🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

Stories by kghose

Nicest 4/1 joke ever! (lobste.rs)
The appeal of dynamically typed languages (gist.github.com)
The GitHub Action mining attack through Pull Request (dev.to)
Text file driven applications (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
Disadvantages of purely functional programming (jaxenter.com)
Notes on Idris (late 2017) (thebreakfastpost.com)
This short and to the point post about Idris made me want to try it (at first) and then not, after he described his experiences in getting it to work. I wish everyone who tried out a language would put out a post in this format - it's extremely helpful to folks trying to get a feel for syntax and us...
How secure are passwords stored in Chrome or Firefox?
(I thought I'd ask here rather than stackoverflow or reddit because I trust people here more, but I don't know if this takes the community in an unwanted direction) My main browser has been Chrome ever since they released that video showing how fast it was (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDji...
Code behaving differently in C90, C99, C11, C++98, and C++11 (kristerw.blogspot.com)
There are some subtle differences between the revisions of the C standard that makes it possible to create programs that behaves differently depending on if they are compiled as C90, C99, or C11. Similarly, C++ is mostly a superset of C, but there are constructs that produce different results for C ...
Oregon is very finicky about people calling themselves engineers (reason.com)
The story leads with the case of Mats Järlström who did some analysis on yellow light timing for traffic cameras and also mentions the cases of several other people (some of whom were critical of the Oregon government) who were fined or cited for stating they were engineers. Oregon's criterion is wh...
মৌলিক: A prime number toy (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
Moulick (মৌলিক – Bengali for Prime) is an Arduino powered mathematical toy that endlessly computes primes and shows fun statistics about them as it goes along. Watching primes born was never more exciting, or slow. Moulik starts from 2 and takes you primally all the way out to 10 decimal digits at...
Distributed bittorrent-like social network?
I am one of the many millions of lemmings who are trying out Mastodon. Mastodon says it's federated. Are there any social networks that work in a distributed fashion like bittorrent? A network where the information is stored across different peoples devices, truly no central server?
CPU caches and data locality: a small demonstration (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
Navy Reverting DDGs Back to Physical Throttles, After Fleet Rejects Touchscreen Controls (news.usni.org)
Random Points on a Sphere (jasondavies.com)
Using Git Hunks (bignerdranch.com)
This particular use case: ("It is tempting to make sweeping changes and clean up lots of code while implementing a small new feature, however, it’s also good practice to separate commits that don’t include any unrelated changes.") is great. However, it requires discipline to remember what changes pe...
Sisal Lives! (sisal.sourceforge.net)
A long time ago, even before the internet, a brave group of computer scientists set off to change the world. Working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they designed a revolutionary new language that exploited fully, implicit parallelism. Using dataflow techniques mapped onto a conventiona...
Rock Balancing (gravityglue.com)
This is indeed far off from programming (though some will say, some of our code is a lot like a pile of precariously balanced rocks). I was enchanted by the minimalism of it all: a person, a bunch of rocks, gravity and imagination and patience
Question: What languages/paradigms lead to readable AND maintainable code?
I would just like to get opinions from experienced folks on what they would consider languages/programing paradigms that lead to readable/maintainable code AND code that is efficient. I would appreciate it if folks would also mention what domain they work in, since this answer will vary with domain ...
Sleep for 1000 years (codegolf.stackexchange.com)
Receipts for votes, receipts as lottery tickets (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
After casting my vote, I wondered why we don't get a vote receipt. I typed up my thoughts (linked article) along with a left field suggestion about how to up the participation rate, but all you folks must have thought about this too. What are your thoughts? Thanks!
Lisp's Mysterious Tuple Problem (2017) (codeproject.com)
I call Lisp's biggest shortcoming the mysterious tuple problem. It stems (from) Lisp's idiomatic over-use of lists as product types, which are more commonly called tuples. In this essay, I'll explain the problem, how more popular languages don't suffer from it, and some ways to have the power of Lis...
"Descent" game networking (myrkul.org)
I was looking to descriptions of how older networked games worked, and found this to be a good read
Creating Languages in Racket (queue.acm.org)
Named pipes, process substitution and tee (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
Most people using bash are familiar with piping: this is the ability to direct the output of one process to the input of another allowing the second process to work on data as soon as becomes available. What is not so well known is that piping is a particular case of a more general and powerful inte...
"Thanks" flag?
I find many replies to my questions illuminating and helpful. I'd like to not add to clutter by adding a 'Thanks' reply. I up-vote them, but it would be nice to have a 'Thanks' button so the writer can see someone has thanked them for an illuminating discussion/answer
A Fast, Minimal Memory, Consistent Hash Algorithm (arxiv.org)
Hobby robotics resources
I want to build mobile robot(s) that interact with their environment. I’m looking for guidance on 1. A platform to pick and 1. Forums to hangout on I’d like an extensible platform that let’s me add vision, lidar, sonar, radar modules and mount custom things like an arm. I’m happy coding l...
std::optional -> Yak Shaving (kaushikghose.wordpress.com)
All I wanted to do was experiment with std::optional. I ended up upgrading my operating system. Is this right, I ask you?
Most complex ASCII fluid - IOCCC Honorable mention (ioccc.org)
Also see http://youtu.be/QMYfkOtYYlg
How to tell when a robot has written you a letter (medium.com)