gngeal

42 ms·

421.
by gngeal 14y ago
Not if your brain is used to doing modular arithmetics since childhood. :/ Python whitespace and Lisp parens seem trite in comparison to that. I just get 1-based indices more often wrong that I get 0-based indices wrong. (When doing things
422.
by gngeal 14y ago
"Transforming wikitext into HTML is surprisingly IO-bound, since most Wikipedia pages transclude many other pages for templating and logic." Sounds like a case for in memory caching. Or is it that any random Wikipedia page requires logic fr
423.
by gngeal 14y ago
You don't even need to do that, you can run Lua in a multithreaded program, as long as no lua_State is accessed from multiple threads. You can spawn independent interpreter states, have them do their job and terminate. The whole Lua codebas
424.
by gngeal 14y ago
Why not? Isn't that the whole purpose of coroutines in Lua?
425.
by gngeal 14y ago
"But, because we’d never planned for wikitext to become a programming language, these templates were terribly inefficient and hacky — they didn’t even have recursion or loops — and were terrible for performance." That sounds like the life s
426.
by gngeal 14y ago
"To my surprise, making decisions about how scope should work was actually the hardest part." Perhaps a thorough reading of SICP would enlighten you as to how scope should be handled if you don't want to run into problems with it.
427.
by gngeal 14y ago
Why unfair? I have a friend who is an extremely competent programmer (and a very prolific writer) and he sends me - of his own initiative - snippets of code written by his cow-orkers (or at least he did, until he switched jobs and went into
428.
by gngeal 14y ago
You don't have to verify the code with gotos, you have to verify the translator. After all, if you were serious about this, you'd have to stop using most computers since they do actually run programs with JMPs in in.
429.
by gngeal 14y ago
Lua 5.1 doesn't have this, which means I have to fake goto using what boils down to a switch statement. This is much less efficient. Or he could just use tail calls and be done with it. I mean, that's the reason why the tail calls are the
430.
by gngeal 14y ago
In that case, Wireshark and protocol analysis comes to the rescue. The trick is to find the images in the mess that is the downstream packets, but I've had success in the past with recording VoIP calls this way (the client didn't support re
431.
by gngeal 14y ago
What about a caching proxy? You can't view it on your screen unless the browser downloads it anyway.
432.
by gngeal 14y ago
"The one with hearts is 944 bytes (css file), 232 bytes gzipped (with 7zip)" Did you measure the compressed size on its own or as a delta inside a larger CSS file? The pattern is going to share at least a part of its dictionary with the res
433.
by gngeal 14y ago
"(Disclaimer: I work at MS. I do work on windows.)" A minor nitpick: I thought that you call this "disclosure" in English, not "disclaimer"? (I'm not a native speaker, which is why I may be easily wrong, but something is nudging me to ask w
434.
by gngeal 14y ago
"And I've found that learning a lot of languages is a waste of time." I'd say that your time would be much better spent learning language concepts and learning to implement them yourself in some sane environment, like OMeta, for example. Th
435.
by gngeal 14y ago
"Gravity doesn't do anything on its own, in the absence of other forces, the orbit of a steel nut around the earth would be stable" Actually, it wouldn't, because orbiting a celestial body radiates energy in form of gravitational waves, but
436.
by gngeal 14y ago
"The point of an anonymous function isn't to make it not have a name, but to be able to define it where it is needed instead of referring to some specific function name in your code." Actually, its point is to make it a value that can be re
437.
by gngeal 14y ago
"The term "WikiData" seems to connote data of the tabular type" There's a strong correspondence between "tabular data" (you probably mean relational) and triples (<predicate,X,Y>). Bot are based on the first-order predicate logic, s
438.
by gngeal 14y ago
There are many more machines without microcode - 6502, machineForth chips like f21, c18 etc. I'd argue that they are much more appealing to a designer with taste.
439.
by gngeal 14y ago
"The culture of CS, "judgmental introversion" as you put it, is not anything intrinsic to CS. Indeed, software engineering is a profession that demands a high level of communication and cooperation." Except that 1) CS has nothing to do with
440.
by gngeal 14y ago
Given a sane language and a sane exposed API, it's not difficult to limit what the remote code can do. It's just that bolting a software-based isolation layer ("sandbox") on top of something existing can be expected to yield a few holes in
441.
by gngeal 14y ago
It's like negotiating with a terrorist.
442.
by gngeal 14y ago
Why not? Much better than assembly. I believe that even today, a sound asynchronous stack design (much simpler, therefore with asynchronicity still being a viable option) would consume less joules per unit of computation than any current AR
443.
by gngeal 14y ago
That's true (except for C), because I can't see how a create_function-defined function closes over its environment), but what I had in mind was the way in which the author of the documentation, obviously one of the PHP core developers, talk
444.
by gngeal 14y ago
Are these phone numbers or DNA sequencing data sets? :-)
445.
by gngeal 14y ago
Hah, a nice article. :-) My favourite sentence from the PHP documentation: string create_function ( string $args , string $code ) "Creates an anonymous function from the parameters passed, and returns a unique name for it ." So there you a
446.
by gngeal 14y ago
Hah, my high school memories - a graphical gravity simulator project for my CS class, leaking energy due to the use of a very naive integrator (the Euler method for ODEs). You might want to try Stormer-Cowell, it's sort of a gold standard i
447.
by gngeal 14y ago
"While async/await is a cool feature and is worth using, it is worth noting the up trend in complexity of generated code – and ansyc/await generates significantly more code in the simpler language without this feature than previous new feat
448.
by gngeal 14y ago
"To be fair you might expect that, if you have a command economy you can say "how can we get more women in IT?" and answer with "Take women out of nursing and put them in IT"." During WW2 in Russia, the Soviets had female snipers and female
449.
by gngeal 14y ago
"If the last math class you took was 20 years ago, ESL probably seems rather intimidating." Actually, only ten years ago. :-) But I do need a refresher. Just started working on it recently. I feel actually smarter today than I felt back t
450.
by gngeal 14y ago
Looks like completely normal math to me. It's not like they're trying to shove category theory down your throat or anything. A useful book! Look just like what I needed. If there's something heavier about it, it's the terse encyclopedic fee

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