ts4z (u/ts4z) - Readit News

ts4z commented on Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens microcenter.com/site/mc-n... · Posted by u/modeless

awful · 3 months ago

Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.

ts4z · 3 months ago

Hear hear. I guess we still have Anchor.

ts4z commented on Initialization in C++ is bonkers (2017) blog.tartanllama.xyz/init... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

MichaelMoser123 · 4 months ago

and putting structure instances into an array so that you can refer to them via indexes of the array entries (as the only escape from being maimed by the borrow checker) is normal?

ts4z · 4 months ago

C++ would be bonkers even if Rust did not exist.

ts4z commented on Initialization in C++ is bonkers (2017) blog.tartanllama.xyz/init... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

ts4z · 4 months ago

This is a specialization of the general statement that C++ is bonkers.

ts4z commented on Good-bye core types; Hello Go as we know and love it go.dev/blog/coretypes... · Posted by u/ingve

divan · 5 months ago

What data structures can't be implemented without generics?

ts4z · 5 months ago

Go has good (enough) built-in arrays and maps. But if you want a tree, without generics, you're really limited. With generics, you can get a nice containerized type, but you don't get the nicer syntax that the builtins have.

It's not just types, either. Look at the signature for the built-in sort, which is amazingly cumbersome to use. A generic wrapper around it hides all the ugly.

ts4z commented on Unix Time and a Modest Proposal johndcook.com/blog/2024/1... · Posted by u/tapan_jk

dvh · 8 months ago

If you have problem with Unix time you are probably using it wrong. It is monotonically rising timer that increments every second. That's it. It doesn't care about leap second, leap years or any of the orbits.

ts4z · 8 months ago

Unfortunately, that isn't true.

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/leap-second-glitch-explained/ https://developers.google.com/time/smear

ts4z commented on Another Silicon Valley institution died spring of 2019: Halted/HSC halted.com... · Posted by u/banish-m4

tivert · a year ago

No idea what that exactly was, but here are the videos I could find about it. Looks like mostly surplus electronic parts (like incompletely used reels, etc)?

Walk-throughs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEV0Kqpg1jE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkPE9aGLihE

Some guy showing off is haul:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM4KED3KWzM

ts4z · a year ago

Halted was an electronics surplus store. A really good one. They had old tubes, old ICs, stuff left over from Atari. They had aisles of capacitors, some with date codes in the mid '80s, and newer surface mount stuff. They had a whole wall of 1/4 W resistors at two cents a piece. They had all kinds of random parts for keeping old electronics running, and making new stuff. And they had a receipt for an oscilloscope they sold in the '60s to some kid in Palo Alto named Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, the owner retired and sold it off for parts.

ts4z commented on American flag sort xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML... · Posted by u/zerojames

nanidin · a year ago

It says it sorts one byte at a time. I think this would break for anything not utf-8.

ts4z · a year ago

Seems like it should work for arbitrary byte strings (any charset, any encoding)but obviously the performance characteristics will differ because of non-uniform distribution. But that happens even in ASCII.

ts4z commented on Sieve: An Email Filtering Language (RFC 5228) rfc-editor.org/info/rfc52... · Posted by u/stefankuehnel

a-dub · 2 years ago

that sounds right. and yes, very good stuff! i remember thinking at the time "hah. this is built with real computer science!". and well, at the time, it was the only thing that worked for large mail spools.

i also think it was the first support for sasl(?) encryption upgrades for legacy text/tcp mail protocols

also, fun sidebar: indices vs. indexes, both are apparently valid english... but it seems computer people have adopted the latter almost exclusively. never noticed it before...

ts4z · 2 years ago

SASL came out as a generalization of the IMAP AUTHENTICATE mechanism. CMU wanted Kerberos to work and it had been done as something of a one-off in telnet, and initially in IMAP. There were a couple companion protocols proposed for IMAP (stuff like contacts) that the same group was working on, and they wanted to leverage the same mechanism. From there, might as well do the same thing for POP and SMTP, etc. So they started working on a library (which Cyrus IMAP didn’t use for at least a while, sorry my fault).

Kind of funny that SASL is the most durable piece of the effort.

(I doubt this is entirely accurate. I wasn’t there for a lot of it.)

ts4z commented on Sieve: An Email Filtering Language (RFC 5228) rfc-editor.org/info/rfc52... · Posted by u/stefankuehnel

grawlinson · 2 years ago

I don’t know what I would do without sieve, I use it to manage my mailing list subscriptions, eg move to folders, mark emails from specific chatty users as read, etc.

It automates a lot of manual cruft and I’m endlessly thankful for it.

I do wish it was more widely supported, and I try to do my part to encourage adoption (I maintain several sieve related packages for Arch Linux).

ts4z · 2 years ago

This is very gratifying to read. I had a lot to do with the original spec, and I'm glad you find it useful.

ts4z commented on Sieve: An Email Filtering Language (RFC 5228) rfc-editor.org/info/rfc52... · Posted by u/stefankuehnel

a-dub · 2 years ago

this was part of cyrus imap from cmu, which iirc was the first big imap server to support server side indexes. (i think they were bdbs, iirc)

believe it or not, but many hugely popular applications from 20+ years ago didn't even implement indexing. in this case if you had too much mail your imap client would just time out.

well through the mid-2000s you even had to use a third party plugin for outlook called "lookout" if you wanted searches to not take minutes.

ts4z · 2 years ago

FWIW they were not Berkley DBs. IIRC the only db was the duplicate suppression feature.

Folders (mailboxes in proper IMAP lingo) had hand-built indexes. Good stuff. Credit to jgm, the original author.