plesner

11 ms·

61.
Floating point spec IEEE 754 revision targeted for 2018(754r.ucbtest.org)
2 points by plesner 11y ago|0 comments
62.
by plesner 11y ago
He's right, this post isn't about gloating. It's a story a manager tells himself to justify screwing over his employees. He says that's what he's doing: "I have an engineer working for me who makes $75k, who is
63.
by plesner 11y ago
Isn't it the case though that the population is pretty supportive of the government, including its religious policies? Iranian elections aren't exactly free but polls suggest that free elections would give basically the same resul
64.
by plesner 11y ago
That's exactly why I ask. It feels like languages often struggle with compatibility issues down the road because they assume that they're making all the right decisions from day one. Since you guys are aware that getting this stuf
65.
by plesner 11y ago
I wonder how many of the features in Rust that have changed were designed with that possibility in mind? And if not, whether it would have made any difference if they had been?
66.
by plesner 11y ago
Alternative title: the true danger of conflating regular expressions and backtracking pattern matchers. I wonder if it would be possible to reintroduce that distinction.
67.
by plesner 11y ago
Electronic voting has been discussed in Denmark and both experts and most politicians are against it. I suspect there's some correlation between how eager countries are to introduce electronic voting and how likely it is to be abused.
68.
by plesner 11y ago
It is homegrown. The Dankort was a government initiative originally built and paid for by a consortium of banks back in the 80s. The theory was that the savings for the banks from having a more efficient alternative to cash would pay for th
69.
by plesner 11y ago
I'm Danish and I find this thoroughly distressing. The payment processor, Nets, is a monopoly, owned by US investment firms. They have frequent outages and are unapologetic when they do. There is no transparency. They have a terrible p
70.
by plesner 11y ago
What I said didn't really make sense -- f.test(f) is a concrete example so how am I generalizing? What I meant was: in the general case of expressions that contain multiple references to the same variable it might, for instance f.testT
71.
by plesner 11y ago
The point I don't agree with is that it's really about the compiler. Had it been an optimization that doesn't affect which warnings or errors you get then yes, that's all the compiler. But what you need here is for the t
72.
by plesner 11y ago
Actually, it's not in general decidable whether f.test(f) is safe because f gets read twice and the value might change in the meantime. In the example a simple flow analysis will tell you it doesn't but the general case is equival
73.
by plesner 11y ago
To what end though? It's a small thing sure but it's busywork. Why am I being asked to do busywork?
74.
by plesner 11y ago
Making python 3 more attractive is not the solution, it's part of the problem. I can't use just python 3 because python 2 is still widely used. I can write code that works on both but now I'm using the worst of both worlds, a
75.
by plesner 12y ago
Is there any evidence that MS's recent OSS efforts are a reflection of anything other than the fact that Ballmer, who was ideologically against OSS, has left and so now MS can act rationally and use the OSS community the same way many
76.
by plesner 12y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing with your broader point but I just want to point out that the examples are only obscure and antiquared in English. æ is common in modern Danish and unambiguously a separate letter, as is þ in Icelandic.
77.
by plesner 12y ago
While balanced ternary is nice in all sorts of ways, there's an argument against it being the most efficient representation. You might consider 2 better in practice in the sense that it makes it easier to pick the optimal amount of sta
78.
by plesner 12y ago
If you like the idea of e as a base I wrote a post about how you can do that, at least asymptotically, which might be of interest. http://hummusandmagnets.tumblr.com/post/48829755849/how-to-u...
79.
by plesner 12y ago
The fact that it's legal to say something, that it's uncensored, doesn't mean that it's right. Those are two different things.
80.
by plesner 12y ago
I use scsh every day, not interactively but the scripts that implement my workflow are written in scsh. I don't change them all that often but when have to tweak something or add a command it's an absolute delight. Imagine -- a sh
81.
Sony hack: sacked employees could be to blame, researchers claim(theguardian.com)
3 points by plesner 12y ago|0 comments
82.
by plesner 12y ago
Speaking of which are the greatest generals, according to Livy Hannibal and Scipio Africanus met at a dinner 10 years after Scipio definitively beat Hannibal and that's what their conversation was about. Scipio asked Hannibal, who are
83.
by plesner 12y ago
IANAL but I don't see how using a BSD license automatically makes code FOSS. According to Lawrence Rosen[1] (who IS a lawyer), "Since courts are likely to construe implied grants of license narrowly, a licensee should consider obt
84.
by plesner 12y ago
> So it wouldn't be worth defending at all, if it weren't being attacked on grounds I strongly disagree with, by people who I believe shouldn't gain any more influence over our culture than they already have. I'm havi
85.
by plesner 12y ago
I just stopped reading after I got to that image. Why, with all the photos you could possibly choose, use a sexually suggestive one? And one whose context is the kind of boys-club software engineering we should be doing everything to get aw
86.
by plesner 12y ago
A little rusty on my QM but I believe the key to demonstrating when the collapse happens is that while doing a measurement will collapse the wave function, applying a transformation won't necessarily. An experiment can work something l
87.
by plesner 12y ago
Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that. I have two reactions. Firstly, I find his example contrived. He wants to determine the accuracy of a black box by subtly tweaking how floating-point operations spread throughout that black box b
88.
by plesner 12y ago
The way I hear this is: you have two options. - Either use interval arithmetic which is tricky and may give you useless large bounds, but those bounds are guaranteed to hold. - Or just try all the rounding modes which is less likely to give
89.
by plesner 12y ago
I'm not claiming authority. What I'm saying is: there are two camps, the FP guys and the language guys, and there's not a huge amount of overlap. I belong to the language camp.
90.
by plesner 12y ago
You're right. To be absolutely sure I tried writing a little program that does the thing I describe in the post, https://gist.github.com/plesner/7a13b5c8d269315df645 , and sure enough it breaks down completely, rou

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