gchpaco

38 ms·

301.
by gchpaco 17y ago
What that refers to is the trick of transforming "int a;" to "final int[] a = {0}" and then referring to a[0] everywhere. This adds about 20 bytes of overhead on Sun's 32-bit JVM and memory pressure for almost no benefit whatsoever.
302.
by gchpaco 17y ago
It theoretically permits optimizations where multiple parts of the code using the same, say, string literal can refer to the same literal. I don't believe for a moment that this is actually happening in Java, but immutable literals are not
303.
by gchpaco 17y ago
You are, of course, quite right, which is why I said that a Map<String, Object> isn't a Map<Object, Object>. However in Java's typing scheme it is a Map<? extends Object, Object>, which represents a key that extends
304.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Specifically because of Java's wildcarding, there is an important difference between a Map<Object, Object> and a Map<? extends Object, Object>; a Map<String, Object> is not the former and is an example of the latte
305.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Data is not simple rows. Data is complex, human generated stuff that has both implicit and explicit structure and it does not collapse down well to any single abstraction, not even object graphs. Fine, so we have to pick some abstraction.
306.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Well, it runs on a CPU with mutable state. So you could claim that everything is all about mutation of state. But that's not a very useful position to take, because reasoning about, reading and writing code at that low level is too concre
307.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Objective C is not "safe", any more than C++ is. It layers another (very nice! don't get me wrong) layer on top of C's semantics but retains all the problems with C.
308.
by gchpaco 17y ago
SQL being notoriously poor at hierarchal data has been known for quite a while; he's obviously very correct there. Oracle goes so far as to offer a non-standard CONNECT statement for tree traversal. And there's not a whole lot of sophisti
309.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The problem with Haskell monad tutorials is that they focus on one thing that monads can do--in your case state. Monads can do more than that, though; nondeterministic computation comes to mind, as does simple error handling through the Ma
310.
by gchpaco 17y ago
It can sometimes be really hard to even communicate assuming you do have the ability to tell them everything they need to know about. I'm not sure the original poster would have been able to figure out what he should have done had he not g
311.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I could believe that claim if by "classic touch typist" we meant "people who learned to type on a manual typewriter and as a result hammer the keys to within an inch of their life" (known to cause stiffness in finger joints, for example), b
312.
by gchpaco 17y ago
My wrists disagree vigorously with you, sir, on that. Standard laptops have terrible ergonomics not only related to key spacing issues (frequently too tight) but also the abruptness with which the keys stop (being as it is almost entirely
313.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I find it amusing in a very bitter way that only when Sun's own engineers realized the pain of programming in Java without closures that they seriously considered adding them. But at the same time closures are so important and useful that
314.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The code signing is a bit worrisome, but I suppose this isn't really a hacker OS. And it along with the sandboxing is really the only "complete" solution to malware.
315.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Some of the style reminds me of Alef from Plan 9; in particular the communication channels, but also a fair chunk of the syntax.
316.
by gchpaco 17y ago
No macros is pretty annoying, but note the package go/ast and go/parser; they include in the standard library a parser for the language, which should make writing tools operating on Go significantly easier.
317.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I suspect they're savvy enough to understand that just 'cause Steve doesn't want it to be a gaming machine doesn't mean that he can't make a ton of money by having games on it.
318.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I'm not sure if I'm atypical, but I do remember having Hugh Woodin give a talk about set theory that I, as a non-specialist (heck, as a computer scientist moonlighting in math grad courses to keep my brain on!) could follow reasonably easil
319.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Only if you're expected to chord three or more buttons on a regular basis.
320.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Something that burned a friend of mine is that college math is nothing like high school math even conceptually. She liked calculus and algebra and became a math major to discover that the math classes she was taking contained very little a
321.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I'm embarrassed. I admit it, I forgot Turkish upcases 'i' to İ. But the core teaching, which is "if it involves internationalization or talking to humans find a library written by a legitimate expert and use it instead" is true gold.
322.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Feynman's report comments briefly on the software, but it is much more relevant as a way of thinking about engineering in general.
323.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I was trying to explain the difference between hackers, if you will, and "programmers" just going through the motions. I likened it to the difference between someone who spoke a language frequently and someone who was working out of a conv
324.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Java is not a good benchmark. Sun's JVM won't even pack memory (if you have a class with 64 "boolean" variables, it takes header + 64*4 bytes, not header + 64/8 bytes, for some reason that is utterly unclear) unless you use arrays of primi
325.
by gchpaco 17y ago
That actually says something slightly different, defining NY as an alternative for New York. But yes, the RDF syntax is terrible. Turtle was my favorite.
326.
by gchpaco 17y ago
All general purpose ontologies look like very verbose and overly-complicated ways of describing things. OWL is no different, and the fact that it has taken on the challenge of relating several different preexisting ontologies to each other
327.
Interview with David Fuchs (author of DVI)(tug.org)
2 points by gchpaco 17y ago|0 comments
328.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The interview linked is also excellent, and very interesting to read.
329.
How Moody's sold its ratings -- and sold out investors(mcclatchydc.com)
4 points by gchpaco 17y ago|0 comments
330.
by gchpaco 17y ago
MBAs are strongly associated with the theory that managers can "manage" competently with no domain knowledge whatsoever. This is unpopular conceptually with people who do have domain knowledge, and those folks can point to scads of example

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