly with TDD? I am guessing that this practice means I just don't get to see a lot of the bugs that a debugger would help me with.

Debugger helps a lot when performing TDD. You will enjoy setting a breakpoint to check whether a line is hit as expected by a test case.

howtofly··on Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux
I've used classic eclipse-cdt for over a decade until it cannot keep up with post-C++14 standards. It seems that it recently regains activity with the introduction of https://github.com/ghentschke/eclipse-cdt-lsp
howtofly··on Why systemd is a problem for embedded Linux
> For anything quasi-realtime, I can certainly hunt down and squash everything systemd is running at the wrong time, but in practice it's much easier to install something else, ensure no processes are running other than the ones I care about, and move those concerns to userspace.

Should these issues be fixed by CPU/IO schedulers? Are there any systemd realtime tasks involved?

howtofly··on A Year Closer to Standard C++ Dependency Management
I really hope that there will be joint-force between CMake and Conan package manager.
howtofly··on Overview: What are Cpp2 and cppfront? How do I get and build cppfront?
Any good CMake integration besides https://github.com/modern-cmake/cppfront?
howtofly··on Glibc's Rwlock Might Eat All Your CPU
This issue is specific to glibc. Neither musl nor uclibc suffers from it.

It seems that all versions of glibc are affected.

howtofly··on Separating debug symbols from executables
This combined with Debuginfod(1) will improve debugging experience greatly.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Debuginfod

howtofly··on Enable ARMv9 Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) on Pixel 8
MTE is something like hardware-blessed address sanitizer. For more on MTE, I would recommend this nice short article: https://lwn.net/Articles/834289/
howtofly··on SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes
I found SQLite grow bigger and bigger: - For 3.7.8, its default build on x86 is only 350KiB (1). - Now it is 650 KB (2).

This is really worrying, especially for the field of embedded development.

[1] https://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/footprint.html [2] https://www.sqlite.org/footprint.html

howtofly··on Security policies for GNU toolchain projects
A simple "gcc -o" command may be dangerous.

More about the GCC policy: https://lwn.net/ml/gcc-patches/20230920115043.3434942-1-sidd...

howtofly··on Digression 3: Corrosion – Rust Never Sleeps
And we have a project named Corrosion: https://github.com/corrosion-rs/corrosion
howtofly··on COM+ Revisited
As for your thesis, i.e., components in embedded system, I think a critical missing piece is C/C++ dependency manager like conan/vcpkg, which IMO is the primary reason why such technology is not popular in embedded world.
howtofly··on The battle for the world’s most powerful cyberweapon
LOL A full OS including webserver embedded in every PC's firmware.
howtofly··on Ten years against division of labor in software
Separation of concerns is a must for ordinary/mediocre programmers to take part in building complex software. Getting these guys involved is getting a good deal for society.
howtofly··on James Gosling Interview
"Modern developers use IDEs, like NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, or even Visual Studio Code. "

I'm curious how can Eclipse, one of the greatest java projects, be omitted? Then I saw the name of JetBrains at the end of the article, and realized that I just read another soft advertisement.

The last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27886575

howtofly··on Difficult math is about recognizing patterns
I used to believe this, and failed miserably when studying algebraic topology. Intuition, the so called "feeling", is way more important than pure mathematical logic.
howtofly··on Sci-Hub is fundraising
Is there an alternative way of donation? I want to donate to sci-hub, but DONT want to pay for cryptocurrency miners.
Page 1 of 2Next →