ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Investigate switching away from GitHub
lol
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Kill Your Dependencies
Ran out of RAM or address space? I've run out of RAM trying to ridiculous stuff like native builds on tiny embedded systems (due to whack code bases that wouldn't cross compile). Though, in the end I overcame this with even more perverse solutions like adding swap space via USB1 flash.
That aside, that is the third time in a couple of months that I have heard people mention situations where they ran out of RAM without explaining why swap could not at least work as a stop gap measure.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Friction Between Programming Professionals and Beginners
1. Sounds like a market opportunity for a beginner oriented forum, that somehow incentivizes experts to help constructively.
2. The number one sign an expert is an impostor is the way the play the role of a teacher and student.
3. The main thing I hate about SO is the illogical ban on questions that recommend something. At least 80% of my searches that land on a SO page are like, "this is blacklisted by some troll master, because it encourages people to post links to cool and interesting things that might be outside of the box".
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Nanomsg postmortem and other stories
Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery.
Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking prestige + curiosity) * tenacity = occasional glory.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Secret US flight flew over Scottish airspace to capture Snowden
Stalinist, no. Mob culture? Lost its way? Disconnected from history? yes.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Secret US flight flew over Scottish airspace to capture Snowden
Four legs good, two legs bad! Snuff him out!
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry (1944)
My startup is a leader in cloud based turbo-encabulation.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Open-Sourced Logos
I like this, but I'm trying to understand the consequences of more than one person using the same one. I think the answer is, nothing until two or more users start to clash. At which point it will come down to who trademarked it first. That sounds reasonable, since you are probably dealing with small use cases wouldn't bother trademarking such a thing. They would get their own unique one first.
One the other hand, I suppose a new type of "trademark troll" could hypothetically arise from paying to trademark these, and then suing you for using them. Although I would like to think that a reasonable defense in court would be, "look I just got it for free from this site, and I willing to stop using it". ... and on the third hand, we see actual out of court settlements for patents that have less to stand on than that.
So I guess it's more of a "who gives a damn", and "quit worrying so much" thing.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: US military finds F-35 software is a buggy mess
This should be no surprise to those following the years of this national embarrassment. Yes the "potential future war" use case does justify high risk expenditures, but this crossed over into pork barrel fraud long ago. That is also on top of the antics of bidding process in the first place. I can't help but speculate as a laymen that the entire joint strike fighter concept is flawed. Part of the reason for having separate branches of armed forces is, or at least should be, strategic and technical diversity. If you consider that it is a form of investing, it becomes clearer to not put all the eggs in one basket. Cost is most damn sure a factor in warfare. Functioning fighter jets is also pretty high on the list.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Scandalous Weird Old Things About the C Preprocessor
My school of thought would be to limit it to just #include, #if, #else, #end, and non-recursive single word only #define / #undef. Force everything to be 1 per single line, and call it a day.
Macros should always be the absolute last resort to doing anything. Stepping through code in gdb with some "creative" macro-based API is almost as bad as C++.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Silicon Valley and Black Coders: Howard University fights to join the tech boom
Free Advice:
Look, the US is filled with businesses in big cities that, while are not "software companies", do very much need to write software to conduct operations. Take Houston, Texas for instance. It doesn't matter where you came from, what you look like, or who your daddy is. The game is supply and demand. If you can supply, you are in demand. If you are a native English speaker, then you are already ahead. In this country, if you are willing to move, work your ass off, and actually like programming - eventually you will reach gainful employment. Especially if you can pass a drug test. The first year? Hell no. Look for the hardest shit you can find that people with no patience think they are "too good for", and you will be filling in your experience in no time. Life is not easy or fair. If you are smart enough to do even some half ass programming, you have been given a gift.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity
Of course design people* don't like good concept art for a tiling wm. It's not "modern", emphasizes work instead pointless high rez stock photos, and acknowledges the desktop.
*not all design people, just a certain flavor
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777
What was this experimental / undocumented roaming feature even suppose to do?
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What is required for a Danish citizen to work in the US for 6 months?
Generally, anyone can come visit for up to 6 months in a row. To legally be employed, you need a work visa of some sort. For a short term gig, in the old days, a letter from the employer was sufficient. I was on flying back from Canada with a man doing just as recently as ten years ago. I would search for the different types of work visas. On the other side of the cost spectrum, there are entire businesses based around sorting these sorts of things out. You could search for an immigration consultant.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Qt Licensing Changes
I didn't actually say unix cli. Powershell is cli.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind
There are many kinds of paper. Cost is one of the factors in the matrix of trade-offs. Newspaper paper is almost at the extreme low end of the spectrum. There really is paper that could give you 1-2 centuries easily using a monochrome laser printer. Not as good as stone, but does not require windows update.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Qt Licensing Changes
Obviously I having some fun with it. Developer/technician/hacker users a different audience. In my office for instance, people can use 'doz/osx/nix. If you walk around, 95% of every monitor you see has at least one terminal open. These are people doing totally different types of work for all sorts of projects.
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: Qt Licensing Changes
It was GPL (or pay license) to start with. I believe you mean you wonder if it had been LGPL to start with. Subtle, yet enormous difference for a library.
As to the speculation, I don't know. Special preprocessing phases to extend C++ are odd. The signals and sockets paradigm is a mixed bag. Plus there are serious trade offs to the entire application framework vs a library choices in the first place. On the other hand, the runtime type system and heavily stylized macro style of GTK's gobject system was certainly an odd duck to say the least.
Personally, between the web, mobile, "modern" UX/UI ideas, desktops that want to be tablets, etc, I think the 20-30 years of GUI exploration is coming up very empty handed. Character cell terminal, and CLI are more popular and mainstream than ever.
Where things are going from here?
ctstover
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10 years ago
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on: The Sad State of Web Development
Think about all the different computers connected together it took to get this web page to your eyes. All those network nodes, routers, the billing for your ISP, the CDN, all the security related, etc. How did those things even come into existence? Think of the tools the humans used to work on those things. Think of the energy it takes to run all those systems. Think of the entire fuel supply chain, power generation, transmission and distribution. All that takes millions of computers. Think of transportation, defense, biotech, astronomy, music, film, games, litigation support, to education. Computers run everything. "Basic" agriculture and land management is even wholly revolutionized by software. The world is a big place. Applied computing is unfathomably far reaching. Further, applied computing relies on development tools, operating systems, microprocessor design, fabrication advancements. Don't settle for a career in something that you find boring.