kutkloon7

To get the unicode codepoint. For example, you need this when you want to render a character, or convert it to another representation.

A huge number of journalists is being arrested in Turkey. Turks who say bad things about Erdogan and/or Turkey on social media often get arrested.

True, but is also a public secret that people who vote against Erdogan are being threatened.

Only in America

"Does micro support Vi keybindings?

No, if you want to use Vim then use Vim."

Kthnksbye

The things that are priorities in the USA have always puzzled me. Students pay an absolutely insane amount of money for an education that is very mediocre. It is clear that the American education is failing. About half of the population voted for a man who does not believe in science. But somehow, the main priorities for universities seems to be enforcing diversity and gender-neutral pronouns?

I am not saying that thinking about this is wrong, there is just a deep disconnect with the realities that people live in, and many people seem to have a problem viewing things from another perspective.

That is absolutely false. Since I have my computer science/math degree my linkedin inbox has been flooded with messages from recruiters. I can guarantee you that they are not looking for an English major.

Well, this is awfully related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15343559

PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else.

Haha, that is ridiculous!

Sometimes you just have to bicycle close to cars. Even if you take the effort to see inside parked cars (it is probably better to just watch the road), it is simply impossible to evade suddenly opening car doors if they are opened at just the wrong time.

Its a bit like saying that cyclists just have to avoid you if you would suddenly jump on the biking line.

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues.

From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

And 120, 180, 240, ... ;)

Ahh, that explains a lot. Thanks.

I'm not sure why the author included 'floating point' in the title (probably to hint that the Babylonians did not use a symbol for zero, and had the point floating in blank space). To technical-minded people, floating point is synonymous with hardware that computes using a floating point representation, so this is a bit deceiving.

The Babylonians already used a composite-ish system for numbers < 60: They had a different symbol for 10. However, smaller numbers were represented by repeating the unit symbol (which is not very clever).

I guess that the least confusing transcript to modern notation would be something like 7, 24

to represent 7 * 60 + 24 = 444

Yes, composite numbers have many advantages. Working in base 60 = 2^2 * 5 * 3, has advantages of working in base 2, base 5, and base 3.

In base 10, you can quickly spot multiples of 2, 5, and ten (or alternatively, reduce any number module 2, 5, or 10).

It is very characteristic for philosophy to have a very clearly defined question, and a very long and pompous essay which does not provide an answer at first sight.

I have skimmed the paper. It seems that they assume that the writes are skewed (e.g. some parts of the memory gets written to more often). This seems to be a reasonable assumption for real-life situations, but I am not sure if 'random writes' is an appropriate name (since usually people assume random to be uniformly random).

(Not 100% sure if I understood this correctly, though)

I think it is also very much a chicken-and-egg problem. Without software for personal computers, there is no need for personal computers. When there are no people with personal computers, it is not interesting to write software for personal computers.

Then again, why would someone want a personal computer in that time? The things computers are used for now are broadly: 1. Multimedia 2. Communication 3. Administration 4. Computing (for example in science or finance)

The only purpose where you actually need a computer is for computing. This is not something that you typically do at home. It was simply not conventional to use a computer for other purposes at the time. There were no fancy HD screens and the like, and no ubiquitous internet access.

While I hate ads, I also think google has way too much power already, and this is not a healthy development.

I am not arguing that it is ill-defined. I am arguing that no-one takes the effort to rigorously define it.

True. My point is that equality is never defined well.

Or define what = means. In fact, most university courses make this same mistake.

The slides are not, and there are so many links that are directly behind a paywall on hacker news... Those really bother me.

I was just about to comment that the topics seem really intense. I got the impression that Carnegie Mellon is an excellent university with very high standards (much better than Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, etc., which are prestigious and have lots of professors which do great research, but the actual scientific education is good, but not extraordinary, and moreover, the courses are not very hard from what I've heard).

It happened multiple times that I googled some relatively obscure topic, and I found multiple excellent sources from Carnegie Mellon professors. For example, there is this excellent document [1] by Jonathan Shewchuk, about the conjugate gradient method, and you will found as many as four lectures about DRAM memory on youtube.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...

Heh, "Look at the laws in the US when thinking about it" would be more appropriate.

Yes, I wrote the example. Then realized it was different and corrected only half of it.

I remember a recent example. What I wrote was:

    int x = somefunction();
    int x_dividedby16 = x >> 4;

    int x_dividedby16 = (int)Math.ceil(x / 16.0);

Looks nice, but also horrible to type on.

While I'm very interested in mobile operating systems, I'm not a big fan of gesture-based interfaces. They just never work well for me; I often accidentally rotate and zoom and do other weird stuff when I enable them (on the touchpad on my laptop).