mjw1007

82 ms·

751.
by mjw1007 8y ago
I don't think the industry is getting dumber. I remember learning a lot from 1980s computer books with jokes and cartoons when I was older than 10, for example http://wiki.c2.com/?ThinkingForth , or the Fortran colouri
752.
by mjw1007 8y ago
Then, presumably, if the criminal doesn't follow the contract the case ends up in civil court. And if the criminal refuses to submit to the judgement of the civil court, that's contempt of court which needs to somehow be enforceab
753.
by mjw1007 8y ago
"Female" is an adjective and "women" is a noun. In English you can very often use a noun to qualify another noun (like in "house brick"), but it's rare for "A B" to mean "B which is an A&quo
754.
by mjw1007 8y ago
Summary: « the skills required of professional and successful programmers are drastically different from the ones needed back in the 1990s. The profession now requires less mathematics and algorithms and instead emphasizes more skills under
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by mjw1007 8y ago
It's quite common to have a situation where in the short term y is a function of x, and in the longer term equilibrium-x is a function of ambient-y. The cylinder-with-a-piston used to teach Boyle's law in secondary-school physics
756.
by mjw1007 8y ago
clamav with Google's safebrowsing filter enabled blocks a great deal of junk. It eats RAM, though. Looking in my logs, it looks like that plus a hard block on zen.spamhaus.org would be enough to remove almost all spam, though I'm
757.
by mjw1007 8y ago
When they were talking about moving off cloud altogether, they mentioned that the reason they were on Azure in the first place was that they were given a pile of free credits. So I suppose once those ran out it was a good idea to choose the
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by mjw1007 8y ago
For a clearer statement from Guy, explaining why he unilaterally shut down the original complaint, see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:JzG&old... : « being attacked by RT and George Galloway is
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by mjw1007 8y ago
I think those results just show that if you persuade the autovectoriser to work you'll get the same result as for manual SIMD code, as you'd expect.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
When 'percache' is higher, there will be more instructions executed between calls to pick_address_of_random_cache_line(). That means as the out-of-order processor "runs ahead" while waiting for the first main-memory requ
761.
by mjw1007 8y ago
Interesting that 3D interfaces deserve a chapter but command-line interfaces don't.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
They added a solution for this three or four years ago, by adding "Open File Description Locks" which don't have the misbehaviour that that SQLite comment is complaining about. See https://www.gnu.org/software
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by mjw1007 8y ago
It certainly doesn't have to be that way. In the UK barristers who both prosecute and defend are common (though perhaps less than they once were).
764.
by mjw1007 8y ago
I'm surprised to see this bit: « I certainly didn't set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption » [Guido van Rossum] explains. As early as 1999 he was one of the authors of the "Computer Programming fo
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by mjw1007 8y ago
Sure, it was the right thing to do. But it wasn't a difficult thing to do.
766.
by mjw1007 8y ago
But Ballmer didn't fall on his sword; he just apologised, to people who had no ability to punish him for the mistake which he claimed as his. If you receive an apology from someone several levels above where the mistake was made, I don
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by mjw1007 8y ago
Also the case where for the original asker it really was was an XY instance, but now the top google result for "how do I fill a bathtub using a hosepipe?" goes to a Stack Overflow page full of people refusing to answer the questio
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by mjw1007 8y ago
I'm not sure anyone "pushed Guido out", but if anyone did I'm pretty sure it wasn't the people on python-committers.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
Alas, the same problem has been known to happen with debugger-provided breakpoints and tracepoints. That's why GCC advertises -O0 as «make debugging produce the expected results» (which in practice will avoid the problem in your exampl
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by mjw1007 8y ago
He writes « Perhaps people equate "debugging" with "using an interactive debugger" » I think it's useful to think of two independent 'axes' of debugging: - single-stepping vs reading traces - using special
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by mjw1007 8y ago
I think that's true. For example, I think "remembering what you have agreed to do" is a rather important social skill, and I don't think it's one where engineers are by any means below average.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
CVS was really designed for multiple users logging in to the same server, so that repository access was working directly against the local filesystem. It was pretty fast in that setup. The network server stuff was hacked in on top.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
CVS indeed has the problem where you can inadvertently tag only a subset of the files you shipped. But it did also let you check out files as of a particular timestamp, which could be more reliable.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
"Spectacularly wrong" here appears to mean that he correctly identified that the bluestones came from the Preseli hills almost 200 miles from Stonehenge (and was the first to do so), but didn't get quite the right outcrop. He
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by mjw1007 8y ago
Weren't their "plans for kicking butt" in the mid 90s largely based on Itanium?
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by mjw1007 8y ago
The point of putting it in the language spec is to promise that they won't change back, even if they do later dream up a faster nondeterministic implementation. The rationale is that even if they clearly said "we might make this n
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by mjw1007 8y ago
I'm underwhelmed by the Rust docs. The tutorial is OK-ish, but the reference docs are weak. If I have a specific question about some detail of the language, the answer is very rarely there. Sometimes the answer is written up in the bug
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by mjw1007 8y ago
The TeXbook, and the Exim spec. The thing the latter gets right is that, as well as the usual long list of options with an explanation of what their effects are, it also describes in full detail what the program actually does, rather than l
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by mjw1007 8y ago
If you're thinking about the scenario A/B/C stuff, he's ignoring the effects of the drop in atmospheric CFCs.
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by mjw1007 8y ago
The page at that link says: « The most effective sink of atmospheric methane is the hydroxyl radical in the troposphere, or the lowest portion of Earth’s atmosphere. As methane rises into the air, it reacts with the hydroxyl radical to crea

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