jedbrown

35 ms·

301.
by jedbrown 14y ago
Tuition should be covered by grant funding (RA) or the department (TA). If a university "accepts" you in a science/engineering PhD program, but is not offering tuition and salary, they're really saying they can't take you. Note that at man
302.
by jedbrown 14y ago
Google's PDF viewer refuses to save PDFs opened via the websites of some scientific journals. I'm not willing to play the proxy game every time I want to read journal papers so I save them locally. I stopped using Google's PDF viewer becaus
303.
by jedbrown 14y ago
In both cases, the second 'git rebase' is just a fast-forward (moving the ref ahead without modifying the graph). Thus we need only distinguish what happens in the first 'git rebase', which is a different choice of which patch gets rewritte
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by jedbrown 14y ago
\usepackage{xspace} \def\Linux{GNU/Linux\xspace} \def\Hurd{GNU/Hurd\xspace}
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by jedbrown 14y ago
By this logic, every user is "programming" when they change their facebook account settings or configure the appearance of their desktop. Call it what you want, but configuration via "config files" of some sort (perhaps managed by a GUI) is
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Then updates to the customer's configuration requires modifying code, compiling it, and shipping the result. It's easy to put an interface on configuration file modification and in many cases, updates can be applied without needing to resta
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by jedbrown 14y ago
That's an interesting project, but it doesn't qualify as portable yet since it's currently entirely dependent on gcc inline assembly syntax and doesn't support a number of important architectures, including ARM. Thanks for sharing though, I
308.
by jedbrown 14y ago
Presumably you are familiar with Boehm's famous "Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library" [1]. Meanwhile, pthreads require heavyweight OS involvement and implementing a simple spinlock requires inline assembly or non-portable compiler bu
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by jedbrown 14y ago
I usually don't let them creep into the API, but I use them for convenience within a function that needs direct access to the multidimensional structure, i.e. void func(int M, int N, int P, double *a_flat) { double (*a)[N][P] =
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Also, Tarsnap and Wuala.
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by jedbrown 14y ago
I don't know what statistic you're referring to, but there are an awful lot of (STEM) fields that have zero jobs if you don't have a degree.
312.
by jedbrown 14y ago
The typical situation in science is that you're expected to cover "100%" of your time through some combination of grants and teaching. There is no specific allocation for "professional service", but you're expected to do it anyway. With sta
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by jedbrown 14y ago
> we're planning to add lightning-fast searching I don't see the point of discussing a mail client that doesn't have fast full-text search that scales to a million messages. If it wasn't designed in from the beginning, why should we hav
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Yup, even when the front page for the hotel (or airline) claims to "always have the lowest rate". Sometimes you can call and negotiate a price match, but it's easier to just book through the online agent. Since online prices are occasionall
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by jedbrown 14y ago
You are leaving out the importance of libraries and coupling of systems that were initially written independently. This is the same mistake that many Lisps have made, assuming that just because the technology is "superior", people will floc
316.
by jedbrown 14y ago
Unfortunately, it was broken with the gmail redesign and is still broken. I open a thread with 30 new messages, select part of a message half way down, hit 'r', and find myself editing a reply to the very last message. Instead, I have to cl
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by jedbrown 14y ago
The shame is that the "social" features of the old Google Reader were better than current G+.
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by jedbrown 14y ago
How did you actually get that plan with your Nexus 4? I've been a T-mobile customer for several years, always owning my phone outright (now a Nexus 4), but they gave me a serious run-around, telling me that particular plan was a promotional
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Good thing he's chairing the next House Science Committee. http://science.house.gov/press-release/chairman-hall-congrat...
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Maxima's user base has long been minuscule compared to Mathematica and Maple. There are many factors that went into Maxima's present state, few of which I think are directly attributable to it being open source. There are plenty of open sou
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by jedbrown 14y ago
I've been using this feature for ages, but it got much worse about six months ago when the last message in a thread became automatically "focused". Now when I scroll up in a thread and select some text, the message I'm selecting text from
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Locking on to a GPS involves numerically solving a 4-dimensional set of linear equations Hah, hardly.
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by jedbrown 14y ago
If data are to "say something", they must do so in a statistically rigorous sense. I'm not going to speculate on statistical significance in this particular case.
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by jedbrown 14y ago
On the flipside, exercise increases your metabolism during the rest of the day, typically more than offsetting your math. This effect is well-correlated with exercise intensity . Also, 100 calories/mile at 6 minute/mile pace is quite effic
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by jedbrown 14y ago
Without a source-level debugger, I see little advantage relative to COS, which is C, but has a more advanced object and type system than Carbon. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192791 https://github.com/CObjectSystem/COS
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by jedbrown 14y ago
This is dangerous misinformation. I'm sorry, but if your "math-heavy" code performs better when oversubscribed, then it is a massively suboptimal implementation. As a performance-oriented mathematical library developer, with colleagues at
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by jedbrown 14y ago
The original point made by vonmoltke was that the patent text does not define an implementation in any meaningful sense. My wikipedia link was merely corroborating my opinion that an implementation of a data structure involves the fundament
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by jedbrown 14y ago
"The implementation of a data structure usually requires writing a set of procedures that create and manipulate instances of that structure." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure ) If you gloss over construction and modification de
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by jedbrown 14y ago
> What is a data structure if not an implementation? The patent is a cartoon of a half-baked idea. It does not even describe how to implement element addition or removal. (Unless the caller maintains some special structure, many O(1) li
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by jedbrown 14y ago
On the contrary, the time per inner iteration is slightly higher this way and the same conclusions hold: 1. python3.2 str() is at least as fast as '%s' formatting 2. '%s' is slightly faster than str() with python2.7 3. theint.__str__() is f

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