jlouis

66 ms·

601.
by jlouis 18y ago
FreeBSDs filesystem is one of the most reliable filesystems out there. It is old, but still performs pretty well and the age transfers to reliability. There are 2 things creating problems now, though: first, it does not use journaling (by d
602.
by jlouis 18y ago
The alternative is Simon Peyton Jones style: Work on some 10-15 papers at the same time. Whenever some new knowledge is gained, try to apply it to all the papers. At some point one of your papers is publishable. It is basically running rese
603.
by jlouis 18y ago
Sysadmin debugging: Many years ago I had the responsibility of maintaing a qmail setup for SMTP. We had around 1500 accounts and a mail-feed of some 80-90k mails a day. We were happily chewing off a 400mhz P-II with some 256Mb of RAM. Sudde
604.
by jlouis 18y ago
Remember that pointers are the double size in a 64bit memory layout. Depending on their structure, your programs might consume more memory. But you get to break the memory limit of a single program and you get rid of some of the cruft in th
605.
by jlouis 18y ago
I find complexity theory to be extremely important to CS students. In fact, complexity theory is exactly what differentiates the good programmers from the bad programmers. Not that they use an asymptote in their day-job, but because they
606.
by jlouis 18y ago
I don't think it affects credibility of hundreds of cores per CPU at all. I think 32 cores is about as high we will go in the first phase though. Disk I/O bound applications can't be faster by throwing more cores at the problem. Memory boun
607.
by jlouis 18y ago
GAP? Pari/GP? Mathematica? Magma? There is much room for programming in modern pure math research. In fact, I think we will end up seeing much more computer-aided-math than you think.
608.
by jlouis 18y ago
If this were true, we would probably face a promotion to 74.0 signals :/
609.
by jlouis 18y ago
If the MySQL documentation is right, it doesn't matter at all in MySQL. VARCHARs up to 255 uses an extra byte for counting the size of the column. There is a reading problem with variable-size records of any kind compared to fixed-size reco
610.
by jlouis 18y ago
I found this very funny. Thanks for kn0thing!
611.
by jlouis 18y ago
I wonder why this one did not get many more upvotes. Are we in cat-picture country still?
612.
by jlouis 18y ago
The key features are isolation and fault management . Isolation means that each process is separated from the others and can only communicate via a safe means. What happens when a process dies? Good systems have far more fault-tolerance.
613.
by jlouis 18y ago
I don't know. Are most of the people that gets laid off prime material for startups? I don't think so, but I might be wrong. I think you should look at a more technical factor. Right now, it is looking better for startups than ever. You h
614.
by jlouis 18y ago
It is because the human brain tends to be wired in a certain way. One guy says something and other people begin to reflect on what he has said. Since their entry barrier to publishing has been lowered by magnitude via blogs, it is easy to p
615.
by jlouis 18y ago
Optimize for lines of code not written! Good programmers can optimize this metric by quite a lot -- hence LOC count means absolutely nothing. It is better to think for a long time about a problem and then only write the 20 lines that solv
616.
by jlouis 18y ago
Thoughtful and correct IMO. Caching is much more important to get right than backend-speed. Number crunching capability does not matter that much for web applications. And you can always outsource the tough calculations to languages better
617.
by jlouis 18y ago
Memory usage can probably be attributed to how PHP manages memory (hint: It /almost/ doesn't).
618.
by jlouis 18y ago
Oh, that is easy to fix. Kill EVAL. I will postulate that EVAL is a much more intrusive thing to have in a language than TCO. And why kill EVAL? Because it makes it a lot harder to reason about programs and the future mandates we can prove
619.
by jlouis 18y ago
I am missing something here if it is considered hard to implement. It is not that hard to TCO in Scheme or ML, so I must surely be missing some detail that makes it hard to implement in Javascript. I can't see why you would leave that out o
620.
by jlouis 18y ago
The advice I consistently give people when buying laptops is: Remember that you can't change the hardware. If you hate a trackpad, you will be stuck with it. If you hate the keyboard: though luck. Too slow a CPU? oh god, no chance in hell y
621.
by jlouis 18y ago
You are wrong. I generally buy a new laptop every 3 years. I tend to buy a bit up the curve and get 1.5 years where the beast is fast, one year where the beast is "adequate" and half a year where the beast is "slow". To me, it is not about
622.
by jlouis 18y ago
I am not too sure that an is_float() guard will yield a performance increase in the BEAM interpreter. It will give an increase with HiPE though I am sure. As per strings and memory consumption: Yes, you can use binaries or even better: ioli
623.
by jlouis 18y ago
Statelessness: Erlang is not side-effect free. Sending a message is a side-effect. You depend on receives of messages from other processes as well. Truth is that you can write side-effect-free code in any language and those functions are
624.
by jlouis 18y ago
The second law of computer science is much more dangerous: "Any program will degenerate until it is written in a conglomerate of perl and shell script." There is a windows-corollary: Substitute perl and shell script for VB. Seriously though
625.
by jlouis 18y ago
It is rather simple to poke fun on operating systems, be it Windows, Linux or OSX. It is also rather simple to poke on hardware in Macs versus PC's. There are 2 things that makes me want to buy another Lenovo Thinkpad the next time (I am cu
626.
by jlouis 18y ago
Erlang's syntax is not really a problem for me either. There are part of the semantics I dislike, but the syntax is not hurting me that much. Erlang's primary problem is that it currently can't cope with the things people try to throw at it
627.
by jlouis 18y ago
(1) Erlang, Ocaml, Common Lisp, Scheme, and Haskell can all, with relatively mundane code, parse a TCP/IP packet in 4 lines, nicely formatted, and some of them gets it type-correct at the same time. The problem isn't that you cannot do it i
628.
by jlouis 18y ago
I weren't clear enough, sorry. Yes, it is extremely hard to add lisp-style macros to C or Java because they have no s-expression structure you can work on. And they do not want an s-expression structure because it is too alien for those pro
629.
by jlouis 18y ago
I think what is meant is that the list is the primary data structure for everything in lisps. Fortunately, it is not the only data structure in lisps. I dislike constructs where eg. a graph edge is built as: '(GRAPH-EDGE <source-vertex&
630.
by jlouis 18y ago
Macros are a double edged sword. Their advantages also drags in some disadvantages. If they were only advantageous, they would have flown into mainstream languages long ago(in the full Lisp-sense where the macro is a lisp program). But they

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