Didn’t we solve this already with slab allocators in memcached? The major problem with fixed allocation like this is fragmentation in memory over time, which you then have to reinvent GC for.
The trivial defense against this is time limited passwords for Wifi access. Deny all access until a valid password is entered, only permit that password and MAC address pair for n minutes.
On a technical level it’s trivial, but you’re taking about having a shop replace their wifi router and/or update firmware, create some way for staff to see the current password and/or integrate with POS systems to print it on the receipt, update signage, etc. Hardly trivial for the average non-techie business owner.
Great idea but yet another blog post, which is actually marketing, which ends with “they did it buy our product so you can too”, which is probably not what Meta did.
Sure, it doesn't directly affect any practical programming tasks to matter in real life... but sometimes it's good to indulge in intellectual curiosity. It sharpens our understanding of how far a language can go, no matter how futile that understanding is. This is HN after all and "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" is on-topic on HN.
It matters in the way all academmic exploration matters.
Which is to say it doesn't matter if it matters.
Or rather, you can say it matters or not depending on your own personality and capacity for intellectual curiosity.
If all you care about is can I eat it or fuck it, then it doesn't matter. The limits of c match the limits of the hardware, and so you can never run into them. You can express anything the hardware could do. Except, the only way I can say "it doesn't matter within this scope, because of this scope" is because someone at least thought about it long enough to figure that out. The question mattered even though the answer came back "don't worry about it", because that answer matters.
It matters, or rather it may matter (you or someone has think about it for a while to find out), if you would be one of the people who helps understand the current world and helps design the next world rather than just use the world however it happens to exist today.
It may also be that it would matter, but the premis is wrong in some way, which again you can't know without formulating the problem and then thinking about it.
I would say that c with variable pointer sizes or compoundable pointers would still be c, and so if the spec happens to specify the size of pointers, that's just a silly implementation detail that shouldn't be hard coded in the spec and could be ignored or officially revised without changing anything that matters. Like saying the language isn't turing complete because the original proposal has a typo.
Another tack: Someone else pointed out that VA_ARGS gets around it. But that's not magic. VA_ARGS has to be implemented somehow using the tools of the rest of the spec. If one part of the spec says something that the rest of the spec can't do, then the spec is inconsistent. That doesn't mean the language isn't turing complete. It means it might or might not be depending on how you choose to reslove the incosistency.
Not a CS guy, but afaiu guaranteed termination lowers the automata class to push-down automatons or FSMs, which are definitely not what we’d agree to call general purpose programming languages. In practical terms, they have a computing regime equivalent to that one of regexps of various sorts.
probably the hardest thing here is people read faster than they write.
in the 1990s I helped build a dating site where people put their profiles on small voicemails. This is very reminiscent of that and I think the engagement was low because it was a lot to listen to
Why do you find it troubling? The article doesn't claim that poor parenting and divorce doesn't have negative effects on a child. It claims that social media, amplified by technology, has had negative effects on his/her child. Technology is a double edged sword and good parenting is supposed to shield predatory action by social media companies.
I think this quotation captures the sentiment the best:
"She assessed her worth within a system where she was simultaneously attention-addicted and attention-starved. She’d internalized an algorithm where provocative content wins"
It is a valid question to ask. Natural response would be to test whether rates of depression, anxiety and lack of belonging were reported lower or higher for previous cohorts.
My take is less nuanced, because I already see some addiction in my kid to screens ( I would blame my wife, but I am to blame as well ), which prompted me to crack down on it. I think there is a lot of blame to share, but I don't think parents are more to blame than a corporation with nation-state level of resources to overcome objections, force trends and so on.
Unlike social media/smartphone usage, divorce rates don't suddenly spike in 2010 to match the spike in childhood mental health problems. Despite social media companies best efforts, there is no reasonable alternative hypothesis for what happened globally in 2010 to cause the problem.
