This is enough to make me keep using C++ for the use cases where Nim is meant to shine, or choose Rust instead. If I'm to learn a modern language, I really expect it to support modern paradigms.

I can see why it'd be interesting to someone with no C/C++ knowledge to get into systems programming though.

Working at one of the top 5 members of that clearing house in Scandinavia, very few people I've spoken to about it at work earlier this week thinks he is actually bankrupt. He's filing for bankruptcy so that he won't have to cover his own loss.

Is that even possible under Norwegian law? To my understanding, Aas has been trading as a private individual, meaning not through an LLC (an AS in Norwegian terminology). If the rumors I'm hearing are correct, this was in order to avoid publishing his trades and profits, which he would have been required to do if he was trading through an AS.

Personal bankruptcy is a very pietistic, convoluted procedure in Norway. It requires giving up all your assets and surrendering all of your income (above a sustenance limit) to creditors for five years, and can only be done once in your life. If Aas is going this route, he will not be able to save any owned assets from the proceedings, and will more or less consent to being a debt slave for the next half-decade. That's an extreme measure that people only do when there is no other option. (The default option being to just not pay anything and leave creditors hanging indefinitely, with the expected consequences for any personal financial endeavor in the future).

So at most this is a play to negotiate with creditors, if the understanding I have is correct. There would be no way to save any assets if actual bankruptcy is the chosen move.

You seem to know a lot about this, though, given that you work with this. Are there some facts here that I'm not aware of?

Would this cover assets not directly owned by him, or assets owned abroad etc ? some loophole which would allow him to retain some chunk of his wealth?

While it likely that it is negotiation tactic, it has to believable one for creditors to think he may actually follow through, otherwise there is no point.

I am aware of no such loopholes. Foreign assets can of course be hidden from the authorities, but they will be confiscated if discovered. Any shares in companies or properties will be confiscated and liquidated, as will any payouts from life insurance policies and such. (Unless I'm very mistaken, all income counts).

As will any primary residence if it has a higher standard or price than the sustenance minimum, any vehicles not required to perform work, any household items beyond a minimum of ~$10k or so in value. It's quite harsh.

If married, the spouse can keep 50% of any assets that were jointly owned.

> this was in order to avoid publishing his trades and profits, which he would have been required to do if he was trading through an AS

Are you sure about this? This sounds very weird. I understand that you might be required to public your annual profits, but an actual trade list?

I don't think there's a requirement to publish a list of the actual trades performed, but I get the impression that the reporting requirements are more detailed than just a profit/loss number.

For private individuals, the only public piece of information that will be reported is the amount of tax paid, and the net assets of the individual.

I thought a bankruptcy procedure is about distributing the remaining assets to creditors in an orderly and fair way. How can this prevent him from losing his assets?

You're mostly right, but there's probably laws governing exactly what assets are redistributed to the creditors. Maybe he is able to stash some assets with his wife or in some complex offshore setup. You'd need lawyers to say. Or the bankruptcy court even.

There was recently a high court judgment in Norway with Alexander Vik who refused to pay for a large currency trade. He tried for years not to pay and even moved his values over to his family, but at the end he lost in court and the money was claimed from his relatives.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2014/03/05/the-ridd...

He might have put a subset of his assets in a foundation, which is not included in bankruptcy (as he no longer owns the assets -- the foundation does).

Foundations however, have no owners (generally only beneficiaries), so they often cannot be held liable for the debts of the (original) founders.

This is one of the big perks of HN - real topics often come with added insights from involved players.

Microsoft's Surface Book comes very close actually, so while the MBPs are still ahead, the gap is getting smaller!

I said this in a previous thread, but I'm surprised that Microsoft haven't jumped on the developer bandwagon after the MBP fallout.

I'd put the Surface Book as ahead of current gen MBP's. The trackpad isn't as good, but that's probably because it's a bit smaller and I like the large track pad. In terms of responsiveness, it's just as good.

The only thing missing is native Linux support, which is why a lot of people on here seem to support the WSL on Windows as an option over just installing Linux on the Surface Book. If Microsoft were to come out and say "Here's the new Surface Book, available in Windows 10 and Linux flavours" I could see a huge shift away from the MBP as the de-facto developer device.

Of course, given how fragmented Microsoft are as a company, I can't see their product team coming together to make this a reality, but a developer can dream.

The Dell XPS 13 touchpad hardware isn't too bad either. It should be bigger though.

I have a Dell XPS 15 and it's on par with any Apple product I've used and it does not have the Apple tax nor touch bar.

If you're looking for a large touchpad, you don't have to look any further than the HP Spectre x360, which has a touchpad literally the size of a modestly-sized smartphone.

My precision 5520 touchpad actually feels very good. It's not MacBook grade but it's /very/ close.

Well, there's plenty to say about C++ compiler errors too!

Clang has done a really amazing job of cleaning those up. I find them super helpful these days.

Aren't they just Clevo computers? If so, the ones I've used have _nowhere_ near premium build quality.

Because they are Clevo. In my opinion the whole "linux laptops" are just a scam in general. Virtually all of them are just slapping their logo on top of generic machine from vendor like Clevo or Compal and are saying that those are "machines designed for linux" ... no they aren't. The most that they are doing is to negotiate with Clevo to put a WiFi card that will work with linux out-of-the-box, which is basically the same what you can do yourself.

The nobel prize committee is far from "an arbitrary commmittee" as far as I know.

At least for the nobel prize in physics I know it's peers who decide and I'd assume it's the same for the other subjects, and it's not just "arbitrary people who have PhDs within the subject" either, it's a few selected ones who are well known in their fields.

I agree that they're not totally arbitrary and there is probably some correlation between broad peer review acceptance of the genius of some work and a Nobel prize. However, there are also plenty of other committees which could award prizes but which don't carry the same prestige for seemingly arbitrary reasons: e.g. the Royal Society.

He mentioned nothing about where he's from though.

Comment history includes both a employment and location history. He's doing this in America.

But just be aware of the legality of whatever you're doing. Broadcasting that you're having your friends mule prescription drugs into the country for you is going to take the very laziest of warrant applications to work out who you and your friends are.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, what you're asking is only possible in a function signature if the compiler inlines it.

However, outside of function signatures, if you write:

int a = 2; int &aref = a; int b = aref;

I'd assume that the compiler is smart enough to optimize away &aref.

Coming from C++, if "passing by pointer value" is considered "passing by value", then what is the opposite? Not passing at all? I mean, there's always going to be _some_ kind of value being passed?

If you write foo(&a), both "you pass a by reference" and "you pass &a by value" are fair descriptions of what happens.

The confusion arises because Java doesn't explicitly distinguish between a and &a; if you write "Foo a = new Foo();" in Java, the behaviour is similar to "Foo *a = new Foo();" in C++. So if we ask how "a" is passed, is the "a" we're talking about the reference or the value?

Ah, I see the reasoning. I only did basic Java in university so I might be remembering incorrectly, but aren't variables storing non-primitive values called "References"?

Seems weird to me to say that Java "passes by value" when all objects being passed are actually references to objects.

> I only did basic Java in university so I might be remembering incorrectly, but aren't variables storing non-primitive values called "References"?

Technically yes, but since the language doesn't let you talk about references directly, the concept rarely comes up. Like, in theory you could say "a is a reference that refers to a value of type Foo", but people don't actually say that; they just say "a is of type Foo".

> Seems weird to me to say that Java "passes by value" when all objects being passed are actually references to objects.

Indeed, completely agreed.

You do see this kind of language in Clojure, where you can talk about a var separately from its value.

The pointer value is passed (which is a valid contention), but that is what it has been defined as for decades.

In C++, terms

    void f(Foo x); // pass-by-value
    void f(Foo* x); // pass-pointer-by-value
    void f(Foo& x); // pass-by-reference

In the last example, you aren't passing in a value, you are essentially creating an alias for some variable in the calling scope.

But it's still just a pointer underneath? It's more or less just syntactical sugar which makes it dereferenced it for you, and I'd argue that it only makes sense to use the phrase in certain contexts.

The only real difference between the last two is that the last one shouldn't be sent in as null, isn't it? The test in OPs artictle doesn't really make sense either, because you can switch the values using pointers as well.

My made-up term "pass-by-pointer-value" just emphasizes the fact that in Java, Python, and sundry other OOP languages, you are always passing around a pointer to an object, even if it is implicit. This is why e.g. equality usually checks object identity (pointer value) in these languages (Python being a notable exception).

C++ just forces you to be explicit about this, as others have pointed out.

Oh yeah, I've heard spying is more memory intensive than running dozens of VMs!