mtdewcmu

94 ms·

811.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
The people who own all the robots shouldn't feel too smug, because robots will not buy their products.
812.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
>> For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills. What?? I have to acquire social skills or a robot will take my job? I'm pretty sure I have more social skills than a machine...
813.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
That's what I was thinking. That piece of rock must be very hot as it's flying out into space from a violent explosion. At least, that's how I picture it. It seems odd that the article was concerned about the danger of space
814.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I borrowed the Robin Williams book from the library and read the first part of it. As a non-designer, I found it to be highly accessible, and it also ringed true. I guess I lost my motivation before I finished the book. But I would finish i
815.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I looked up the sparse FFT, which this is about. It looks like a nice transform, but I think this article misrepresented it a bit. The article makes it sound like they found a new, much faster alternative to the FFT. In fact, their algorith
816.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
This sounds like it could have been an Onion headline, e.g. "Simulations back up theory that Universe is a simulation"
817.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
There's nothing to destroy. The string is static.
818.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Of course, this is perfectly good C: const char *f() { return "abc"; } void g() { const char * s = f(); puts(s); } Nothing temporary is created at all. It's rather convenient.
819.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I see. It was already in production. It's an open question whether the more complex syscall conventions would have held up over time as new features were added. It makes a lot of sense in general to push unnecessary complexity out of t
820.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
C is spartan with syntax, and you could accomplish much the same thing with a macro. Of course, in C++ you could define your own arrays with their own indexing scheme.
821.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
That's funny. Someone should implement Roman numerals in a real language.
822.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
What I meant to say is that people are arbitrary and capricious and, in many cases, will never agree on what is easier. The objectivity of the practical engineering concerns offers a rational basis for making a choice. People are certainly
823.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
The reason they seem obvious is that they represent a quantity that has meaning -- the offset.
824.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Computers aren't a development in numeracy?
825.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
1-indexing is no longer intuitive when numbers become large. Years are 1-indexed; how many people observed the start of the millenium in 2001?
826.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
It's interesting to consider whether PCLRing might have worked. I'll look at it in more depth.
827.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Well, frankly, I always thought 0-indexing made perfect sense, given the elegant symmetry with pointer arithmetic in C. It also makes sense in that variables are naturally initialized to zero, and that puts an index right at the start of an
828.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I don't get why zero-indexing requires so much justification. Here are two powerful reasons why it makes sense: * Zero is the first unsigned integer. If you start at 1, you're wasting one * p[0] == *p, and it makes no di
829.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
The distinctive thing about hardcore conspiracy theorists is that they don't base their ideas on reality (reality as perceived by non-conspiracy theorists). They are not truly skeptics, because their skepticism is selectively applied.
830.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
The call instruction on x86 automatically writes a return address to the stack, and I suspect that that's a standard instruction across architectures. That's sufficient to make my point that the CPU expects a stack.
831.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
False flag operations are the bread and butter of conspiracy theorists, and I'd like to show this list to some I know... This may not be an ideal list, but it describes things that actually occurred. The false-flags that involved the U
832.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I had to do a little bit with assembly language for a core course and learn a little about hardware. So probably yes, at least at some places.
833.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I don't know about all architectures, but I took a peek at ARM and it has a stack pointer register and built-in instructions that use the stack. So that's Intel and at least one RISC cpu that assume a stack. Of course, you can pro
834.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
The stack is a concept that's built into the CPU to handle function calls. Every time you call a function, there is a return address that needs to be stored. Since you need to hang on to a return address for every function that is curr
835.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I posted that article to HN, but it didn't get any votes. I know very little about Clojure, but I think the conservative/liberal dichotomy he describes is very real. Liberalism and conservativism in software are closely related to
836.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
Maybe that's because SELinux was handled by the NSA, and they're not so thorough?
837.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I think you may have hit on something subtle. To me, it's better to have two completely distinct modes: I'm either dealing with errors or not. Then if an error occurs, I can expect one of two things -- either it should be handled
838.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I worked with PHP for a while and I found it to behave like you describe: I rarely found bugs in code once it reached a stable state. I haven't used Python (I might be the only one), so I can only speculate on whether it's truly m
839.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
In a lot of ways, comparing syscalls like stat and Java methods is apples and oranges. System calls are at the very bottom of the stack, where userspace interacts directly with kernelspace, so they must return all error information, other
840.
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I suppose Cuba is the reason we don't have universal healthcare. If they do it, it must be Communist.

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