MrManatee

9 ms·

31.
by MrManatee 6y ago
Chris Lattner wrote a chapter about LLVM in The Architecture of Open Source Applications. https://aosabook.org/en/llvm.html Based on that, my understanding was that while intermediate representations were certainly not
32.
by MrManatee 6y ago
Don't feel too bad. The notation "0.999..." looks non-threatening, which tricks people into believing that they understand what it means. We could make "0.999... = 1" look scarier by writing it as [n ↦ 1 - 10^(-n)]
33.
by MrManatee 7y ago
I agree that it's worse, but I'm not that surprised about the attention. I've seen people come up with this idea in multiple threads about password managers, so there is clearly something appealing about it. Instead of seeing
34.
by MrManatee 7y ago
Some forget. This page explicitly sets the background white. If the user runs a browser extension that overrides this setting, what can the page do?
35.
by MrManatee 7y ago
Indeed. "Conference on Very Important Topics 2016" is not a real conference, but placeholder from a template. Maybe it was left behind by accident? The paper is from the PLATEAU Workshop 2019.
36.
by MrManatee 7y ago
Regardless of the interpretation it's not a false premise. The uniqueness of the answer is just an assumption that we don't need. Suppose the question was instead: "What is the unique real number x for which x^3 = 8?" We
37.
by MrManatee 8y ago
Please correct me if I've misunderstood Curry–Howard, but the way I see it: In mathematics we can take a proposition, and then try to find a proof for it. Depending on the proposition, this can be extremely challenging. And in programm
38.
by MrManatee 8y ago
Hosting costs are not the main reason for the yearly fundraisers on Wikipedia. From July 2016 to June 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation raised $87.5 million in donations and spent $2.2 million in hosting. https://annual.wikimedia.org
39.
by MrManatee 9y ago
Every IDE or editor I've used has had automatic indenting, but what I hadn't experienced before Prettier is working with a formatter that can break expressions onto multiple lines. For me, that's the new thing that streamline
40.
by MrManatee 9y ago
Ah, I wasn't really thinking about DNS cache poisoning. I was thinking about someone going to a public place (a school, a cafe, an airport), setting up a deceptively named Wi-Fi hotspot on their smartphone, and intercepting all non-HTT
41.
by MrManatee 9y ago
> And what's really annoying is that HTTPS doesn't really affect user security much. It mainly just affects privacy. Most people are not hacked by a man in the middle. They're hacked by a person accessing a database, or ru
42.
by MrManatee 9y ago
That's UTF-16, not UTF-32. UTF-8 is one to four bytes, UTF-16 is two or four bytes, and UTF-32 is always four bytes. For some code points, UTF-8 is 50% longer than UTF-16 (3 vs 2), but UTF-8 is never longer than UTF-32.
43.
by MrManatee 9y ago
Saying that computer science is not about computers is an insightful thing to say. It is good to try to understand why someone would say something like this. But it is not the only perspective one can take. Allen Newell, Alan J. Perlis, and
44.
by MrManatee 9y ago
The article says: 'A definition MUST be an "if and only if" statement.' It is an established convention in mathematics to write definitions in the form "X is Y if P(X)". For example: "A metric space M is c
45.
by MrManatee 10y ago
I totally agree that EV certificates don't work. I know the difference between EV and DV, but I'm glad I don't have to rely on that knowledge very much. I don't trust myself that I would notice if an EV site would sudden
46.
by MrManatee 10y ago
As others have already replied, sometimes it can. But sometimes, and particularly if we care about efficiency, this is so difficult that we're not even close to being able to automate it. For example, here is my "formal definition
47.
by MrManatee 10y ago
Gödel's incompleteness theorems are more of a theoretical limitation than a practical one. Roughly speaking, Gödel's incompleteness theorems say that all proof systems for number theory are limited in some way. For example, first-
48.
by MrManatee 10y ago
You're right, of course. My wording is was bit poor. What I should have said that harmony is less ad hoc; it has less "degrees of freedom". With regards to melody, there are tons of tuning systems that are quite close to the
49.
by MrManatee 10y ago
The article says that the "human ear loves ratios", but doesn't dig deeper into why. Here's my two cents. First of all, let's focus on harmony (notes played at the same time) as opposed to melody (notes played one a
50.
by MrManatee 10y ago
Indeed. To support backreferences, "regex" libraries are forced to use algorithms that can be very slow in the worst case. The sad thing is that the libraries use the same algorithms even if the expression doesn't contain bac
51.
by MrManatee 10y ago
This is not the easiest thing to explain briefly, but let's give it a shot anyway. There are several ways of defining real numbers, and one of them is the axiomatic definition. Real numbers are defined by a list of axioms they must sat
52.
by MrManatee 10y ago
So, how severe should warnings be for untrusted certificates and for plaintext? For untrusted certificates, the answer is clear: very severe. If https://www.facebook.com suddenly has an untrusted certificate, it is almost certai
53.
by MrManatee 10y ago
A little off topic, but that got me thinking... Is there actually any major software that is still using decimal version numbers? So that, for example, 1.1 < 1.12 < 1.2? Wikipedia [1] says it was common in the 1980s, but gives two onl
54.
by MrManatee 10y ago
I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to. You might be referring to the fact that the author's definition of big-O doesn't say anything about constant factors or asymptotics. This makes the definition incorrect, or at
55.
by MrManatee 10y ago
I'm afraid the author is correct in using big-O here instead of Omega or little-o. For comparison, suppose that someone claims that for all x, sin(x) ≤ 1/2. That would just be wrong. If someone claims that sin(x) ≤ 2, then that is
56.
by MrManatee 10y ago
Here's one interpretation of Gödel's first incompleteness theorem that may help. First, let's look at computability. The intuitive idea that some functions can be computed by an algorith is very old (think Euclid's algor
57.
by MrManatee 10y ago
I like that the function in your link is called preduce and not just reduce. Reduce has a standard definition, which doesn't require associativity. To eliminate confusion, a function that does require associativity deserves a different
58.
by MrManatee 10y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that you should rarely use reduce directly. It is much less useful than map or filter. Suppose that you have a bunch of things implemented using map or filter. When someone writes parallelized versions
59.
by MrManatee 10y ago
It's good to think of dy/dx as (d/dx)y. In addition, it is also possible to make some sense of dy/dx. Here's one very hand-wavy way of looking at it. Let ε be something very small, and define the difference operator
60.
by MrManatee 10y ago
If I understood correctly, the article suggests that as a general principle you should replace your union types and case-by-case code with lambdas. I feel almost the opposite. Article: "In functional programming, the use of lambdas all

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