pjscott

48 ms·

511.
by pjscott 7y ago
Nit: The brute-force solution for the one-dimensional case is O(n^2), not O(n^3).
512.
by pjscott 7y ago
That sounds more like a case of your managers not wanting to stick their necks out by doing something weird, even if it would benefit both you and the company. Happens all the time.
513.
by pjscott 7y ago
> Also, what became apparent with Apollo – though it is not how it worked – is that it is better to define your system up front to minimise errors, rather than producing a bunch of code that then has to be corrected with patches on patch
514.
by pjscott 7y ago
Yeah, I got the same error, along with a bunch of warnings earlier in the build about how 32-bit builds are deprecated on recent macOS versions. And then when it goes to link, it can't find the 32-bit symbols for functions like sqrt()
515.
by pjscott 7y ago
Apple's new-ish APFS filesystem includes something for this pattern: the renamex_np(2) system call with the RENAME_SWAP flag. This atomically swaps two files, and can be used to atomically swap your staging directory with the existing
516.
by pjscott 7y ago
A more precise version of the title would refer to "high-level nuclear waste": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_waste
517.
by pjscott 7y ago
Haskell doesn't force anything, but it does make some pretty strong suggestions. Haskell suggests immutable data, pure functions, and algebraic thinking. You can make your data mutable, do everything in the `IO` or `State` monad, etc
518.
by pjscott 7y ago
Here's a podcast where one of the authors of that study goes into more detail, especially on your second point: http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-i...
519.
by pjscott 7y ago
It turns out that Hidden Order is hard to google because of a spy thriller by the same name, so here's an Amazon link to the econ book: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Order-Economics-Everyday-Life/...
520.
by pjscott 7y ago
I checked the latency and throughput of the SSE4 POPCNT and LZCNT instructions on a bunch of microarchitectures [1], and can't think of any way to get that kind of performance with a combination of simpler instructions. These are occas
521.
by pjscott 7y ago
One of my favorite things about comments in programming is that you can stick a label on that fence explaining why it's there. One of my biggest frustrations is that so many people don't bother, even when it would literally be jus
522.
by pjscott 7y ago
That's definitely less kind, and it's a huge problem in practice. I think it's still not that bad -- people can and do get much better at designing things for medium- to long-term maintenance over the course of a few years.
523.
by pjscott 7y ago
I've noticed that the majority of my economic output so far has happened over a handful of weeks. The problem is that nobody had any idea when those golden weeks would happen: there always had to be some big problem that I was uniquely
524.
by pjscott 7y ago
That would be burning Amazon's reputation for dubious short-term gain. If they're thinking about the longer term, it would make more sense to play it straight: make the Amazon's Choice recommendations as honest as possible, a
525.
by pjscott 7y ago
This is such an elegant idea that I literally laughed with joy for a few seconds when I read the abstract. You made my morning.
526.
by pjscott 7y ago
This could be great for battery life, if it allows the system to better schedule tasks that were going to happen anyway. For example, consider a photo app that auto-tags people's faces: rather than running that battery-draining computa
527.
by pjscott 7y ago
On Apple's platforms you can get this with a background NSURLSession. It lets you express concepts like "Download this URL at a convenient time, preferably when the device is plugged in and connected to Wifi" or "Start d
528.
by pjscott 7y ago
Imagine a perfect SAT that preparation can't affect; for the purposes of the hypothetical, the test just stares into your soul and measures pure scholastic aptitude. If (a) scholastic aptitude has a significant effect on your lifetime
529.
by pjscott 7y ago
On completely random data, Timsort is just a mergesort with some extra bookkeeping. Its advantage is on arrays that have sorted subarrays of non-trivial size, which is often the case with real data.
530.
by pjscott 8y ago
This is a pretty sweet hash function, with security guarantees similar to SipHash but about 5x faster. Here's more info: https://github.com/google/highwayhash
531.
by pjscott 8y ago
A certain number of shares of stock are set aside for you. When they "vest", that means you get them. The vesting schedule varies, but probably the most common arrangement is that you get 1/4 of the shares per year for the ne
532.
by pjscott 8y ago
This industry throws around the term "senior" the way restaurants hand out complimentary breath-mints. It just means someone who has been out of college a few years and hasn't been fired for gross incompetence.
533.
by pjscott 8y ago
You're right that it's a lousy set of categories, but I don't think it's disingenuous. Those categories roughly match the ones that large companies in the US have to track for their EEO-1 reports. I can't blame th
534.
by pjscott 8y ago
If you'd prefer a (much) higher information-to-fluff ratio, the wikipedia page delivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superadobe
535.
by pjscott 8y ago
This is one of the few times when a Considered Harmful article deserves the title. Did you see the RISC-V assembly code? Holy shit! It's so much nicer than every other SIMD ISA I've ever used! So much easier to program, so much ea
536.
by pjscott 8y ago
Aw, man . Some day we'll have this all figured out, but that day won't be soon.
537.
by pjscott 8y ago
I love this trick. It generates a float of the form 1.xxxxx..., filling in the x part with random bits, generating a random number between 1 and 2. Then it subtracts 1.
538.
by pjscott 8y ago
That is, in effect, a limit on how risky their loans can be if they want to stay in business. The more likely someone is to default on a loan, the higher the interest rate needs to be in order for it to have a positive expected value for th
539.
by pjscott 8y ago
I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.
540.
by pjscott 8y ago
Being heterozygous for the sickle cell trait gives some protection against malaria, which explains why the two tend to be common in the same parts of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterozygote_advantage#Sickl

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