jemfinch

80 ms·

661.
by jemfinch 16y ago
If you mean by "qualitative difference" that they differ in some substantial way, please describe what that difference is, rather than asserting that it exists. Java interprets bytecodes, Python interprets bytecodes. Java has JIT, Python h
662.
by jemfinch 16y ago
He wasn't trying to write something faster than C, he was just establishing a good baseline. He makes that clear in the article when he specifically addresses the fact that compiling with optimizations removes the loops. (I wonder, did the
663.
by jemfinch 16y ago
The most important thing in an interview is to make sure the person's level of skill is enough to be your coworker. Their conception of their skill doesn't matter. Programmers who know they're bad programmers are still bad programmers.
664.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Hopefully it's not too irrelevant to ask... Does anyone know what music was playing in the background of that video? I really liked it.
665.
by jemfinch 16y ago
How do you sue someone you can't contact? What if the costs involved in bringing suit exceed the amount owed?
666.
by jemfinch 16y ago
As mentioned above, attempts to contact them have failed. Now what do you do?
667.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Yes, I agree there's an annoyance factor. In all honesty, what do you think should happen when someone isn't paying a debt they owe? Can you think of a reasonable way to get hold of someone who's refusing your phone calls that doesn't inv
668.
by jemfinch 16y ago
They can't share any details about the debt or even that there is a debt. All they're allowed to say is "Have your friend contact me." Is that what constitutes threatening a reputation these days?
669.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Can you explain some of the reasoning behind that policy, because I don't understand it.
670.
by jemfinch 16y ago
I'll come back and reply more thoroughly later, but to give you some interesting reading in the meantime, I figured I'd drop you a link: http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/rsrg/documents/2009/09PHABKW.p... . The citations in that paper will b
671.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Calculus is not fundamental to the technology that we use every day. I work an extremely technically challenging job and I'm serious, I haven't used calculus or trigonometry since my last physics exam in undergrad. Am I happy I know them?
672.
by jemfinch 16y ago
I'm sorry, but at what point are you disagreeing with me? "Not every student necessarily needs to learn every thing" is essentially the point I'm making.
673.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Since when is high school education? High school is preparation for the real world: it has replaced the old apprenticeships and parental involvement that served as life preparation for centuries. High school fails in this purpose when it w
674.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Language exists for communication. I consider it a decline when perfectly good idioms must be laid to rest and replaced with newer phrases because widespread misunderstanding and misuse have led to inevitable confusion when the idiom is us
675.
by jemfinch 16y ago
"If you want to learn trig or calculus, it's set at such a pace in schools that it guarantees that only the absolutely best students will learn it." Pardon my elitism, but only the absolutely best students need to learn trigonometry or ca
676.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> What's more, if it is known that no liquids can be taken through security then the bad guys won't even bother to take liquid precursors to explosives through security. So the bad guys will just find another way to get their precursors
677.
by jemfinch 16y ago
"To be fair, this compares per-passenger costs for El Al, Israel's national carrier, to the costs for the TSA, the U.S. agency responsible for air safety. Ideally, we'd want to compare the airport security costs for Shin Bet, a Israeli secu
678.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> Mutable state and manual memory management are responsible for almost all bugs I have seen. I don't think this proves what you seem to think it proves. Mutable state is pervasive in most software written today. Almost all bugs can
679.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> The president actually has fairly little direct control. The TSA is executive branch. The president has all control. He tells the TSA to jump and it says "how high." > The biggest thing he could do would be to get rid of the d
680.
by jemfinch 16y ago
"Rosa Parks would be proud" indeed.
681.
by jemfinch 16y ago
My apologies, I missed that edit (somehow, despite my posting time).
682.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> On a properly calibrated display, the display of RGB[0,255,0] and RGB[0,0,255] should have identical luminance values. It does, and your eyes still suck at blue. Why do you fight so vehemently against the scientific fact that your eye
683.
by jemfinch 16y ago
You're wrong. No, you can't just split a picture into three channels and say "Hey, blue looks dark," because blue might actually be dark. You can, however, make a picture grayscale, then turn that same grayscale picture into redscale, gre
684.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> What you're arguing here is that because there are some cases where pure Python is simply not fast enough, there is no point in thinking about performance at all in a Python program. It's a false dichotomy. No, it's a very real dichot
685.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Your point about amortization is good. Insertion mid-list is just splice with a singleton; I don't bother mentioning it separately. Those really are the only two advantages of linked lists over growable arrays.
686.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> The burden of proof should be on the mutable end, not of the applicative one. On the contrary: the burden of proof is on the uncommon software development methodology, on the uncommon data structure, on the uncommon programming langua
687.
by jemfinch 16y ago
> But the difference between 56 seconds to process some data and 0.8 seconds? That matters. This must be a purely theoretical argument for you, because you wouldn't be arguing this point if you were consistently analyzing data in Python
688.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Haskell "gets it right" because you can't write an applicative hash table with the same computational complexity as a mutable one. Haskell's option is either "ordinary balanced binary trees" or "hash table in the IO monad".
689.
by jemfinch 16y ago
That's a great article, and I agree with most of it (e.g., that a balanced binary tree should be the default set/map data structure in programming languages; unfortunately it seems only C++ gets that right), but its reference to FNV as a go
690.
by jemfinch 16y ago
Yes, and? Growable arrays use the same or less memory and offer random access to elements. They're not applicative, but then, if you insist on applicative data structures you're obviously not very concerned with performance anyway so there

More ›