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maninalift | 10 years ago | on: Knuth and Plass line-breaking Revisited

Is anyone aware of any line-breaking algorithm which penalises for rivers or typesetting algorithm which adjusts spacing to compensate for it.

I'm interested that rivers are such a concern of manual typesetting but I have never heard mention of it in typesetting algorithms.

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: All Major Browsers Fall at Pwn2Own Day Two

dumb question: "more ht2000 lines of code" - is that a typo of "more than...", is "ht2000" something I don't know and can't google, or are are these hacks in some way related to an antique motherboard?

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: Narrowing the notion of a runtime in Rust

The description notes the replacement of many uses of "tasks" with native OS threads. Tasks may map to threads or may be managed as green threads.

Threads unlike tasks must be detached if they are too be allowed to outlive their parent.

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: Our Development Workflow

even if software is formally verified, and even assuming the specification is both totally accurate and complete, there is plenty of room for issues at software deployment in a multi-component system such as this

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Bloop: Information-theoretically secure, expiring messages

This appears not to actually solve the hard problems of cryptography. It simply generates a random key, them XORs your message with it.

The key and the message are independently just random data and don't reveal anything about the content of the original message (except it's length).

It is a pretty rare case where we cannot transmit messages securely but we are confident that we can transmit two messages and not have them both intercepted.

If on the other hand you can securely transmit keys that are as big as your data, you could of course just transmit the data itself.

As such this is a starting point in understanding cryptography rather than a practical application.

I think, please tell me if I am missing something

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: Programming with Nothing (2011) [video]

A nice demonstration of lambda calculus using Church Encoding in Ruby, without saying that that's what he's doing.

I guess at the end of the video, he will probably reveal what the thing he's been doing is called.

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: CUPS 2.0

Voted down? It's just a quick, weak joke, I don't see the harm.

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: How to Make the Best Pourover Coffee

Put enough ground coffee into a cup that a spoon shushed into it goes "thunk" like a spade into sand and stands up.

Pour over hot water to just cover, stir until saturated, fill cup, allow to settle, drink.

No need for filters or devices. All the flavour stays in the cup.

maninalift | 11 years ago | on: Underscore.go

Ew, now you can have an awkward weak implementation of some FP ideas in Go too.

Yeah, I'm a bitch.

maninalift | 12 years ago | on: Those Who Say Code Does Not Matter

Surely the key point is that most of us read indentation first, it doesn't matter whether you are witting C with semicolons and curlies or ruby with no semicolons and "end"s or lisp with parens, what the programmer really reads first is the indentation. Those other things are sometimes checked afterwards.

Therefore there are two reasonable courses of action to prevent this kind of problem:

  * use automatic code indentation
  * use a whitespace significant language
The second is absolutely the better choice. You may disagree but you are wrong. This is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of programming language syntax actually reflecting what the programmer reads.
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