TheBoff

8 ms·

31.
by TheBoff 14y ago
Believe it or not, we actually had a C exam question where we were asked to sketch out an implementation of this. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/pastpapers/y2010p3q6.... With classic mildly amusing exam humour introduction!
32.
by TheBoff 14y ago
Can you explain what you dislike about it? It's a different operator, certainly. I'm pretty sure that it has an "odd" shape, because indexing a list in Haskell is potentially O(n). The operator itself is essentially a warning...
33.
by TheBoff 14y ago
Really? I've found Haskell's syntax and overall design to be the most elegant of anything I've tried. I really appreciate the lack of unnecessary punctuation which litters other languages.
34.
by TheBoff 14y ago
The point about "someday we will look back and laugh" is an interesting one, and I'm not sure how true it is. I think the maturity of web design as a field must be a curve, and I find it hard to believe that website will change in such a ju
35.
by TheBoff 14y ago
I'm amazed that file upload wasn't fixed with HTML5: we shouldn't need piles of elaborate hacks to provide attractive, functional uploads, especially when it's such a vital part of most web applications. I ended up taking the brutally simpl
36.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Ahh, I can't find it. I just remember that it was looked like a normal HN story but you couldn't comment on it, and that it didn't ever actually mention the company name.
37.
by TheBoff 15y ago
This reminds me of that job advert which specifically asked for programmers with MacBooks only. No way in a million years would I apply there! I have an iMac, but only because I'm interested in different sorts of computer. I mean seriously,
38.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Possibly we just a have a different idea of what a lambda calculus is: I was thinking of Church's untyped lambda calculus, which is a much weirder beast than System FC.
39.
by TheBoff 15y ago
"Syntactic sugar on the lambda calculus" is just silly, really. I wish people would stop saying this. It's like saying imperative languages are syntactic sugar on Turing Machines. This is a bit of a pet peeve for me, really. It seems like a
40.
by TheBoff 15y ago
I particularly enjoyed the little comment on modern society: "Money doesn’t buy happiness but it certainly solves your money problems".
41.
by TheBoff 15y ago
In Garry's Mod the default name was "Mingebag". That's very much reflective of Garry's sense of humour...
42.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Ahh, he obviously only thinks this because he hasn't learn Haskell yet ;-)
43.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Does this allow for better compression, for example?
44.
by TheBoff 15y ago
I wish he would describe this as his personal set up, rather than some sort of mega pack. It just seems like a lot of marketing over someone's settings...
45.
by TheBoff 15y ago
This was only true some time ago, unfortunately. The technique used by both companies to achieve speed increases is called 'pipelining', which essentially means you can have a different instruction in each bit of the processor (so, the ALU,
46.
by TheBoff 15y ago
I would very much like to see ARM gain traction in the desktop market: the whole way the x86 works is quite inelegant (longer instructions decoded into a RISC-like 'microops'). Considering how small ARM is compared with Intel, they've done
47.
by TheBoff 15y ago
This is really really great to see: pypy is such an interesting project, and it's really encouraging to see it make so much ground. It's interesting that Guido deliberately didn't go for a full re write for python 3, but this project which
48.
by TheBoff 15y ago
I think perhaps he is slightly over reacting to get his point across. Whilst security bugs may well be worse than a lock up (due to stolen data etc.), they aren't the be all and end all of the system. I think he thinks that perhaps the secu
49.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Shamus Young is an excellent games blogger, and does the occasional interesting post on graphics programming and procedural content generation. Have a scroll through the backlog! (I'm not Shamus, I just follow his RSS feed :P)
50.
by TheBoff 15y ago
Ppffftt, I wrote a recursive algorithm that calculates 2^n in O(2^n) time for an exam question. That's what I call a bad algorithm!
51.
by TheBoff 15y ago
I don't think you've read the article, actually. The key point is that he is trying to calculate arbitrarily large fibonacci numbers, and so the addition is itself an O(n) operation. This means that even after memoization, the complexity is
52.
by TheBoff 15y ago
From Linus, that's practically a shining endorsement.
53.
by TheBoff 15y ago
This is a good article, but I must take issue with "Static typing allows you to generate the optimum bytecode/binary", simply because whilst you generally get faster binaries, you can't know that it's optimum. Just a nitpick, though.
54.
by TheBoff 15y ago
As a current Cambridge undergraduate studying computer science, I find this absolutely outrageous. The article seems to imply that the scientific fields simply aren't studied here. The particular example of Lord Cherwell is particularly mis
55.
by TheBoff 15y ago
The fact that fossil has "Versioning, Tickets, Wiki, and Blog/News", really puts me off this, actually. I'm not massive into the unix philsophy, but this seems like bloated: they should be separate things, even if they're interconnected imo
56.
by TheBoff 15y ago
This is really fascinating, although a blow for the chrome team. It would be even more interested to see performance based on the javascript that, say, twitter and facebook use, but I would guess that it's very difficult to feed the scripts
57.
by TheBoff 15y ago
If you read the comments, it turns out that he's not really aiming to show anything, just experimenting. It's just interesting to know quite how severe the costs of global namespace lookups can be, for me.
58.
by TheBoff 16y ago
As a first years CompSci undergraduate at Cambridge, I've found more or less the opposite of this: it seems like I've suddenly become really recruitable. Despite the fact that I'll have only had a years CS tuition, and no industry experienc
59.
by TheBoff 16y ago
The first section is pointing out list comprehensions as a better syntax than lambda, I believe. Also, the zen of python has been around for a long time: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ . There's an import statement that will prin
60.
by TheBoff 16y ago
Sorry, what is your source for this?

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