dandotway

> The most philosophically and mathematically consistent interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is that there are "many worlds".

Why is "many worlds" the most mathematically consistent? (I won't bother asking for the philosophical bit; I'm sure it's too long for an HN post.)

Atheists: "We have faith natural selection at a cosmic level makes life way more likely."

Christians: "We have faith supernatural selection at a cosmic level makes afterlife way more likely."

Big Endian POWER isn't bug-for-bug compatible with buggy Javascript usage of typed arrays that assumes little endianness, and thus browsers/nodejs/deno on POWER will be exposed to bugs that don't affect little endian x86-64/ARM.

After so many years of endianness bugs in C/C++ code, it's perplexing that the web standards committee voted to put typed arrays in Javascript in such a way that exposes platform byte order to Javascript programmers who can't generally be expected to have low-level C/C++/ASM experience with memory layout issues:

  function endianness () {
    let u32arr = new Uint32Array([0x11223344]);
    let u8arr = new Uint8Array(u32arr.buffer);
    if (u8arr[0] === 0x44)
        return 'Little Endian';
    else if (u8arr[0] === 0x11)
        return 'Big Endian';
    else
        return 'WTF (What a Terrible Failure)';
  }

EDIT: my old Power Mac was big endian, but I just read POWER has an endianness toggle. So in little endian mode it ought run endian-buggy JS with bug-for-bug compatibility.

> [15] Richard Waters (1979) developed a program that automatically analyzes traditional Fortran programs

Anyone have a PDF link to a paper about this Fortran analyzer?

While faster-than-light (FTL) travel is impossible through spacetime as PhD physicists know it (i.e. as "Relativity-confirming experiments reveal it"), there are forms of apparent FTL that have mainstream PhD acceptance, because they don't allow information to travel from point A to point B faster than light and thus do not violate causality.

The expansion of the observable universe itself being apparently FTL is perhaps the most interesting. If we point the Hubble telescope (and soon JWST) towards opposite ends of the observable universe, we observe extreme redshift galaxies receding away from each other in opposite directions greater than twice lightspeed if we measure according to "distance in light years" from earth. But no photons or information from a galaxy at one side of our observable universe can be sent to a galaxy at the opposite end: they are receding away from each other too rapidly, these two galaxies exist Beyond the Cosmological Event Horizon relative to each other and are forever unknowable to each other, and thus causality is not violated.

An advanced alien race in galaxy A might be able to beam a message to earth before galaxy A vanishes Beyond the Cosmological Event Horizon within the next 100 million years earth-time, and likewise galaxy B might beam a message to earth within the next 100 million years earth-time, but earth can't relay the message from A to B or B to A because they have already forever receded from each other and will soon both likewise forever recede away from us.

Individuals and small business owners don't have time to learn patent law, nor do they have money to have dedicated legal departments like rich corporations. If I was sued I would not listen to some anonymous stranger on HN. I would get a lawyer. And I would be charged $300-$800/hr by said lawyer. In the patent ecosystem the patent-holding apex whales and lawyer-sharks hunt smaller creatures to eat, and devour whole.

  - never talk to cops

  - never read a patent

  - never read proprietary source code

I need a nice printable version of this to post on my wall.

Clearly you've never been sued by a patent troll.

The patent system only benefits (1.) rich corporations that can afford the millions of dollars in lawyer fees to litigate patent claims, (2.) the lawyers that receive said fees.

+NaN For comments that make me laugh out loud for duration T>2.0 seconds, I wish HN provided a way to transmute/sacrifice one's past karma points into additional +1 mod points.

So whenever I have to study someone else's 'dynamic' python I encounter this sort of thing:

  def foo(bar, baz):
      bar(baz)
      ...

What the heck is 'bar' and 'baz'? I deduce no more than 'bar' can be called with a single 'baz'. I can't use my editor/IDE to "go to definition" of bar/baz to figure out what is going on because everything is dynamically determined at runtime, and even

  grep -ri '\(foo\|bar\|baz\)' --include \*.py

Won't tell me much about foo/bar/baz, it will only start a hound dog on a long and windy scent trail.

> I like the idea of a small, performant language

So the earliest C compilers were under 5000 lines of C+asm:

  https://github.com/mortdeus/legacy-cc

If you want a minimal "standard committee approved" C89 compiler then David Hanson's lcc and Fabrice Bellard's tcc both come out to over 30,000 lines. To understand C89 fully you at a minimum have to read a ~220 page (14,248 line) copy of the (draft) ANSI standard:

  http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.txt

I don't know what the smallest C23 compiler would be with all the new features since C89 added, but it's at the point where a single human can't implement a C compiler anymore. It's becoming a language only rich corporations have the wealth and power to implement and steer.

"Another programming language" cannot even meaningfully exist if all programming languages are forced to have the same feature set. Should Python get C-like low-level pointer manipulation so that Python users don't need to "pull in another programming language" of C to do pointer manipulation?

C doesn't need "defer" because C programmers have managed since the 1970s to implement operating systems, compilers, interpreters, editors, etc., just fine without it. Those who want a bigger C can use C++, this pond is big enough for two fish.