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karatinversion
Joined 1,139 karma
SWE for IBM Storage.

  1. The people in the UK actually go to prison though
  2. There's also the fact that common methods threw exception types that were not final, and in fact overly generic. If I call a method that declares itself to throw NoSuchFileException or DirectoryNotEmptyException, I can have a pretty good idea what I might do about it. If it throws IOException without elaboration, on the other hand...
  3. I just tested it by creating a repo with two branches without a common ancestor, and I was able to move a branch pointer to either history with update-ref, so no, I don't think so
  4. You are looking for

      git update-ref <branch-name> <commit-sha>
  5. > we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries

    The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.

  6. I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation - and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words, except for nominative plurals.
  7. To say of that which is, that is is, or of that which is not, that it is not
  8. Luckily, the link provides just this information:

    35-44: 62% 45-54: 70% 55-64: 75% 65+: 79%

  9. To tie this back to TFA, even before we knew that the Halting problem was uncomputable, we could have defined

      f(n) = { 1 if there is a Turing machine with at most n states that solves the Halting problem;
               0 otherwise }
    
    and we can easily show that f(n) is computable without proving that the Halting problem is undecideable. Viz., f is either constant 0; or equal to a function of the form

      g_k(n) = { 1 if n >= k;
                 0 if n < k },
    
    and both the constant 0 function, and all the g_k functions, are computable; thus f is computable.
  10. As I understand it, the C spec defines what are valid programs, and for valid programs, either specifies what their observable side effects must be, or leaves them either unspecified or implementation defined. Importantly, programs with undefined behaviour are excluded from the class of valid programs; thus the spec imposes no requirement on the resulting behaviour. To quote,

    > Permissible undefined behavior ranges from ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable results, to […]

    And I think this is where “can’t happen” comes in: in the case of undefined behaviour, the compiler is free to emit whatever it pleases, including pretending it cannot happen!

  11. Do you also count the first decade of your life from January 1st of the year before you were born?
  12. And also, the system is a direct descendant of regnal numbering, where zero wouldn’t have made sense even if invented (there is no zeroth year of Joe Biden’s term of office).
  13. I always thought the problem with this was that the compilers do loads of these optimisations in very mundane ways. Eg if I have a

      #define FOO 17
      void bar(int x, int y) {
        if (x + y >= FOO) {
          //do stuff
        }
      }
      void baz(int x) {
        bar(x, FOO);
      }
    
    the compiler can inline the call to bar in baz, and then optimise the condition to (x>=0)… because signed integer overflow is undefined, so can’t happen, so the two conditions are equivalent.

    The countless messages about optimisations like that would swamp ones about real dangerous optimisations.

  14. Only if the interfaces the underlying implementations provide remain stable
  15. Doesn’t the fact you do use it mean the customer (the one who chooses the vendor) did not care, though?
  16. On top of all the other problems pointed out, java's checked exceptions don't even do a good job of indicating possible failure conditions. The standard library set the tone on this with exception like IOException, which has an enormous amount of subclasses represting different IOExceptions, and is thrown by anything related to IO. So I still need to rely on documenation or code inspection to understand what exceptions might actually be thrown and what they mean, if I want to recover from errors.

    The classic case of this is that the compiler cannot tell that

        new StringReader("Example").read()
    
    doesn't throw an SSLException.
  17. The iPhone launched 17 years ago. The correct rough approximation is now "20 years ago" :)
  18. I always write a negative “is empty” check as “size > 0” for this reason
  19. No, that’s not right. If you did that, you would need to force push to get the result pushed to the remote.
  20. tarball is the mandatory parameter to the preceding -f and can’t be used to inject commands
  21. Indeed, and even with apples, we can say "the apple is native to Central Asia" without meaning a particular apple.
  22. The version of rigorous infinitesimals I've seen didn't let you have these identities, because e^2 != 0 (because it still maintains the field axiom xy = 0 => x=0 V y=0); but the argument still goes through by carrying the whole power series in place of these simplifications – you can write the higher order terms as e*f(x, e) and drop them when you evaluate st(...).
  23. Hey now, at least once a quarter I power down my router, count to 30 and power it back up again because it is a temperamental baby
  24. But then you need to run your business with that salary range - if you put it in writing to your hr people or hiring managers that the maximum they can actually offer is $less_than_that, those emails will come out in discovery.
  25. I would have said Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all ended with decisive victories - there is no South Vietnam, the Taliban rule in Kabul, and Saddam Hussein was hanged.
  26. The accent gives away that this is in fact a loan from French

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