army

12 ms·

91.
by army 13y ago
Agreed. I think we really need to look at where we're losing women, especially in the transition from high school to college.
92.
by army 13y ago
It's a pretty big grey area, that's for sure.
93.
by army 13y ago
a) Educating foreign students and sending them back to their home countries is a great example of how to do "soft power". This is actually the explicit intent of many programs, particularly Fulbright awards, where recipients are
94.
by army 13y ago
This sort of stuff has been happening forever. I'm sure if you found some people who were international students in the 80s or 90s they would have similar stories about capriciousness with regards to student visas. The rules basically
95.
by army 13y ago
I find it comforting that a coworker isn't going to unknowingly hide lots of superlinear algorithms in the codebase that will blow up without warning when data sets get significantly larger than the test data. Sometimes you have to make a d
96.
by army 13y ago
"Does the faculty balance necessitate someone of the candidate’s specific field?" You'd think they could make that decision before they offer a tenure track position.
97.
by army 13y ago
I think there's a bit of a disconnect here between people who work on applications where, say, a 25% reduction in CPU usage would be a big win, and people who don't worry about performance as long as their cluster isn't melting down.
98.
by army 14y ago
Because benchmarks are really hard to do fairly. There's a great deal of subjectivity in what is a "fair comparison" regardless, since there's always a bit more tuning you can do. That said, a lot of benchmarks are just completely bogus.
99.
by army 14y ago
That sums it up pretty well: great work, but take the evaluation with a grain of salt.
100.
by army 14y ago
I agree. I think the original article is mostly right and very insightful. But what I've discovered over the last few years is that sometimes maximising productivity requires knowing when to take a break from the problem. A lot of time I
101.
by army 14y ago
Depends on what you're doing. There are plenty of cases where, for example, the Java collections library doesn't quite do the trick for various reasons. E.g. the standard collections are very memory inefficient for storing primitive types
102.
by army 14y ago
Mathematizing a fields is a bit of a double edged sword though and I think needs a great deal of skepticism and caution. Yes, if you do it right you can get insights and prove things more rigorously. If you do it wrong, the mathematics ca
103.
by army 14y ago
It does depend a lot on the sub-field of CS. For systems work you spend a lot of time implementing ideas and running experiments. In a lot of cases it isn't necessarily that difficult to find an interesting idea that's probably viable. Th
104.
by army 14y ago
I agree with the general approach, but isn't this just bottom-up design?
105.
by army 14y ago
I'm familiar with the LISP metacircular interpreter and programming language theory. I know you can define all sorts of things with a very small set of primitives. It's one thing to build a minimal implementation where your main constraint
106.
by army 14y ago
Some of those points are a bit misleading. Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up.
107.
by army 14y ago
Because the performance would be so totally awesome that it would melt the servers. And we don't want the internet to melt.
108.
by army 14y ago
Neither is a particularly viable option: GCJ is nearly a decade behind mainline Java in terms of feature support. VMKit seems cool but I'm not sure about the maturity of the project.
109.
by army 14y ago
I'm not sure that I'd call dynamic languages like Python safer, it depends on context. Compared to C/C++ you lose static typechecking but gain a safer memory model.
110.
by army 14y ago
Yup, there's no reason why you can't be productive writing code in Java if if you're willing to get over the fact that you'll be writing more lines of code. I've been implementing a compiler in Java (not my original decision, but I don't th
111.
by army 14y ago
I think the true measure of a language is how little it makes you swear when trying to make changes to your own code that you wrote a year ago.
112.
by army 14y ago
I think maybe different communities attract and cultivate people with different sense of aesthetics. I originally learned Django and have been picking up a little bit of RoR. I never found the additional context-specific RoR "magic" to be
113.
by army 14y ago
The rumours of Fortran's death are greatly exaggerated. People still write new code these days in Fortran for scientific computation. Fortran compilers are still markedly better at optimizing numerics, multi-dimensional arrays, etc, partia
114.
by army 14y ago
You seriously would turn down a good job or other opportunity if the only downside was having to write in a whitespace-sensitive language? Most of the good developers I know have their preferences for sure, but can be productive in all sort
115.
by army 14y ago
I think the skills you need to throw together a nice RoR app are different from other positions. I wouldn't want on critical infrastructure code alongside someone who can't reason through the performance implications of their code on the fl
116.
by army 14y ago
I think it's unlikely that many retailers are going to pass along the fee via a surcharge. The law in Australia now allows retailers to impose surcharges or minimums for credit cards (by making these provisions illegal in the contract betw
117.
by army 14y ago
The article is a pretty good account of the reasons why talented and capable people drop out of Ph.D. programs (often for the best), but the reality is that your mileage may vary - a lot depends on the fit between student and advisor and de
118.
by army 14y ago
The difficulty I have with his manifesto is that he proposes many ideas that sound quite similar to existing ideas (e.g. graph reduction model of computing, dataflow execution models, dataflow languages), but there isn't a direct comparison
119.
by army 14y ago
RE: the article not being "intellectually gratifying". The situation sounds enormously distressing but the author's writing style isn't overwrought at all. Even on a purely intellectual level, this is a devastating rebuttal of the point tha
120.
by army 14y ago
So far no flame war :) I don't think you can actually separate discussion of health care (even though its a political hot button) from discussion of running a small business, given the challenges in getting insurance as an individual or for

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