waigl

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

The only label on the map that's both on Latin and in old German.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Is OpenBSD seriously still using CVS for development?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I can see it going both ways. Talking about execution times, this would be an exaggeration, but then, these memes always are.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 3 months ago (7 children)

und ich hab nichts gesagt.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Going by what OP thinks "Chaotic Evil" means for sysadmins, they have clearly never heard of BOFH.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (11 children)

Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn't yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that's how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

  • Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
  • Don't comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
  • Don't comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the "what" style comments for where that just isn't possible.
  • Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
  • In some cases, comment the "why not", to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

In a language that has exceptions, there is no good reason to return bool here…

[–] [email protected] 66 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Floating Point Unit. The thing that does mathematical operations on floating point numbers. It used come separately from the CPU as an add-on chip, but around the 486 era, manufacturers started integrating it on the same die as the CPU. Of course, as these things go, from the system programmers point of view, there is still no difference between an add-on FPU and an integrated one.

The one pictured here is an add-on FPU for an Intel 80386 CPU.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

As someone who is in tech… not sure, either.

[–] [email protected] 334 points 6 months ago (21 children)

About 20 years ago, Microsoft was found guilty and convicted, because they forced their browser on their users, driving out competitors by abusing their de facto monopoly on PC operating systems. These days, they are doing the exact same thing again, just on an even broader base. I don't even understand how this verdict took so long.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

But this is about companies, not products or brand names.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

WhatsApp is not its own company, it belongs to Facebook/Meta.

Also, on that topic, you could do the same thing you did with X/Twitter to Meta/Facebook.

*edit: Oh, and of course Alphabet/Google. Curious how many big tech companies seem keen on obfuscating their own name these days...

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