psykotic

58 ms·

541.
by psykotic 15y ago
> Most don't know that (I am one who does) and I never hear it advocated that they should. You and me must not be hanging out in the same circles. I hear it advocated all the time. You can't claim to understand how CPUs work if you can'
542.
by psykotic 15y ago
> DRAM architecture fu is just as important, IMHO Well, I happen to know about that stuff out of interest, but I wouldn't claim it's very useful knowledge for a programmer. The top-level cache (L2 or L3) communicates in big chunks with
543.
by psykotic 15y ago
If you read back to my comment in that thread, I explicitly touched on the GPU vs CPU issue. They were benchmarking and ranking algorithms based on CPU performance while allegedly investigating the problem for GPU implementation. Pretty sil
544.
by psykotic 15y ago
A gaming PC is already so fast compared to consoles that I'm generally not super concerned about those discrepancies. Compared to the big gains in going from no SIMD to SSE3-level SIMD, it's very minor. As I already said, if you have a few
545.
by psykotic 15y ago
Intrinsics are about the same level of readability in my experience. Although it's annoying that compilers tend to pile on prefixes to the instruction mnemonics and thereby make everything longer. If that's a big problem for you, just use y
546.
by psykotic 15y ago
> SIMD assembly can give performance improvements of 10-20x or even higher for many types of real-world code. Using SIMD intrinsics is often preferable. For set-in-stone inner loops, the extra performance you can wring out by hand-writi
547.
by psykotic 15y ago
Could you be more precise? Are you repeating the "it's impossible to voluntarily place a work in the public domain" canard? There are well-established precedents in the US and Europe for authors waiving copyright. See djb's FAQ: http://cr.
548.
by psykotic 15y ago
That rhetorical stance you take is particularly irksome when someone is talking about giving away their own code. He isn't whining that library X isn't under the GPL/LGPL. He's saying that'd he'd rather just give away his code entirely with
549.
by psykotic 15y ago
> "Logic programming is a cool idea, but not that useful for most things" would be a better explanation for why it's not popular today. It strikes me as a rather narrow and dogmatic AI technique; and one that you're better off reimpleme
550.
by psykotic 15y ago
I'm certainly not claiming I could have done better. But the Pentium 4 was such a spectacular failure and Intel's competition managed to navigate that transition well enough that I feel a certain amount of pointing and laughing is justified
551.
by psykotic 15y ago
Yes, it's as you say. Signed arithmetic is a minefield in C. Here is a case that also explains why my intransitivity example for simplicity used INT_MIN+1 rather than INT_MIN: // buffer size must be >= ceil(log10(INT_MAX)) + 2
552.
by psykotic 15y ago
// Slimey cheap key comparator. int32 cmpkey(const void *key1, const void *key2) { return (int32)((intptr_t)key1 - (intptr_t)key2); } Any C programmer's spidey sense should tingle when they see a ternary comparison
553.
by psykotic 15y ago
The point is that they grossly underestimated the impact of the power wall. They were aware of the power issue and you can find early papers by Pentium 4 architects like Doug Carmean which address that concern and make it seem like they hav
554.
by psykotic 15y ago
You don't need to know much mathematics, but a solid practical understanding of 3D geometry is a bread-and-butter skill in game programming, no matter your speciality.
555.
by psykotic 15y ago
I'm pretty sure the literal meaning of altiora (cf. altitude) is height. Of course, depth and height have very similar connotations when applied to intellectual pursuits. The breadth/depth pairing is more idiomatic in English, but my readin
556.
by psykotic 15y ago
Now you know how non-programmers feel when they overhear programmers talking shop. :)
557.
by psykotic 15y ago
Polynomial splines are pretty shitty compared to rational splines for animation and modeling, but they both have the problem of non-constant speed. It gets much worse with higher degree curves. You fix that by letting the animator separatel
558.
by psykotic 15y ago
There's a closed-form expression for the arc length of a quadratic Bezier segment. Maybe that's what he had in mind. The integrand is sqrt(x'(t)^2 + y'(t)) dt, where x(t) and y(t) are quadratic in t and hence x'(t) and y'(t) are linear, so
559.
by psykotic 15y ago
Fun fact: The Pentium 4 was originally anticipated by Intel to eventually run at 10 GHz after a few years of process shrink. Seriously.
560.
by psykotic 15y ago
Oh, I meant the cosmetic bugs specifically. And to be clear, I'm not saying they shouldn't have been reported. Issues like that _should_ be fixed. I just found it all vaguely amusing for some reason because unless I keep myself in check I'm
561.
by psykotic 15y ago
Cool experiment! I found it amusing (and unsurprising) that the distribution of reported bugs matches what you would find in code reviews within most companies: a small handful of genuine issues buried in a giant pile of superficial nitpick
562.
Dangerous Optimizations and the Loss of Causality(securecoding.cert.org)
3 points by psykotic 15y ago|0 comments
563.
by psykotic 15y ago
Oh man, this kind of thing drives me up the wall! Yes, differential pricing can be a boon to buyer and seller alike. If the seller could offer their product only at a single price point, they'd be forced to price it out of the range of some
564.
by psykotic 15y ago
And those two would be considered among the least piratic! The English Crown granted licenses that gave commercial vessels the rights to any plunder from Spanish ships and settlements. It was effectively a loose mercenary affiliation. Deal:
565.
by psykotic 15y ago
You go right ahead, but I'm not going to discuss the article's main point until I've had time to read up on the relevant background from other sources. Facts are not ornamental adjoints to an analysis but the very stuff out of which it is m
566.
by psykotic 15y ago
This! The empty function is the function whose graph is the empty set. When you stop thinking of functions as symbolic expressions and make friends with the empty set, it's all clear as crystal. The empty set has perplexed a lot of people o
567.
by psykotic 15y ago
Thanks, that makes more sense. The article gave a different impression: > The British government threatened to freeze Icelander savings and checking accounts. Unless I'm totally daft, this is saying the British government was threatenin
568.
by psykotic 15y ago
You're thinking of #flipCode and the network was EnterTheGame.
569.
by psykotic 15y ago
I'm totally not qualified to talk about this, but since I'm just writing an off-the-cuff comment on a website, I can at least give you my impression. Don't take my word for it, I'm probably full of shit. Keep in mind that the debt here mean
570.
by psykotic 15y ago
Is that the author's own clarification? That lessens my confidence in him. Yes, it is a EU candidate country, but its formal ties to the EU (EEA, Schengen, etc) have been much closer and longer-lasting than those of any other candidate coun

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