numeromancer's comments

On: Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?

[numeromancer]

I focus on peer-to-peer services, as I think it is the most important focus for free software:

- Radicle - IPFS - torrents and magnet links - i2p - syncthing - PeerTube/ActivityPub

&al

On: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)

[numeromancer]

"allows them to have more resources to invest in patient care" LOL

[rgzz → numeromancer]

lmao even

On: I create buildings from mushroom components

[numeromancer]

PW;DR: Pay-Walled; Didn't Read. But...

Will this be the stuff of the housing of tomorrowind?

On: Long division verified via Hoare logic

[numeromancer]

> will likely not be a major boost for software productivity

You can make plastic knives much faster and cheaper than metal ones. Production!

On: Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” (2022)

[numeromancer]

It failed to catch on outside the defense industry because that is where is started. It was long sneered at as a "language designed by committee".

In one programming class, in college, we used a text-book called "Oh my, Modula 3!". On the back they explained the title, saying "better 'Oh my, Modula 3!' than 'Oh no, Ada!'".

[timbit42 → numeromancer]

You mean, "Oh My! Modula-2!", not 3.

The title of that book was chosen as a reference to a previous book titled, "Oh! Pascal!".

[tombert → numeromancer]

Yeah, people have explained to me here before.

It's just too bad, because Ada looks like a language that should have gotten more popular. I was playing with some of the concurrency constructs built into it, and it was fairly pleasant, and it makes me think about the "what if?" universe where it caught on instead of C++ dominating the 90's and 2000's.

On: Markdown's Big Brother: Say Hello to AsciiDoc

[numeromancer]

ASCII makes up 90% of all digital text; UTF-8 makes up the other 90%.

On: Understanding Memory Management, Part 1: C

[numeromancer]

Just no.

    address = X
    length = *X
    address = address + 1
    while length > 0 {
        address = address + 1
        print *address
    }

[ekr____ → numeromancer]

Author here. You're quite right that this isn't the thing you would normally do. I'm just trying to help people work through the logic of the system with as few dependencies as possible, hence this (admittedly yucky) piece of pseudocode which isn't really C or Rust or Python or anything...

[helothereycomb → ekr____]

At least update "length" for the for loop since it would go into an infinite loop the way it is now in any of those languages.

On: Janet for Mortals (2023)

[numeromancer]

I am not waiting for Janet for Ethereals. Once it ships, it will always have been available.

On: C Until It Is No Longer C

[numeromancer]

No.

On: A book Stanley Kubrick didn’t want anyone to read is being published

[numeromancer]

Stanley Kubrick was one of that kind of people who cannot take criticism of anything they do.

[JKCalhoun → numeromancer]

That's too bad. I understand that as a young filmmaker with an ego, but your supposed to lose that ego as you mature both emotionally and as an artist.

[Towaway69 → JKCalhoun]

Directors to a certain extent need to dominate, it’s the nature of the job.

If you’re the one organising 30 to 50 people on a set with a good many of them also being egos (think actors for example), you have to make hard decisions and to certain extent be that unpopular leader.

On the other hand, there also plenty of soft spoken directors that use soft power to manage a set.

Just want to point out that directing isn’t an easy job at times and how that gets handled various from director to director.

[onemoresoop → Towaway69]

Kubrick movies left a big impact on me, whatever he did it seems to have worked. But I also think he was a bully who it was very hard and damaging to work with.

[psychoslave → JKCalhoun]

As surprising as it might be, narcissistic personality disorder won’t go away simply as people age, especially if they live in a social bubble where they are sent overall continuous positive feedback that society is very pleased at the global result of their behavior.

[onemoresoop → psychoslave]

Do you suppose Kubrick may have suffered from narcissistic personality disorder?

[psychoslave → onemoresoop]

Actually, no.

Apart that he was a film maker, I don’t know anything about him. If anything, this thread thrown more claims on the person than I have ever read before, as I couldn’t care less about topics that can perfectly fit gossip magazines.

Plus not being a doctor, I’m not even qualified to make a compelling diagnosis.

All that said, clichés don’t come from anywhere, and tyrannic personalities who destroy everybody around them as sure as they get social glorification for practicing some art is a well established one, so I wouldn’t be surprised that it would be the case. However I would rather have Picasso coming to my mind.