mrbrowning

15 ms·

91.
by mrbrowning 13y ago
> I think the first thing that should be mentioned in any introductory article on Python threads is that Python threads work great for IO concurrency but they won't help with CPU concurrency. Things like downloading files, sending
92.
by mrbrowning 13y ago
Big-O (or Ω or Θ) notation is orthogonal to notions of best-case or worst-case, which are merely constraints on the set of inputs we're considering. If, for example, you ask "what is the upper bound on best-case running time for l
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
I don't want to over-generalize based on one data point, but on my Galaxy Nexus I noticed that 4.2 pretty handily undid all of the improvements that 4.1 managed in this arena. It was indeed a paradise of smoothness for that one point r
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Have you settled on a good workflow for ClojureScript projects? cljsbuild at least lets you amortize JVM startup time with the auto mode, but the Write-Compile-Test loop (as Joel Spolsky calls it) still feels a little more sluggish than w
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
I think the comment you're replying to rests on the assumption that it's not possible to optimize your interface for all levels of competency, i.e., changes that make an interface more beginner-friendly will necessarily limit the
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Well, that's how I understood the comment about listening to people sing on the subway -- she casts it as though the uninitiated listener isn't going to be able to pick out the harmonic context of what the people are singing and w
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
So, I want to preface my comment by saying that I think this video is really well-made and entertaining, and that it's a decent attempt at making serialism accessible to a wider audience than it's traditionally had. That said , i
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
I'm guessing the sensors on Voyager 1 have some sort of self-check diagnostics built in so that NASA can reasonably rule out sensor malfunction?
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Cool, that absolutely makes sense with embedded applications. In light of the post I was reading your previous comment in terms of x86/64 assembly.
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
In those cases, are you writing in asm for fun? If not, what advantages do you see in taking this approach over just writing most of the project in C and using inline asm where necessary?
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
I was hoping that too, but I knew it would be about Euler's identity, since to people with only incidental exposure to the concepts that underly it it seems (justifiably) inscrutable and mysterious, thus its general popularity. It's funny t
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Moreover, as far as Lisp dialects go, homoiconicity is a big part of their identity and a major source of their power. It's an orthogonal concept to functional programming in general, just look at e.g. Haskell, but that's one of the first t
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Eh, it's a natural progression given their design goals -- I think the central principle behind Apple's design, one even more basic than their idolization of Dieter Rams, is to capitalize on a trope you see in a lot of science fiction: tech
104.
by mrbrowning 13y ago
The confidence comes from two things, really: 1. The conjecture has been found to hold for a large number of trial cases, and 2. The conjecture has an intuitive aura of rightness. A good example is the 3n + 1 conjecture: http://en.wikipe
105.
by mrbrowning 13y ago
Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective has a pretty solid overview of memory allocation strategies at just the right level of abstraction for someone who's just getting into this kind of thing: doubly- vs. si
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
There's an analog in music to the notion of concurrency, which is the polyphonic melody -- a single melodic line that, by jumping between disparate registers, expresses the simultaneous sounding of two (abstract) voices moving against each
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Oh, I wasn't trying to make a claim that this would result in any noticeable performance degradation in the vast majority of cases, but as a means of making code more understandable this particular example suffers in comparison to a comment
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Not only that, but in the last example in that section he replaces a fairly short and readable expression with a function call. I don't see how this is different than a comment in any meaningful way (except that it requires extra lines of b
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by mrbrowning 13y ago
Out curiosity, what sort of mechanism do you think is best for the OS to figure out the file type? Metadata can be opaque and leads to applications being rigid about what type of input they'll accept, and sniffing magic bytes can't possibly
110.
by mrbrowning 13y ago
The fast inverse square root trick is clever, but this is right on. It's bypassing the provided interface for FP operations and mucking around with implementation details. That's not to say that that's a bad thing, or that floating point nu