geophile

22 ms·

271.
by geophile 4y ago
My greatly advanced age allows me to comment. I got my PhD in computer science in 1983, and spent some time in research, moving quickly to "industrial research", and so I was very aware of Xerox PARC and similar institutions. - Xe
272.
by geophile 4y ago
Same.
273.
by geophile 4y ago
None of this either/or reasoning is correct, in my experience. In practice, I write tests both before and after implementation, for different reasons. In practice, my tests both test correctness, and of course they also work as regress
274.
by geophile 4y ago
Maybe not a coincidence. For some reason, Facebook has been showing me lots of woodworking videos and books lately. And this has some relevance for me. I did notice multiple posts pushing books by Chris Schwarz, and now I see this comment.
275.
by geophile 4y ago
New article, but haven't we been seeing this technology get occasional PR for years? And yet it never seems to get anywhere (no pun intended).
276.
by geophile 4y ago
I agree completely. I live in a very bike-friendly American city, and there are still lots of deaths and horrible injuries. People still bike, sometimes with kids in tow. Electric bikes are increasingly prevalent. I also notice that e-bikes
277.
by geophile 4y ago
I think that we're thinking about EVs all wrong. There is this expectation that an EV is basically a car that runs on electricity instead of gasoline. Home charging is a nice feature, but if you stray from home, you have to figure out
278.
by geophile 4y ago
I teach, in order, more or less (there is some interleaving): - Data modeling - Relational algebra - SQL - DBMS architecture (buffering, btrees, query processing, index selection, ...) - Query optimization - Transactions A few assignments h
279.
by geophile 4y ago
Sort of related: thinking in relational algebra, or SQL. It appears to be "natural" to think about computing one atomic value at a time, in loops, or slightly less intuitively, recursive functions. (That latter choice may follow f
280.
by geophile 4y ago
The Mythical Man Month?!?! That is not computer science.
281.
by geophile 4y ago
I know you are kidding, but Quanta is not ELI5. It's more like ELI am a college graduate, at least, with a very strong interest in math and physics, intense focus, and a willingness to deploy that focus.
282.
by geophile 4y ago
The more constraints you have on pushing something to production, the less it makes sense to deploy logging dynamically! Those constraints are there to minimize risk, ensure quality and security, etc. Dynamically deployed logging seems to p
283.
by geophile 4y ago
> In a distributed parallel computing scenario, dumping stacks from 64 processes via a signal handler would have created 64 different files scattered in 64 different remote filesystems. I was working on a cluster and often needed to do t
284.
by geophile 4y ago
And if you need to fix a bug in production you need to redeploy too. Bugs and logs and testing are all related. You obviously (should) do unit testing, integration testing, system testing before production. As you do these things, you will
285.
by geophile 4y ago
> The problem with logging is that you have to know where to log. I start with basic lifecycle logging, at an INFO level: The FooBar is created, the FooBar is destroyed, and major states in between. If a FooBar manages a set of things, t
286.
by geophile 4y ago
Early in my software career, I was debugging a compiler problem. Version X worked, version X+1 did not. I debugged by tracing both step by step, in two gdb sessions, looking for when behavior diverged. Pure torture, and that was an extremel
287.
by geophile 4y ago
That doesn't make sense to me. Complication is mainly a property of the software you're writing, not the language in which the software is written.
288.
by geophile 4y ago
... or you could just log. I don't understand the extreme attachment to interactive debugging that I see in some of the comments here. It's like people are so attached to this idea that they will do anything to make it work as eac
289.
by geophile 4y ago
Even in development. You could, I suppose, but I'm not sure why you would want to. Going back and forth to two debuggers (at least) seems like torture. And with multiple processes, timing and synchronization issues could make interacti
290.
by geophile 4y ago
I have become less and less enamored of gdb (or IDE equivalent) debugging over my many years in software. Debugging is often very confusing with multithreaded code. It only works in one language at a time. If you're doing Java with JNI
291.
by geophile 4y ago
Why I Dislike "Why I Dislike John Oliver". It's because of this quote: To be more specific, what’s really missing from Oliver is skin in the game. He weighs in on controversial political topics. Unlike an actual pol
292.
by geophile 4y ago
This too: https://marceltheshell.org .
293.
by geophile 4y ago
Check out marcel ( https://marceltheshell.org ). Marcel is a shell that allows the use of Python functions, and pipes Python values between commands. E.g. remove the files/directories listed in victims.txt (one per line):
294.
by geophile 4y ago
An average of about 3.8 is not hard to achieve. Much harder is to reduce the number of failures, (i.e., requiring more than 6 guesses). At least in hard mode, that's true. I'm experimenting with easy mode now.
295.
by geophile 5y ago
Mulva?
296.
by geophile 5y ago
As the article points out, using collected client data is problematic, because some errors will often be undetectable, as in numeric data. And in general, you would have to control for bit flips somehow caused by software. I wonder whether
297.
by geophile 5y ago
I wonder if there is some connection to the underground HUP comics (1987-1992).
298.
by geophile 5y ago
Like a few people here, I also had spontaneous pneumothorax as a teenager, a few times. Never severe, no medical intervention required (beyond diagnosis), which I'm finding a bit strange, based on what others here are writing. This was
299.
by geophile 5y ago
Yes, Postgres has been playing various tricks in the last few years, to make this optimization actually optimize things, but the Postgres MVCC approach makes it difficult. The problem is that index information can be stale, and that you oft
300.
by geophile 5y ago
I think that advice is not necessarily correct. Suppose you have this query: select a, b from T where x = 1 And suppose you have an index on x. You can locate the x=1 INDEX records using the index quickly (probably no more

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