pierrebai

46 ms·

421.
by pierrebai 13y ago
Every times I hear these sort of justification my little rage meter goes up a notch. These arguments are all based on unverified and unncessary optimizations. * How many times have you read a project history commit by commit? How much time
422.
by pierrebai 13y ago
If you're using var x = x; then stop. The compiler is able to validate that assignment to variables are never used using data flow analysis, so always initializing has no cost once optimizations are turned on. Beside, even if it was no
423.
by pierrebai 13y ago
Does anyone knows enough about the stylometry to judge if letters to editors and a letter to a local government can really be compared to a white paper? It seems to me that in tones, style and vocabulary, these are very different format whi
424.
by pierrebai 13y ago
One trick I've used that saves life when designing and reviewing regex and makes them readable even for later programmers who know nothing about regex is to chunk them into smaller bits with significant names. For example, using C, fil
425.
by pierrebai 13y ago
The information you're missing is the timeline: 1. Ackman shorted Herbalmagic. 2. Ackman lobbied against herbalmagic. 3. Lobbying failed, and Ackman has now accumulated 500 millions in paper loss. 4. Ackman announces that he will give
426.
by pierrebai 13y ago
Either to author of the serialized data realized that the numbers could overflow a float or didn't. This is independent of serialization format. In your contrived example, somehow, the user of JSON didn't realize the salary could
427.
by pierrebai 13y ago
The reason the GPL is annoying is that free license with an advertizing clause have existed for a very long time and are actually widely used. A quick look at the about box of various software will usually show you a long list of mandatory
428.
by pierrebai 13y ago
The problem is that both your attitude and 4ad reflect a somewhat toxik high-priest holier-than-you. For example, someone enquiring about using arrow for history navigation gets an immediate response about how bash is an abimination and a r
429.
by pierrebai 13y ago
4ad is just nit-picking. The labs still only distribute Plan 9 under its own license. Now Plan 9 is available also underthe GPL, but the labs doesn't distribute that version. it's only relevant if they continue to work on it and d
430.
by pierrebai 13y ago
That is slightly incorrect, at least if one takes "slightly" to mean "widly". Actually, as the blog points out, he invests 25K while the invited investors can pitch in up to a totla of 250K. He gets 20% of any profit off
431.
by pierrebai 13y ago
The paradox is interesting to discover and discuss errors in reasoning, but we should agree from the start that any proof that one should always switch (or that any behaviour could increase the expected gain) is flawed. This can be easily p
432.
by pierrebai 13y ago
I find the Mercurial way improves codebase hygiene: do your dirty stuff in a clone repository. If you allow rebase, people will mess up and create ugly histories. Mercurial's lack of rebasing is a plus: it's a tool-enforced discip
433.
by pierrebai 13y ago
A small compendium of errors... For starter, a | b |c doesn't create two file descriptors. It creates four, two per pipe. Then there is a problem with the central argument. For regular files, and in fact all method of creating file des
434.
by pierrebai 13y ago
Since the question is about the average, it seems the question can be simply answered: the next-oldest person, on average, will die at the same age as the current oldest person. (Obviously, assuming an unchanging mortality rate over time, b
435.
by pierrebai 14y ago
Python is strictly a call-by-ref language. The author of the blog and many commenter here seem confused. There are two causes: 1. Some objects are immutable. This makes some calls seem to be call-by-value, but they are not. A simple look at
436.
by pierrebai 15y ago
Unbelievable is the level of comment on HN. Let's see, the law: 1. Aim to make available orphaned work. 2. Only applies to work unpublished for at least 5 years. 3. The public publishing right can be revoked by the author or publisher. 4. T
437.
by pierrebai 15y ago
The sad or happy truth is that thanks to advances in computing power, what used to be dummy toy programming is now not only a valid way of doing things but the correct one. Using made up stats, slurping the entire output of a process in a b
438.
by pierrebai 15y ago
Then stop focusing on "being alive" bit. I was giving this solely as an example of why making statements about the future and basing arguments about some future state cannot work. Yet you take it as some trick to avoid having to explain the
439.
by pierrebai 15y ago
True, the way it was worded not involve surprises. Instead, the ambiguity is shifted to the meaning of what consitute knowing, which is pretty much equivalent and causes the same confusion. My aim was to try to put aside such semantic argum
440.
by pierrebai 15y ago
There a few traps in the question, leading to different refutation or explanation. The first is the ambiguous definition of surprise. This lead to easy explanation of the paradox. The teacher might as well hand out an exam on a red piece or
441.
by pierrebai 15y ago
How does the system deal with real-world data that has cross-datum consistency requirements? Many system mnodeling real-world have this issue: accounting, inventory, ... I'm also annoyed by the repeated mantra that you must have partition t