KMag

55 ms·

601.
by KMag 4y ago
I don't think Hoare said that null was his mistake. I believe he said that the null reference was his mistake. In other words, null is not a reference, and treating null as a reference in all contexts conflates optionality and refere
602.
by KMag 4y ago
You forgot to add "asking for a friend" ;)
603.
by KMag 4y ago
I was asking about indirect branches, and the Branch Target Buffer... there are two main cases where you're making indirect jumps or indirect function calls in ELF C/C++ executables: shared library function calls (an IP-relative c
604.
by KMag 4y ago
> door unlock/lock behavior I just imagined the wireless unlock button sequentially stepping through the 16 lock/unlock states for a 4-door vehicle. "The car is locked. 13 quick clicks later, both front doors are unlocke
605.
by KMag 4y ago
There's some kind of corollary to Zewinski's Law of Software Envelopment: device developers are incentivized to "innovate" their product to the point it can send email.
606.
by KMag 4y ago
I'm far from an expert here, but don't most modern branch predictors actually keep a shift register of the last few conditional branches, hash that branch history with the instruction's address, and use that as the index into
607.
by KMag 4y ago
The sad fact is that most people really care about their 150 or so closest acquaintances, somewhat care about people in their various tribes, and try and largely fail to have much compassion for outsiders. For the majority of people, their
608.
by KMag 4y ago
The symbolic proofs of the protocol are independent of the implementation. The portions of the implementation that are formally verified are written in F* and Coq, and emitted as machine-generated C.
609.
by KMag 4y ago
If even our performance-critical code moves to languages that always bounds-check, perhaps that will put pressure on ISA designers to add instructions for never-taken branches that just don't participate in any of the branch prediction
610.
by KMag 4y ago
I was on a different team, but my third-hand knowledge from 20 years ago (notably, before deep learning became mainstream, even at Google) was that Google crawl scheduling had a bunch of heuristics to guess at the update frequency of a give
611.
by KMag 4y ago
The lowest friction workflows make data collection/entry as lazy/delayed as possible and maximize optionality. Allow users to "save as default" as part of their normal workflows on your site, rather than demanding the i
612.
by KMag 4y ago
If the GP is assuming that initial password setting is done via the verification link sent in the verification email, then the workflow they're proposing won't cause the confusion you describe. In other words, the "verify my
613.
by KMag 4y ago
If you worked on Google's crawl scheduling, HN would be one of the sites you used to test out ideas for better scheduling heuristics, right? I worked in indexing over a decade ago, but back then, after some basic constraints (per-IP ra
614.
by KMag 4y ago
The basic elements all exist. As others have pointed out, HP's Dynamo managed to use runtime re-optimization to improve performance of many binaries without cooperation from the original compiler. Runtime optimization doesn't str
615.
by KMag 4y ago
> Also, why do folks always impart way more significance to logo/label than makes sense? I'm not sure we can imply importance from the volume of communication; perhaps the opposite. After colors and names, logos/icons are
616.
by KMag 4y ago
An important difference here is that your shell script executes the steps in the order you defined. Make performs a topological sort on the required rules, so in the general case, a Makefile doesn't explicitly define the ordering of t
617.
by KMag 4y ago
If your hardware is designed to allow very lightweight profiling and tracing, then static + LTO w/ PGO can still be improved by runtime re-optimization. If designed properly, the runtime overhead can be brought arbitrarily low by incr
618.
by KMag 4y ago
LLVM is lower level than Python or Java bytecode. LLVM is also virtual machine in the sense of an abstract machine, similar in idea to a process virtual machine. Most usages of "virtual machine" today are talking about system vi
619.
by KMag 4y ago
But, JIT vs. AoT is a false dichotomy. Given light-weight enough profiling utilizing cooperation between hardware designers and compiler writers, one could have AoT with feedback-guided optimization and link-time optimization, and still ha
620.
by KMag 4y ago
... or the person tapping you on your shoulder to inform you that you're wearing headphones, your IM is on do-not-disturb and you're not sitting in your usual desk (but still responding to email).
621.
by KMag 4y ago
Why not use a min heap to track expiry times? (Or a doubly-linked list, if lifetimes are uniform?)
622.
by KMag 4y ago
Michigan also seemed to waitlist me and several of the people I knew at MIT. If they know they're the backup school, and they think you're going to get into your first choice, it hurts their acceptance rate to accept you outright
623.
by KMag 4y ago
The online instructions I found for reaching a human at Experian didn't work. They seem to purposefully change their menus when it becomes too easy to reach a person, as a cost-saving measure. Out of desperation/exasperation, I
624.
by KMag 4y ago
I'm sure they reserve the extra tough prison cells for people who simultaneously commit identity theft and impersonate senators, and I'd certainly not advocate anyone commit crimes. However, I do think that if someone were to ste
625.
by KMag 4y ago
Maybe I should have used the term "popular self-determinism". If the result is the government better represents the will of the populace at large, then popular self-determinism is improved, even if externally imposed.
626.
by KMag 4y ago
The GP wasn't asserting that drugs are a commodity. They were arguing against the blanket implication that the federal government can't get efficient price discovery because it's the whale in the market. The GP is pointing
627.
by KMag 4y ago
There are certainly manifold shameful aspects to US foreign policy. However, it does humanity a disservice to disregard the degree to which the US has tried to promote self-determination in the past 40 years. The US really tried to run fr
628.
by KMag 4y ago
Or sometimes the lower bits, as at least used to be the case for integers in v8. (Also OCaml, but that's not dynamically typed. It simplifies the garbage collector to at least some times not require a pointer map for each type, just
629.
by KMag 4y ago
From my reading, it's checking the maximum index into the circular buffer. That is, when it hits the end of the circular buffer, there's an assertion to check that they're properly wrapping the index back to the start of the
630.
by KMag 4y ago
This is one reason why Minnesota's large iron ore deposits were concentrated locally (if necessary, some of the Mesabi Range ore is already 65% iron) and shipped to Pittsburgh (near coal mines) for steel making, instead of shipping the

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