charles-salvia

14 ms·

91.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Right now, I can't think of a good way to have everyone voluntarily fund infrastructure. No nation-state has ever functioned without the threat of state-imposed force. It's not a pleasant reality, but nobody really knows how to
92.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
That's a good analogy - the problem is a student could reasonably ask "why would you do it this way"? - i.e. this kind of algorithm seems like a better candidate for iteration. Instead of asking the guy in front of you, get
93.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Recursion sometimes makes it easier to implement certain algorithms, since modern programming languages have an implicit call stack which conveniently provides a snapshot of the state of all local stack variables at that point in the algo
94.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The best way I've found to introduce the concept of recursion is to explain it like trying to escape from a maze. Suppose at your starting position you have 3 possible corridors to try, in search of the exit. You mark your current po
95.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I understand that's the conservative/libertarian position - however the government forces you to pay taxes to support infrastructure and other things. Are you against that as well?
96.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Programmer salaries went up. Teaching salaries went down.
97.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The history of the perceptron is interesting. It was invented all the way back in 1957, and seemed like a promising way to learn a function. In fact, it was so promising, that it was actually intended to be implemented in hardware as a ph
98.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I agree with the comment about assembly of course, but ironically I find myself spending more time writing comments when programming in high level languages like Python, rather than in C. The reason most of the time seems to be that many h
99.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
It's probably more related to the universal constant that 90% of everything sucks.
100.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I've been doing interviews pretty frequently lately. Maybe it's just the limited scope of my experience, but I've never asked anyone to code bubble-sort, nor do I know anyone who has ever asked that, nor have I ever been ask
101.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Evolutionary explanations are often speculative just-so stories with no basis in actual genomic research. Nobody ran a hierarchical clustering algorithm over the human genome, inspected the dendrogram, and then found meaningful gene expres
102.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The sheer number of "scandals" coming out of Uber raise the probability that something isn't Kosher to nearly 0.99. That said, I find it deeply disturbing that anyone expressing any form of skepticism of any individual c
103.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
C++ is very big in finance and game development.
104.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The first time I tried to read R code I was immediately disgusted with how '.' is a valid variable name character. Not only valid, but inexplicably also in common use.
105.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The article attributes a lot of the results to the perception of varying degrees of precision in these various fields, but a lot of the results are also explainable via US politics. Words like "climate change", and by extension &
106.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
With iostream, yeah - but in general C++ templates give the compiler more opportunity to outperform similar generic C code that relies on void pointers/function pointers. See the classic qsort vs. std::sort archetypal example of this.
107.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
One possible implementation of a hash table in Rust possibly beat another possible implementation of a hash table in C? This has little bearing on the overall inherent speed of either language. Conceptually, both languages should tend to
108.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I would turn the question around and ask you: what percentage of jobs are similar enough to repetitive, algorithmic tasks? We can joke around about it, but I think most things humans do are a lot more complicated than we realize (precisely
109.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Yeah - see my half-joke comment below
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by charles-salvia 10y ago
I can't help but be skeptical of things like this... historically speaking, humans tend to underestimate just how many things we do that require full "general intelligence" to make "common-sense" decisions. Despite
111.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Meh... the new in-demand job for "useless" people will be gathering all the training data to feed into TensorFlow.
112.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
We sometimes use online code editors
113.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Of course, s.__len__() actually works.
114.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I'd like some endorsements for Hypercard, Police Quest 3, and obscure x86 opcodes
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by charles-salvia 10y ago
At least it's not an endorsement for SGML
116.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The best way to think about the Bloomberg terminal is a web browser that connects you to a private network. (Bloomberg actually is the largest known private network.) Once connected, you have access to thousands of "web apps" -
117.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I've spent hours/days/weeks implementing algorithms or data structures from journal articles. No, you're not an outlier. A lot of times they don't include source code, even in the age of Github. Certain details o
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by charles-salvia 10y ago
When you need them you really need them. A Patricia Trie for example, which includes back pointers to ancestor nodes, is simply an ideal structure for prefix search.
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by charles-salvia 10y ago
an LRU cache?
120.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
C++ programmers usually prefer contiguous data layout as well. I mean std::vector is just a contiguous array that dynamically reallocates and copies/move-constructs everything as needed. But many interesting data structures are hard

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