Hacker News Reader

At least in C, I like to line things up sometimes:

    void function_with_lots_of_arguments (int arg_a,
                                          int arg_b,
                                          int arg_c);

If I was to use tabs and someone had a different tab width to me, they might end up with:

    void function_with_lots_of_arguments (int arg_a,
                                  int arg_b,
                                  int arg_c);

udpon Mojang's Monster Profits

I dislike Java to develop in. I don't dislike software just because it's written in Java, nor do I wish that everything written in Java wasn't.

udpon Show HN: The List

And the fact that it's 2% rather than some fixed amount means that it costs established users more to post, and new users less. Which seems somewhat backwards.

udpon Your files aren't safe on Soundcloud

Well, what do you expect? DRM?

Whatever SoundCloud do isn't going to prevent someone from firing up Audacity to record their loopback audio device.

udpon My experiences with Hacker News.

I know you explicitly don't want to play the "I'm a kid" card, but you're kind of doing that just by mentioning it in this follow-up post. I think 17 is probably the age when you just don't have that card to play anymore.

I released my first OSS project (here) at 17, and mentioning my age didn't even cross my mind. You just take the feedback and criticism and reiterate like everyone else, because you won't have an excuse forever.

udpon How to Start Learning Computer Programming

This is very Microsoft-orientated. Even the open source software he recommends is Windows-only (Dev-C++, Notepad++).

udpon Squash

I can't watch the video right now, and as a result I have no idea what this actually is (despite being able to read about all the features).

Fewer e-mails sounds good, but it doesn't mean much to me if I don't know what the product is.

udpon Windows Phone Error Message Tells Users To Insert CD And Restart Computer

I've also had an error message along the lines of "cannot read from tape" when using tar(1) in OS X.

udpon Bit.ly was down

Or just use direct links, instead.

udpon Safari is released to the world

Your browser preference really doesn't have anything to do with this article.

udpon C11, yo

There is indeed a world outside of Linux and mobile, and most of that world doesn't have a problem working with C99 and C11. Windows is - as with many other things - the exception, and it's getting tiresome.

There's no way Windows developers are going to stop using Visual Studio - and rightly so, because it's a very good IDE. So there are basically three things Microsoft could do to resolve this situation and let Windows developers make use of modern C code:

1. Update their C89 compiler to a newer C standard. This is unlikely, and probably a lot of work for Microsoft (I'm guessing they'll be removing the C compiler from one of the next releases of Visual Studio).

2. Add support for essential C99/C11 features to their C++ compiler, such as designated initializers. This would still force us to compile our C as C++ and do nasty things like casting the return type of malloc, but it might be the easiest solution.

3. Switch to a modern, open source C compiler like Clang. I would be very surprised if Microsoft would do anything like this (else IE would be using WebKit already).

So we're basically forced to either butcher our C code to make it compile as C++, or write C89. Or drop MSVC support, making our projects difficult for Windows developers to work with.

udpon Blizzard Entertainment Planning A Linux Game For 2013

This is what the LSB[1] is for.

[1] http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb

udpon Behind enemy lines: 3 months as an iOS developer at Google

An 80 character limit is great if you like looking at multiple source files side-by-side.

udpon Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

That shell script will be no good on Windows, which was your other recommendation to replace OS X.

udpon Automating the setup of my perfect developer environment on OSX 10.8

I don't know, I find the solid kernel and userland combined with homebrew just as good as Ubuntu, and most graphical applications are a lot more stable and consistent than their Linux alternatives. I work on all kinds of things, and the only thing I've ever needed a VM for is testing code written specifically for Windows.

Also, Instruments.app (dtrace frontend) is awesome.

udpon Json ⊄ js

If Python's JSON library accepts Infinity by default, that's a bug and should be reported.

udpon Show HN: ppl - The Command Line Address Book

Nice - and not just for us CLI buffs. This would make a very good backend for a GUI address book application.

udpon Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

It's actually a pretty nice idea. Since the wiki and issues tabs are already optional features, perhaps the "Code" tab should be optional too.

udpon Thank HN: You helped the FreeBSD Foundation raise over $43K in three days

> Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.

That's the beautiful thing about BSD-style licenses. Once the code is out there, nobody ever has to reinvent the wheel for legal reasons again - only technical.

udpon GCC 4.8 Has Automatic Return Type Deduction

I was just about to make a similar comment. There isn't much about C++98 I don't know, but having ignored C++11 for too long I feel utterly lost looking at stuff like this now.

What concerns me even more is that it must be pretty much impossible for a beginner to pick up C++ today.

udpon Color schemes for Sublime Text 2 and Textmate

Coloration is fantastic - the converted VIM versions of the schemes are in the repository now.

udpon Textmate to VIM

I prefer my default vim clipboard to be the system clipboard:

   set clipboard=unnamed

Being able to yank and then paste in other software (or vice versa) is pretty handy.

udpon Show HN: Parson, lighweight json parser in C

Just out of curiosity, was json-parser one of the ones you looked at? If so, what did you dislike about it?

udpon Show HN: Parson, lighweight json parser in C

Have you really been using jsmn for something or did you just recall the link?

IMHO jsmn doesn't do nearly enough with the JSON to make it usable by an application (it's basically a lexer).

udpon Show HN: Parson, lighweight json parser in C

Well, you beat json-parser on SLOC. :-)

Main differences are that you use recursion instead of a stack, and that you dynamically resize your buffers as you parse (whereas json-parser passes through the JSON twice so that it knows exactly how much memory to allocate).

udpon The Sorry State of C++ Portability

Interesting - I wasn't aware that any other platform implemented IOCP. I wonder how that performs vs. traditional I/O with /dev/poll?

udpon The Sorry State of C++ Portability

Now that's one area where Windows really differs. You can't write a high performance server for Windows without using IOCP, which couldn't be more different from what every other platform has for that kind of thing (epoll, kqueue, /dev/poll, ...)

It was interesting watching node/libuv face all the same problems I did when originally trying to abstract over this.

udpon IE10 on Windows 7 available in November

I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?

udpon Hacker News Data Analysis

And then hope some people see it before it gets pushed from the "new" page, after which it doesn't matter how original or deep it is.

udpon Show HN: Hacker News IRC channel

Hopefully this will settle down soon - currently seems to be overrun by trolls.

I think only allowing registered nicks would be a very good idea.