_kst_'s comments

On: Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

[_kst_]

The Senate??

Any law changing the name of the Defense Department would have to be passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President (or by 2/3 of both Houses overriding a Presidential veto). The Senate has no such authority on its own.

[mandeepj → _kst_]

Right! I meant to write ‘Congress’, but mistakenly wrote Senate.

On: Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)

[_kst_]

If you want any kind of non-trivial formatting, use the printf command, not echo.

On: I found a vulnerability. they found a lawyer

[_kst_]

Like re-introducing wolves into Yellowstone.

On: A terminal weather app with ASCII animations driven by real-time weather data

[_kst_]

I'm already running tmux. Opening a new window is easy.

On: Tiny C Compiler

[_kst_]

That has the same content as git://repo.or.cz/tinycc.git

On: 4 billion if statements (2023)

[_kst_]

The author missed an opportunity for a much shorter solution for the given problem statement.

    // Check whether a number is odd or even.

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <stdbool.h>

    static bool is_odd_or_even(unsigned long num) {
        return true;
    }

    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        const unsigned long num = strtoul(argv[1], NULL, 10);
        printf("%lu is %s odd or even\n",
               num,
               is_odd_or_even(num) ? "is" : "is not");
    }

[niccl → _kst_]

Brilliant! Mr Boole would love this

On: Dependable C

[_kst_]

I see a huge semantic gap between assembly language and C.

An assembly language program specifies a sequence of CPU instructions. The mapping between lines of code and generated instructions is one-to-one, or nearly so.

A C program specifies run-time behavior, without regard to what CPU instructions might be used to achieve that.

C is at a lower level than a lot of other languages, but it's not an assembly language.

[vnorilo → _kst_]

And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Both ISA-level assembly and C are targeting an abstract machine model, even if the former is somewhat further removed from hardware reality.

[arghwhat → vnorilo]

Java also targets an abstract machine model (JVM) - such statement really doesn't mean much.

Assembly is not about corresponding to exactly which gates open when in the CPU. It's just the human writable form of whatever the CPU ingests, whereas C is an early take on a language reasonable capable of expressing higher level ideas with less low-level noise.

I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

[vnorilo → arghwhat]

>I seriously doubt anyone who has written projects in assembly would make such comparisons...

With genuine respect, I believe this type of insinuation is rarely productive.

Someone might still have silly opinions, even if they have been paid to write assembly for 8-24-64 bit cisc, risc, ordered and out of order ISAs, and maybe compilers too. Peace :)

[arghwhat → vnorilo]

Yes but someone might also have silly opinions from having no experience how production assembly actually looks, such as underestimating just how different working with that is to working in high-level languages like C and why such languages were quite revolutionary. :)

This should not be mistaken as appeal to authority, it is merely reasonable discrimination between those speaking from experience, and those forming opinions without experience.

If one believes those with experience has poorly informed opinions, they're always free to gain experience and associated perspective. They will then either have the fundamentals to properly push their viewpoint, or end up better understanding and aligning with the common viewpoint.

[cylemons → vnorilo]

Sure but from software POV assembly is the lowest level you can target

[torstenvl → cylemons]

Which assembly? Assembly with macros? Assembly with synthetic instructions?

If you use

    mov %i0, %l0

instead of

    or %g0, %i0, %l0

Then that isn't "the lowest level you can target."

[cylemons → torstenvl]

I was thinking of x86 when I wrote that, also I am not sure macros count as an abstraction level since they are just preprocessors?

What I meant to say is that since there is no way to directly write microcode, assembly is the lowest level software can target.

[jcelerier → cylemons]

Yes and no, you can use c in situations where there's no "assembly", for instance when synthesizing FPGAs. You target flow graphs directly in that case IIRC.

[IshKebab → vnorilo]

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

Nobody claimed that. It corresponds to the instructions the CPU runs and their observable order.

Also it's really only x86 that uses micro-ops (in the way that you mean), and there are still plenty of in-order CPUs.

[vnorilo → IshKebab]

sure, I was thinking of large OO cores. "Correspondd to the instructions the cpu runs and their observable order" is how I'd characterize C as well, but to each their own.

[flohofwoe → vnorilo]

> And yet modern assembly does not correspond 1:1 to the micro-ops the CPU runs or even necessarily the order in which they run.

It's still much closer to the input machine code compared to what compiler optimizer passes do to your input C code ;)

[vnorilo → flohofwoe]

I have empathy for this having written compiler passes for 10ish years of my career. But as I've studied register renaming, speculative branch prediction and trace caches I would no longer agree with your last sentence. It's fine though, totally just an opinion.

On: The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)

[_kst_]

Are you sure it's been open sourced? I'm reasonably sure you've linked to a site offering pirated copies.

There are several links to PDF versions of the book. None of them include either a copyright page or a statement that it's been released as open source.

The author's own website <https://afu.com/> includes errata for the book, but doesn't provide or mention a free copy.

A free sample of the Kindle version of the book does include a copyright notice. A book published in 1994 is not public domain unless it's been explicitly released.

Something that appears to be a legitimate PDF sample (not the while book) is here:

https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780131774292/samplep...

On: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

[_kst_]

I think you meant to post this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45481892

[725686 → _kst_]

Hmm, yes...I don't see how to move or remove, so...sorry for that

On: We shouldn't have needed lockfiles

[_kst_]

The author seems to have assumed that readers are going to know that he's talking about NPM and JavaScript, and that "lockfiles" are an NPM-specific feature (to me, it means something completely different).

Perhaps that's a valid assumption for readers of his blog, but once it appears here there are going to be a lot of readers who don't have the context to know what it's about.

Can an "NPM" tag be added to the subject of this post? More generally, I encourage authors to include a bit more context at the top of an article.

[deathanatos → _kst_]

> that "lockfiles" are an NPM-specific feature

… they're not, though. Python & Rust both have lockfiles. I don't know enough Go to say if go.sum counts, but it might also be a lockfile. They're definitely not unique to NPM, because nothing about the problem being solved is unique to NPM.

[_kst_ → deathanatos]

OK, but to me a "lockfile" is a file whose existence signals that some resource is locked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_locking#Lock_files

When I saw the title "We shouldn't have needed lockfiles", I expected something about preferring some other mechanism for resource locking.

More generally, I see a lot of articles that talk about an issue in some language or framework that don't mention that context. Just adding "JavaScript" or "NPM" (or whatever) in the title or near the top of the article would be very helpful.