It also reminded me about quines, I especially like the Quine Relay project which uses 100 different programming languages (each producing an input for the next one) to finally produce its own code https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
Well, I don't have similar experiences with SO. Sometimes I feel that easy questions are being answered very quickly by many people because everyone wants to get reputation points quickly, but difficult questions are often left unanswered forever as they require a lot of effort and don't bring as much reputation to the answerer (as their potential audience is not so wide).
Yes for questions with very less audience, you can offer a a bounty after a limited duration (3 days if I remember). You will have to give away your points as bounty. If you do not have enough points to give away, sign-up on other Stack Overflow affiliate sites that give you 100 point for every sign-up. And give it out as bounty.
I've just tried playing "Your account has a balance of 100 dollars and 95 cents" on https://www.ivona.com/us/ and it seems quite natural to me (but I'm not a native english speaker so I may not be sensitive).
- The "bank" one referenced above: this is made of short recordings of a real person saying the words or phrases, cut up and then concatenated. For some messages they sound exactly like a real person (because all it does is play a single recording), but when numbers are inserted, the above characterization is quite accurate. There is no effort to make the inflection fit properly in a sentence or have it sound natural.
- ivona.com and OS X `say`. These generate audio in real time, and may have a few samples but are generally created on-the-fly according to what is around the text. This is where the research is at right now, but the main problem is the CPU required to generate these. Your car, or Madden 2015, or the bank might not want to use up too much CPU time to make their audio sound like that.
I've always wanted to create at least a small working Java library that could be potentially useful to someone and put it into the Maven Central repository to learn the whole process. I've finally managed to do it in 2015 by creating the LambdaFromString[0] library that can convert a string with code to Java 8 lambda at runtime :-) Surely not a rocket science, but still makes me feel a little bit proud.
No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide.
Also, for something as important as an aircraft, I'd prefer to have a developer who knows what a seg fault is writing the code for any aviation equipment over someone who thinks "'undefined' is not a function" is equivalent to a seg fault.
> No that is simply not true, seg faults provide useful debug info in any potential core dump they provide.
I'm not sure I understand this. Can't you get a backtrace out of a JavaScript exception just as well as you can get one out of a segfault? The segfault itself doesn't carry any information other than at best the faulting instruction and the nature of the fault, and you can surely get that out of a JavaScript exception.
Furthermore, a segfault is very often a sign of memory corruption that has already happened, possibly in the stack frames themselves. "undefined is not a function" is not. JS code that crashes with that error is in a much more debuggable state than native code that crashes with a segfault. And you can certainly configure your interpreter to take a coredump on an uncaught JS exception, which will definitely be more debuggable than a coredump post-memory corruption.
Sorry its really not intended to be a personal attack and i regret the wording.
To clarify what I was trying to convey, the issue I personally find is that JS errors often produce difficult to understand descriptions and misleading traces when compared to some alternative languages.
Segmentation faults can also be very cryptic, especially in the memory related cases like you suggested, but its likely that any tool would behave in fairly unpredictable ways when it comes to any form of corruption or out of memory scenario.
Sorry again and hopefully that clarifies my thoughts.
Correct, however given that any addition to the plane has the potential to cause unintended conflicts with critical systems (i.e. in the downed Swissair flight 111 example I gave in another comment) I was suggesting that these should still be treated just as seriously.
Don't get me wrong though, I don't think that using JS in a plane is a bad idea. In fact I think the aviation industry is extremely slow moving and it frustrates me, fortunately the experimental category has access to some interesting tools but for certified aircraft you're very restricted in what you can and cannot do to modify the aircraft.
And 'undefined is not a function' provides a full stack trace to the line of code causing the error. In this particular example, both planes crash, so it's not like anyone would say "But at least it crashed because of a seg fault."
Get off your high horse. What a ridiculous and ignorant comment.
Yes you're right they do provide a trace, however the trace can be misleading and difficult to understand. I attempted to clarify my position in the comments above. Sorry for any offence I caused.
"the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the entertainment system in the plane started to overheat"
It's not too far fetched to think you could end up with an infinite loop (or other random issue) in some inflight entertainment system code, causing it to overhead and potentially ignite. I'm sure there are plenty of safeguards, but they too could fail...and this is why we still have circuit breakers and a master switch in planes that a human can control. Sadly humans too can (and often do...) fail to make the right decision.
Any system other than flight surfaces, avionics and the source of propulsion to an aircraft add some degree of risk that we could otherwise fly without.
People seem to be missing my point. To be clear, i'm trying to suggest that there is a high chance that the hardware fault that was triggered by overheating, was potentially caused by a software fault.
It is not good that the software malfunctioned but it should be totally isolated from rest of airplane function. Also if software could cause overheating, someone should have redesigned the hardware (heatsink/fan for example) because it was already marginal.
Yep. Likely multiple failures. The software shouldn't cause extra heat, the hardware should be able to handle it, the insulation in the plane shouldn't have caught fire, the pilot should have pulled the circuit breaker sooner...the list goes on.
I'm not sure I agree. While its possible the overheating was due to a failed fan or something physical, but its also very possible that the software running on this hardware caused it to overheat.
Often when you review critical failures you find multiple things went wrong at once to cause the catastrophic failure. I would place a good bet that there was a failed fan, poorly secured heatsink or maybe just a clogged air filter that meant the hardware was unable to handle the additional heat being produced.
Yes, it's clever because it implies how entertainment slowly but inexorably manages to take insinuate itself into and corrupt every essential application.
What makes you think anyone is planning to use NodeJS in avionics in 20 years? Where have you got that information, and how is it relevant to this discussion?
What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system".
It sure was the first thought I had, even before seeing the parent's joke.
>>Perhaps you missed the whole obvious joke thing?
What's remarkable about HN is that most jokes are heavily voted down with responses like "go back to reddit", and jokers regularly complain that HN has no sense of humor. And yet every now and then a joke gets voted to the top. I've yet to wrap my mind around this phenomenon, personally...
I've seen the phenomenon on Reddit where two identical comments will have completely polar votes. One might have -50 and the other 50.
Someone deduced that it was the time that the comment was created that mattered. If a large number of jokesters are on at one point then their up votes will create the critical mass to push the comment to the top and keep it there.
I also believe that once a post is at the top fewer people will downvote it, either because they are afraid to go against popular opinion or merely respect it and leave it as it is.
I don't know whether to laugh at the suggestion that a crowd as diverse as HN has a "cumulative sense of humor" or be offended by the implied suggestion that my sense of humor matches that of Reddit's.
>I don't know whether to laugh at the suggestion that a crowd as diverse as HN has a "cumulative sense of humor"
People overestimate how different they are from the average person all the time, but regression to the mean is a thing. That's how we get a general culture (in the broad sense) -- even if there are subcultures within it.
Besides, how diverse is HN? If anything it's one of the more targeted communities -- most people here already are focused in programming and startups, and have a same-ish background even when from different countries. Contrast with something like YouTube or Reddit (general channels), where people are from all walks of life.
If 9gag, which also gets people from all around the world and with all kinds of interests and ages, can develop a "cumulative sense of humor" (and it has) then surely HN can too. This doesn't mean that everyone on HN will agree on some funny thing -- just that a large percentage will.
> What makes the joke relevant to the discussion is that this is the first thought on lots of people's mind: "gee, I hope they don't ever use it for the actual flying system".
That's the second thought for me. The first was "thank goodness the airline I'm flying intercontinental with next week uses Boeing planes at that route".
Windows + Firefox => looks like cars don't work - some icons are not visible and all of them are just creating rectangles in the picture
http://snag.gy/4fm3H.jpg
Thanks for the report & screenshot! What, in general, happens with other emoji on Windows? Namely, the Apple color emoji—is there an analogue that Windows users fall back to?
"forgetting to add brackets when expanding a single-line if clause (and Eclipse will nag me about unnecessary brackets if I try to play it safe)" - I believe that putting every if clause's body (even one-liners) inside brackets in Java is a good practice and I have never seen Eclipse telling it's bad.
