jbrichter's comments

fscanf has to parse and execute the format string. It might be interesting to compare your custom ascii-to-float converter to one which calls strtof in a loop.

The only thing you can begin to understand by reading glibc is the terrible genius of Ulrich Drepper.

I had a similar question to this once, and what I mainly found out was that FreeBSD's (and thus OSX's) libc is much, much, more readable than glibc.

Atom from back then really did suck, though. In-order, etc. This thing has one of the newer Qualcomm ARM cores, which are reasonably wide out-of-order.

Yeah, this is basically my point. You're more likely to find Harry's kind of silliness among CS people than math people.

Real math majors find all this weird category-theoretic jargon in programming pretty dumb. Just so you know.

In C, there is no stack.

Well, at least I'm not the only one who took your post literally. The argument is interesting. I feel like the reason it's overlooked might be a realization that once you have to make such an argument, all is lost, evil has won, everything decent will come to an end, &c.

Which is exactly the unfuriating thing.

I find it infuriating that his argument against facebook spying isn't "this is wrong", but "we will have to hire dead weight, and could be exposed to legal liability." I of course don't mean to criticize the author personally; it's just sad how far culture has slid that this is the go-to argument.

The traditional student is better educated. Presumably (s)he is motivated and interested in certain classes too. The difference is the computer student avoids doing anything (s)he doesn't feel like doing. Living according to your whims is not taking it on yourself to be responsible.

Second of all, it's not like Thrun left a comfy life in the ivory tower to get with the times. The WSJ article says he was an adjunct. It's not surprising he left a dead-end job to join a startup.

I'd also say that if you're not learning outside of your immediate narrow interests, you're not really learning. Is learning an 8th programming language once you already know 7 a bigger learning experience than taking a course in chemistry when you know none?

Boring (to you) required classes have two purposes: to be truly educated you need breadth, and for a degree to be worth anything on the job market it should demonstrate that you can suck it up and do unpleasant tasks. If you don't care about either of those and just want to stick with what you know and like, why the hell are you in school anyway?

Summary: they don't want to; there's no good in it for them.

Why is Apple doing this, then? The article suggests high profit margins. I think it has more to do with the lack of Broadway one man shows about Dell's or HP's labor practices.

If you're dead-set on publishing a lengthy article about somebody's private business, it at least behooves you to spend some time on it. You even managed to get his name wrong.

It is simply not true that the article is "mostly in praise of his accomplishments," either. There is a brief description of LoseThos at the start and a vacuous upbeat sentence about workflows and usability near the end. In the middle sits an illustrated description of Mr. Davis's antics and a rather uninformative discussion about how mentally ill people are mentally ill. You cap it off with a quote from the DSM describing behavior similar to his, and reflect that you can "understand and appreciate" someone's illness now that you have blurb, even one which says nothing more than "yeah, schizos do that sometimes."

The article, aside from rubbernecking at a mentally ill man, has almost no actual content. It seems you were more interested in telling a "tortured genius" story. You insinuate that mental illness would be some sort of creative advantage if only society were more accommodating, that his mental illness and his writing an operating system are somehow two sides of the same coin.

He's been unemployed and stuck at home for 7 years. I don't think it so notable that a programmer in that situation might do some programming. LoseThos is neat, but let's be level headed. Writing a basic kernel (and this one doesn't even have virtual memory or preemptive multitasking) and a basic compiler are both common projects for CS undergrads. To produce this over 7 years isn't some unfathomable feat, though I can't imagine being sick and medicated made it any easier. I absolutely don't mean to be critical of him, and the treatment he received on Something Awful was really unappetizing. But it does seem that you're building his accomplishments up a little. And it seems that you're doing it because you want to write a moving story and parade his personal tragedy through the streets like some nerd Oprah.

This post is too long already, but I also want to say your blaming the community's lack of acceptance for the progression of diseases is ridiculous and trivializes mental illness. Smiling and nodding at his PRNG won't make him better. Finally, your stamping the article with a little self-aggrandizing blurb about yourself and a link to your github account leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

This seems like a bad idea. There are (or at least used to be) a couple of rants about his doctors on his website, so it's clear he's getting treatment of some variety. There's also a reference to his parents, who presumably have been put through enough by his illness without a swarm of internet strangers calling them at home to gawk at their son like a sideshow freak.