HeraldEmbar's comments

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Single-Assignment C

The home page is fairly free of any details about SaC, though I do now know an awfully lot about who is involved. Also, there's no reference manual.

Where can I find a tutorial, examples, or any concrete details?

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: iKe: a browser-based sandbox for K

There needs to be detailed comments for at least ONE of those examples! Very cool. I've looked into k and J...they look like fun toy languages.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Artifact: What Went Wrong?

> Artifact had in effect a perfectly reasonable economic model, but players did not see it that way.

CCG player stockholm syndrome is why we can't have nice things.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Pedestrian detection systems don’t work well, AAA finds

Now let's put a person talking on the phone and texting at the same time and have that person do the same exercise that AAA conducted..

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: String Lengths in Unicode

tl;dr: Unicode codepoints don't have a 1-to-1 relationship with characters that are actually displayed. This has always been the case (due to zero-width characters, accent modifiers that go after another character, Hangul etc.) but has recently got complicated by the use of ZWJ (zero-width joiner) to make emojis out of combinations of other emojis, modifiers for skin colour, and variation selectors. There is also stuff like flag being made out of two characters, e.g. flag_D + flag_E = German flag.

Your language's length function is probably just returning the number of unicode codepoints in the string. You need to a function that computes the number of 'extended grapheme clusters' if you want to get actually displayed characters. And if that function is out of date, it might not handle ZWJ and variation selectors properly, and still give you a value of 2 instead of 1. Make sure your libraries are up to date.

Also, if you are writing a command line tool, you need to use a library to work out how many 'columns' a string will occupy for stuff like word wrapping, truncation etc. Chinese and Japanese characters take up two columns, many characters take up 0 columns, and all the above (emoji crap) can also affect the column count.

In short the Unicode standard has gotten pretty confusing and messy!

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: CDC says stop vaping as mystery lung condition spreads

It’s a worthy mention that it’s mostly THC vapes. Rarely nicotine vapes alone.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: An informal survey of z-index values found in the wild

This was fascinating, thanks. Made me think about why I used 99 as my max -- I think it's because back in the SNES days, all the RPGs used 99 as a limit.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Inside a low budget consumer hardware espionage implant (2018)

I think I'm going to run 50 volts through all my usb cables when I get home.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Galton Board

Is it really 50% though since more than one ball is falling through at a time? Wouldn't a steel ball hitting another steel ball affect it's possible path?

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Give Me a Secret Garden

Seeing things for what they really are...isn’t that our greatest desire and our greatest fear? I love the voice in this fiction, and the astonishing fact that it is provided to the world in a newspaper. Speculative fiction is where truth can be approached safely. Keep it going.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

As I understand it, the "Do 10,000 hours" idea is about achieving expertise. It doesn't mean that you had to have to started specializing and achieving that expertise when you were 3 years old. So I think that the premise of the article, though not necessarily that of the book itself, is a straw-dog argument.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors

The arrogance of nurses and physicians in constantly waking patients up, completely unaware and uncaring of the health detriment that comes with loss of sleep, is inexcusable. While some people can go back to sleep after being awakened, there are many of us who have real difficulty getting back to sleep, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: Before Netscape: Web browsers of the early 1990s (2011)

Lynx was widely used at my university when I started there in 1993. I remember vaguely not liking Mosaic and other early inline graphic browsers, not because they weren't revolutionary, but because they were too slow on our relatively slow networks and phone connections.

HeraldEmbar | 6 years ago | on: iPhone apps share data with trackers, ad companies and research firms

Privacy is not gone. We could set up laws and enforce them. We already do this for medical data (HIPAA). There's no reason we can't do this for other categories of personal data, such as what you buy and where you go. Europe does this with its GDPR. It can be done, but we need a government that doesn't prioritize interests of corporation-people over those of human people.