dajt (u/dajt) - Readit News

dajt commented on Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access dl.acm.org/openaccess... · Posted by u/Kerrick

Al-Khwarizmi · 4 days ago

> We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality.

In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.

If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).

I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.

dajt · 4 days ago

I assume uploading to arXiv doesn't count as having published a peer reviewed journal article, which is a problem for professionals.

For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.

I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.

dajt commented on Stop Breaking TLS markround.com/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

dajt · 12 days ago

This is a massive pain at my work, same as I'm sure most other comments are saying.

I use Platform.IO for firmware development and can't build my firmware unless I hotspot my phone. I would say that's a PIO bug unless there is a flag I don't know about, but it's exposed by this nuisance of a firewall.

The devs where I am spend much of our time hotspotted to our phones with the corporate network never connected so IP goes out over the mobile network.

Whenever possible we use 'do not verify server certs' flags in libs and commands which is not ideal.

dajt commented on Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell starship.rs/... · Posted by u/benoitg

wocram · 6 months ago

I hope to not age out of trying out new tools other people like!

dajt · 6 months ago

You won't. I tried uv the other day. But I'm too old to want to run a child process just to draw a prompt.

I should know what git branch I'm in, and if I don't it's a simple command away.

dajt commented on Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell starship.rs/... · Posted by u/benoitg

inejge · 6 months ago

> Personally, over time, I have stopped caring too much about prompt customization.

For a while, I tried a couple of Christmas tree prompts which included all kinds of condensed Git status and other bells and whistles, but eventually tired of them and settled on:

- Exit status of the previous command, if nonzero.

- Current time, HH:MM, 24 hour format.

- user@host, red if euid 0, green otherwise.

- Current directory, shortened if the path has three or more elements, with home directory recognition.

- Current directory, full path, echoed as hardstatus and hence appearing in the terminal window title.

- The name of the current branch if within a Git repo.

- Prompt character, dollar/hash sign.

All those elements are meaningful to me, inasmuch as I can quickly orient myself using that information and explore further if I notice anything out of the ordinary.

I'm pretty sure that megaprompt programs like Starship could produce the above, but I like obtaining a familiar prompt with a minimum of external dependencies, and so have written it all in Bash, then ported to Zsh and various Korn shells, which was quite tricky. It probably wouldn't work on Xenix 286, but anything newer has a fighting chance.

dajt · 6 months ago

That does look pretty good. I wouldn't bother with the time but I like the rest of it.

dajt commented on Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell starship.rs/... · Posted by u/benoitg

m000 · 6 months ago

I would be very curious to see an age demographic chart of people using e.g. Starship.

Personally, over time, I have stopped caring too much about prompt customization. I concluded that, no matter how carefully you curate your prompt, 90% of the information shown will be irrelevant 90% of the time*. After a while, your brain will start perceiving this as visual clutter and filter it out, to the point you may even forget the information is there, right in front of your eyes.

And for the things that matter, you probably need more details than any prompt can show you. E.g. are there changes in your git branch? Ok there are, good to know, but which files have changed? Just knowing that there are changes is not really actionable information. You need to run additional commands to get actionable details.

* the numbers are completely arbitrary, but you get the picture

dajt · 6 months ago

For most of my nearly 40 years in work I had PS1='$ ' and PS2='> '.

A few years ago I progressed to having the current directory in there.

The thought of running a child process to create my prompt every time I hit enter doesn't feel right.

dajt commented on NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++ github.com/dail8859/Notep... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

qwertox · 2 years ago

Notepad++ (and this one here) are based on Scintilla [0]. It's worth pointing it out because it is a high-quality open source code editor component.

SciTE [1] is the "official" demo-editor for Scintilla and was last updated on March 9th 2024. The history reaches back to 1999.

[0] https://www.scintilla.org/

[1] https://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

dajt · 2 years ago

I used Scintilla as the editing component for a JavaScript IDE about 20 years ago, was good.

dajt commented on How I replaced deadly garage door torsion springs (2002) truetex.com/garage.htm... · Posted by u/bronzekaiser

dajt · 2 years ago

Proper nerd chic, that site. Love it!

dajt commented on Java 22 Released mail.openjdk.org/pipermai... · Posted by u/mkurz

jimbokun · 2 years ago

Maybe my favorite feature in this release:

https://openjdk.org/jeps/463

Finally solves the inscrutable Hello World program!

Yes, it's just ergonomics for early beginners. But could be the difference in whether or not someone new to programming sticks with Java or not.

dajt · 2 years ago

I really doubt that. Java is complicated enough that it's not beginner friendly even if you don't have to write the class to put main into.

Given these are still methods of classes this JEP seems pointless to me. Not having to write class x {} isn't a great time saver.

dajt commented on A bird's eye view of Polars pola.rs/posts/polars_bird... · Posted by u/rbanffy

vundercind · 2 years ago

“Fancy array-of-associative-arrays with their own set of non-Python-native field data types and a lot of helper methods for sorting and import and export and such, but weirdly always missing any helpers that would be both hard to write and very useful”

“SQLite but only for Python and worse. Kind of.”

“That annoying transitional step you have no direct need for but that you have to do anyway, because all data-wrangling tools in Python assume a dataframe”

(I use this stuff daily)

[edit] “Imagine if you could read in from a database or CSV and then work with the returned rows directly and as if they were still a table/spreadsheet. Except by ‘directly’ I mean ‘after turning it into a dataframe and discarding/fucking-up all your data type information’. And then with another fucking-everything-up step if you want to write it out so you can do real stuff with it elsewhere.”

dajt · 2 years ago

LOL.

I have been programming for over 30 years on all sorts of systems and the Pandas DataFrame API is completely beyond me. Just trying to get a cell value seems way more difficult than it should be.

Same with xarray datasets.

I just loaded the same CSV into Pandas and Polars and Polars did a much better job of it.

dajt commented on Smart terminals: Personal computing’s true origin? (2023) thehistoryofhowweplay.wor... · Posted by u/rbanffy

ChuckMcM · 2 years ago

Sort of? I don't disagree but this shift of locus for compute from the datacenter to the edge and back again is kind of like a pulsing heartbeat if you stick around long enough.

Mainframe -> form based terminals

Minicomputers (multiple servers) -> Terminals with flexibility in their formatting

Personal computers (combined terminal + compute)

Server farms (lots of servers) -> Thin X servers / Citrix style clients

Server farms (lots of servers) -> Web Browser (software implementation of a terminal with very flexible formatting)

Surprisingly, I wrote about it in BYTE Magazine back in the day (like in 1984) about how "intelligence" (which was code for programmability) in remote nodes lead to a separation of computation and presentation. There is a tremendous bandwidth advantage if you do it this way (sending text is less bandwidth than sending bitmaps or compressed video streams).

dajt · 2 years ago

Exactly! I've been around long enough to experience that series of events from top to bottom.

That's the weird thing about this business. There's always a new generation saying 'this is dumb, we should do it differently' and things bounce back and forth.

As you say, smart terminals are one reason why an old mainframe could support so many users with so few resources - all that display and input processing offloaded in a very distributed fashion.

Web and Electron apps make me weep for what was.