In college we had Mojo for downloading tracks out of other people's iTunes, for a precious little amount of time (maybe just a year or year and a half before they released an update that killed the actual filesharing). It was always fun finding hidden gems in people's libraries - learned about some of my favorite artists that way.
I've cracked into quite a few programming books over the years and it's pretty crazy how much of an advantage it's given me. I'm a lowly systems engineer, not even a real programmer, but I definitely understand networking better than the majority of programmers at my company because I read Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated 10 years back. (and I read the OLD version from the 90s that was already dated when I read it!) And then I read UNIX Network Programming to help understand all the different sockets APIs and that's paid dividends too, because I get our network programming code better than most of my coworkers too.
Then there was that one time I was self-studying computer architecture (Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective) and was able to turn what I learned around and hack our binary code at a customer site because I wasn't in an environment where I could compile our code... and then years later, when I wanted to analyze the ROM of a 90s electronic device with a much simpler instruction set than x86, I wasn't afraid to crack open the thing in Ghidra
Let's see, what else have I read that's paid dividends over the years:
- Modern Operating Systems (Tannenbaum)
- Learning Python (Lutz)
- JavaScript - The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)
- Programming PHP (Tatroe)
- Learning Web Design (Robbins)
- Algorithms (Sedgewick)
- A book I read whose name escapes me now, about technologies like RS-282/RS-484 and serial communications in general
- (I could probably put down Cuckoo's Egg too as an "inspiration" for me ultimately getting interested in computers and networking, and I bet that's not too uncommon a story)
It's probably a sign of my age (mid 30s for reference), but when I'm curious about something and want to learn it really deeply - I look for a good book on the topic. (although I'm willing to admit that maybe this process hinders me in some ways, because it means I sometimes spend more time studying than I actually do working with a thing - I have spent a LOT more time reading about circuits than building them - but I like studying so I'm happy either way)
I still find myself hoping (probably futilely) that Bjarne Stroustrop will come out with a new edition of The C++ Programming Language, to help me understand all the features that have been added to it since C++14...
Thank you! I knew that existed, but now that I read the synopsis I'm thinking that the C++20/23 material makes sense in this "tour" book... the C++11 (and earlier) material in The C++ Programming Language is like the basis for the language, and everything that came after is more advanced in usage. I guess.
Anyway, maybe all obvious observations but thank you nonetheless
Before I RTFA, I was wondering if this would be about trying to find a way to include Wayback Machine results in search. Searching the Wayback Machine is always such a nightmare, and wouldn't it be nice if your search turned up that long-dead 1997 web page that has the exact answer for what you're looking for...
(minor use case I had recently was I was trying to find old Japanese blogs for Tamagotchis, which I gather there were a ton of in the 90s but almost none survive today - imagine if I could get those instead of the 1,000,000 sites just trying to sell them to me)
They're likely only serving previously accessible domains already in their index as wayback machine links, which is neat, but doesn't really solve the problem of indexing the wayback machine in a broader sense.
Would be a very nice feature to have indeed, though the data is a bit too inaccessible to index as far as I can tell (even though I've not given it any serious effort, so maybe it is?)
I kinda consider that a feature and not a bug. If it were easier to find all the really deep stuff in the Wayback Machine, people would be trying to censor it all the time. I like being able to spear-fish my way into the deep shit by finding layers of URI references in other archived pages.
The Usenet was considered a better place to store data about a topic for a year than a website because the interactive format allowed other people to comment. There was only cgi guestbooks which pale in comparison to a newsreader. People didn’t think back then about keeping information around forever because books were still the primary way information was captured, retained and transferred
My girlfriend has been getting into crocheting recently, and I've been learning a lot about it and craft stuff in general.
I've always been a computer guy... I'm bad with my hands. Could never do origami. Part of the reason I dropped out of Boy Scouts was I didn't want to learn how to make knots. I was terrible in art class, I can't draw and I honestly have trouble just visualizing things (I was not great in geometry either). It's difficult for me to be creative like that. So that's my background, lol.
I could play music (and that's a hobby I still want to pursue), but lately I've been wondering if there was a craft that was better for people like me. Like, I got these cute handmade plushies as a gift recently, and I want to do something like that.
(honestly it seems like crocheting and knitting might not be bad options, but just wondering what else is out there!)
e; one thing I've considered is making something with electronics (I know enough about circuits to be dangerous), but the thing you run into quickly is you don't really want to just give somebody a circuit board, lol. At some point, it seems like all the interesting projects move towards 3D printing which I find intimidating.
I've found painting mini's (like Warhammer) to be really fun. You get the structure of the model to work from, but you get a creative outlet with the painting. There is a ton of painting technique to work on and learn, and you get a game to play for extra motivation. Plus at the end of the day you have a nice display piece to look at for the shelf.
I am definitely interested in how things look for STEM majors on average, and whether they've seen a similar decline. Although the article has a quote from a math professor, and that's certainly not a degree you get into without some level of dedication.
When I was an undergrad (2008-2012) I don't think I even had any classes that were given as PowerPoint slides. If they had been though, I don't think I would have felt bad asking for them - they definitely could have helped jog my memory! Notes aren't always perfect...
I was in school (2011-2016) and almost all professors had a wiki or moodle where we could find all their slides and documents.
I noticed that the rare few professors who didn't upload their powerpoints, were mostly the ones who would just recite the content of their slides in class (almost) word-for-word.
Years ago (like 2013), I had an actual use case for lynx, which was that I was staying at a hotel long-term and I couldn't access the Wi-Fi landing page from my browser for some reason. But I could hit it from lynx, so I'd just log in from there every day.
Never had to do that since, but it sure saved my ass back then...
We tried other names, but we found collisions with essentially all of them. =/ We ended up picking a "least bad", and actually talked to a couple of folks familiar with the old usage to see if it was a worse collision than we realized. They weren't delighted but generally shrugged. So here we are. =/
It's definitely not perfect, but I think it's much more searchable than "C" or some other choices. Ultimately, I think its at least not bad enough to matter compared to the actual project.
A big goal was being short and easily pronounced, including by non-native English speakers, in a recognizable way from reading the text. That made the overwhelming majority of "fun" spellings not work well.
On one hand, I feel like we're just not as good at naming as Rust and Zig. Both of those names are :chefskiss:
On the other hand, Carbon does have a bunch of awesome puns waiting for us... So we've got that going for us. =D
But it isn't that we're directly using this, but that definition checked generics are fairly similar to the ideas in that series of proposals, and that led to the generics in Swift. Also closely related to the generics in Rust, etc.
I feel the same, especially given how significant Carbon was to the revitalisation of Apple. Without carbon they likely would have lost several key developers in the Mac OS X transition, which all of their later success stems from.
Depends on your definition of "a good name". It seems like yours includes "must be a short English word", but doesn't include things like "is easily web-searchable" and "doesn't conflict with existing names". Throwing out the "short English word" criterion opens up a universe of names like "Wubulus" or "Flarnit".
Last time, someone had come up with some kind of new database-oriented language or something and they called it "Limbo".
Limbo is the programming language in Inferno. Plan 9 is what the Unix creators did next -- it's UNIX 2. Inferno is UNIX 3; it's what Plan 9 developed into.
It is the next language from the team that developed C.
It may not be widely-used but it's important, significant, and just as someone knowing their history makes me take their work more seriously, someone not knowing their history makes me think they have less to contribute, because they clearly haven't gone looking at prior art.
Ignorance is no excuse.
For someone to know what they're doing, they need to have at least a vague idea of whose shoulders they're standing on (as Isaac Newton put it). If they don't, they could be reinventing a wheel, and if they call things "struts" and "roundbuffers" and "spinny-pivots" then this says they don't know about "spokes" and "tyres" and "hubs". And making it hexagonal.
The flipside of this coin is making life easier for the community to search and learn.
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