jemfinch

51 ms·

451.
by jemfinch 15y ago
"And it's much easier to write correct Ruby than correct C." No, it isn't. C may be spartan, but its failure modes are predictable and manageable. A ruby program can be incorrect for a host of reasons completely unrelated to the program (
452.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Your comment contributes nothing to this thread or this website. Stop wasting your time and others' posting about matters of stylistic opinion.
453.
by jemfinch 15y ago
And millions more waste atrocious amounts of time being unproductive--or worse, becoming addicted or going into debt. Farmville abuses the social guilt that evolution built into our human nature to bring profit to Zynga. Do you really thin
454.
by jemfinch 15y ago
This is a poor quality comment, not worth posting here.
455.
by jemfinch 15y ago
I don't know anyone who defines a "bug" as "an unexpected result as a product of good programming." Bugs are when code is wrong: when it doesn't do what it says, when it doesn't do what was asked of it, when it doesn't do what the user rea
456.
by jemfinch 15y ago
You don't seem to understand that as long as enforcement isn't 100%, the cost of punishment must exceed the cost of compliance if it's going to deter violation. If the only cost of overrunning a meter were paying the amount of the overrun
457.
by jemfinch 15y ago
There's a vast chasm between what consumers "have to" pay and what consumers do pay.
458.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Did you read my post? What I said was nowhere near "it goes quadratic 50% of the time". You're arguing against a straw man.
459.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Timsort optimizes for partially sorted data, but that's a long way from saying it's not intended for uniformly distributed data. It's intended for all data, that's why it's the default sort in Python. It's no less intended for all d
460.
by jemfinch 15y ago
The downvotes will suffice in the future, I think.
461.
by jemfinch 15y ago
You say that you're not "defending quicksort"--not that it really matters if you were, it's a great algorithm--but you are. And you're wrong. We can't easily select better pivots for quicksort. For every deterministic selection of a piv
462.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Clearly you didn't actually read the source file. I graduated in CS. I know B+ trees. I also know that an 85-line, 7-argument method in a 1988-line file shouldn't depend on a global variable ("guessIncreasing") modified from several other
463.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Where?
464.
by jemfinch 15y ago
A very real threat of termination: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp
465.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Here's what I get: Input array size is 1024 Naive sqrtf() CPU cycles used: 54514, error: 0.000000 Vectorized SSE CPU cycles used: 900, error: inf Marvelous CPU cycles used: 21514, error: inf I'm not sure how to
466.
by jemfinch 15y ago
I originally signed up for Prime because it saved me money. Not because I was paying for a lot of fast shipping, but because I would frequently have a $10 item I wanted to purchase, and i would add $15-25 worth of stuff to get super save
467.
by jemfinch 15y ago
While that's accurate, it's a truism that adds little to this discussion. Perhaps someone can explain the specific, concrete reasons why this solves a problem existing implementations do not.
468.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Would you mind posting your bench framework for this?
469.
by jemfinch 15y ago
At least you can express ownership semantics in C++ code, using constructs like `unique_ptr`, `scoped_ptr`, and `shared_ptr`. In a garbage collected language, nothing expresses ownership, and so while you not be at risk of memory leaks
470.
by jemfinch 15y ago
None of us do "guardrail driving", but we still put guardrails on roads.
471.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Most of the time I do give up part way through, and I don't find his articles a joy to read at all. Yegge needs to learn brevity . He makes good points, and still even I feel like I'm wasting my time reading his articles; I can only i
472.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Have you read "Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs" by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1]? It's the same principle: when civility diminishes and hostility increases, the first members to leave aren't the ones being uncivil and hostile, but the ones who
473.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Utility is better served in the long run by ensuring continued civility. Reduced civility frequently results in the retirement of the best contributors to utility.
474.
by jemfinch 15y ago
The main use of points seems to be to allow people to view the best comments and ignore the others. Perhaps threads could be sorted by total score?
475.
by jemfinch 15y ago
They replaced bottled water with a water dispenser that dispenses ambient, cold, and sparkling water. Many engineers still choose to drink ordinary water even with all the flavored options.
476.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Whatever your opinion of MySQL's replication, the MySQL community calls it master-master.
477.
by jemfinch 15y ago
> The problem is we can't all work on every problem. Which is exactly the point of a representative democracy. We elect other people to work the problems we can't. If they do an unsatisfactory job, then we should elect someone else
478.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Only ten years of evidence? I still remember the Performa lines costing twice as much as a comparable PC. I wouldn't go so far as to call Apple products Veblen goods, but they're pretty close, and I don't see iPad's $500 pricing harming i
479.
by jemfinch 15y ago
If you have more car-lengths of empty lane in front of you than you do cars backed up behind you, you're impeding the flow of traffic. Bad rule. You're actually smoothing traffic by creating anti-traffic in front of you to absorb minor
480.
by jemfinch 15y ago
Can you explain why? (Otherwise it boggles my mind that you created an account solely for this post...)

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