Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Only showing the most common values means that sizes of non-maximized windows are lost in the noise. It would be nice to see a cumulative size distribution that would show the percentage of viewport widths smaller than x, for various values of x. Then a developer could easily see that if they make the content e.g. 900 pixels wide, what percent of users will have to scroll the viewport left/right.
Comment · 2 months ago
What's crazy is that the much more advanced Amiga custom chips were manufactured at the same 5 micron feature size as the C64 chips. That's why the Amiga needed two custom chips for video (Agnus and Denise) instead of the one in C64 (VIC-II).
Comment · 3 months ago
Also, since CP/M 3.0 on Z80 supported more than 64 kB memory via bank switching, one might expect CP/M to do so on other platforms too.
Comment · 4 months ago
C++ template metaprogramming is in some ways more powerful than Common Lisp macros, because it works at the type level: you can generate new types and dispatch into separate implementations by type. In contrast, Common Lisp type declarations are not available at macro expansion time unless you implement a full source-to-source translator in macros.
Comment · 4 months ago
It leads to the catch-22 that when saving a BASIC program you cannot tell which filenames are already in use, since you cannot get a directory listing without losing the current BASIC program in memory. All you can do is guess a filename that is probably free.
Comment · 5 months ago
Is there still some kind of sales tax in Germany? Shouldn't it be long gone due to the EU value added tax system?
Comment · 5 months ago
It's the same problem with autovectorization. Often the only way to tell whether a compiler optimization is successful is to check the produced assembly or benchmark the code.

It seems that for devirtualization GCC has a warning option -Wsuggest-final-types which is supposed to tell when devirtualization fails in link-time optimization. Not sure how reliable that is, or whether it will produce gobs of unhelpful warnings. Maybe it could be combined with some kind of hint that we want this particular call to be devirtualized, and don't care about calls without the hint.

Comment · 5 months ago
I don't see why there has to be a special staging area when you could just edit the HEAD commit instead. In git you could do "git commit --patch" to commit selected parts and then add more changes to the HEAD commit by "git commit --patch --amend".
Comment · 7 months ago
It's not so easy any more if you try to rotate the hypercube and have to visualize intersections with arbitrary hyperplanes. Already in 3 dimensions the intersection of a cube and a plane can be a non-regular polygon with 3-6 sides.
Comment · 8 months ago
So apparently the Elvish spoken in the Peter Jackson movies is as far from the language imagined by Tolkien as the famous Portuguese-English phrasebook is from natural English. That's one childhood fantasy broken. What about the Klingon spoken in Star Trek movies?
Comment · 8 months ago
If Ctrl sets bit 6 to 0, and Shift sets bit 5 to 1, the logical extension is to use Ctrl and Shift together to set the top bits to 01. Surely there must be a system somewhere that maps Ctrl-Shift-A to !, Ctrl-Shift-B to " etc.
Comment · 8 months ago
There are plenty of old-school companies in Europe still working on moving to the cloud. Now that there is a burgeoning movement towards avoiding American cloud providers, Oxide could have an opportunity to sell "private cloud" servers instead. If they play their cards right, they could make significant inroads in European markets.
Comment · 9 months ago
It's probably much more exciting to implement stuff like this when you can experiment with your own ideas to figure out the solution from scratch, compared to someone who sees it as a trivial exercise in signal processing, which they can't be bothered to implement.
Comment · 9 months ago
Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.

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