rwallace

52 ms·

421.
by rwallace 10y ago
'We' is a bit vague here. Are you this guy's boss? If not, you shouldn't start a feud with a peer. It doesn't do anyone any favors. Get on with your job and let everyone else get on with theirs. If so, decide whethe
422.
by rwallace 10y ago
A common cause of this is 32-bit x86 builds that use x87, which uses 80-bit precision which sounds like a good thing except that it only does it while values are in registers, which from the programmer's viewpoint means the precision m
423.
by rwallace 10y ago
I didn't downvote you, but I'm not seeing the problem here. It's great that we have these fantastically powerful GPUs, which of course don't use text files as their internal representation, but then we have to tell them
424.
by rwallace 10y ago
It doesn't reliably do something sane. IIRC, LLVM in that case just falls back to reading the file into an array the ordinary way. That only happens one time in 4096, so there's no practical difference to performance.
425.
by rwallace 10y ago
Well it's a true statement, even if made in an irascible way. If you're going to insult the guy, at least wait until he makes a false statement.
426.
by rwallace 10y ago
Actually there have been a couple of times when people called me a cunt and it was funny in context. Now granted, whether this article is that kind of context, is a different question.
427.
by rwallace 10y ago
To clarify, any time I in any way praise floating point, I'm always talking about double precision. I think single precision floating point should never have been invented, and given that it unfortunately was, it's best to behave
428.
by rwallace 10y ago
Back in the late eighties, early nineties, I was of the opinion that fixed point is really the way to go, the only thing holding it back was lack of adequate compiler support. Until I realized what would actually happen if the world started
429.
by rwallace 10y ago
Well yes, it's clear that repurposing '=' for assignment confuses or at least annoys many academics , no disputing that. But your earlier claim was that it confuses children , which it certainly does not. (Source: it didn&#
430.
by rwallace 10y ago
I'm guessing for the same reason casts are slow; they're not bottlenecks for the most common number crunching workloads, so it doesn't occur to anyone they might be bottlenecks for somewhat less common ones.
431.
by rwallace 10y ago
> I suspect the main slowdown of the naive floating point algorithm is the repeated multiply/divides more than the cast to integer, not the casts. You'd be surprised. Last time I tried it, casting a floating point number to an
432.
by rwallace 10y ago
I can't comment on the Bach or Escher parts, but he does a very creditable job summarizing Gödel's work for a lay audience. Of course if you want to take up this stuff professionally, more in-depth study will be required, that goe
433.
by rwallace 10y ago
I would prefer to use Chrome because of the process per tab model, but the second time a Chrome update started the browser intermittently crashing, I ran out of patience and switched to Firefox as my primary browser.
434.
by rwallace 10y ago
One concern is that there is a limit to how reliable a single box can really be, no matter what sort of engineering you throw at it. Consider http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Designed-For-Reliability - because the box w
435.
by rwallace 10y ago
However, because SHA-256 is so widely used, efficient implementations are available off the shelf; I've even seen talk about providing it in hardware on the CPU. Given that, you might as well just go ahead and use it.
436.
by rwallace 10y ago
Well yes, engineers do need to learn how to stand their ground - over things like pay and working conditions. But no amount of standing your ground will let you overrule the CTO on a corporate strategic decision, no matter how mistaken. As
437.
by rwallace 10y ago
If you are unusual, well and good, but that makes you, well, unusual. For my own part, I would like to believe all sorts of things about what I would do in dire straits, but I'll remain agnostic unless and until I get to find out. Anyw
438.
by rwallace 10y ago
I did answer your question. As for your answer, well, the vast majority of people do not choose to stand on principle when faced with the likelihood of falling from a fourth floor window, falling into a death spiral of unemployment and home
439.
by rwallace 10y ago
Good article, brought back memories! A small correction: > 56 kilobits per second just before the technology was effectively wiped out by wide-area Internet around the end of the 1990s, which brought in speeds of a megabit per second and
440.
by rwallace 10y ago
> What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Indeed, and many employees have found themselves assigned duties that were not at all what they expected, and damaging to their health or otherwise harmful, b
441.
by rwallace 10y ago
> The guy was a highly paid executive. I don't understand how he could have been under duress. (Is Elon Musk really hiring desperate people who have no options?) That in combination with the claim that he asked other employees to co
442.
by rwallace 10y ago
An "agreement" made under duress is not actually an agreement, therefore not morally binding. A clause in your employment contract is only actually an agreement if: 1. Society defines having a job as an optional luxury. 2. The emp
443.
by rwallace 10y ago
> None of the business analysts could remember what this statistics feature was used for, so we tried to find out who uses it. We looked at the logs of the last 6 months and found out: It was never used! Not a single time! I've seen
444.
by rwallace 10y ago
It's perfectly okay to say, if you want to get the most out of this program, you need a big GPU rig. The price of such should come down over time. That leaves the question of how to get the data. If you make it optional, will enough pe
445.
by rwallace 10y ago
> How do you know you need an antibiotic? An excellent question. If house calls aren't going to be brought back, the best I can think of is to allow consulting over the phone. > If you really are so severely unwell that you can&#
446.
by rwallace 10y ago
Well, in this case it's not that I'm saying 'yes, holding onto a personal supply of antibiotics is the right answer', it's that I'm saying there is a real problem to which the official advice offers no solution
447.
by rwallace 10y ago
Other countries have followed the American example with regard to lots of bad policies. They might very well follow it with regard to a good policy. At least trying would be much better than just throwing our hands in the air.
448.
by rwallace 10y ago
To play devil's advocate, since this doesn't seem to get mentioned often: 1. People ending their antibiotic course early is a drop in the ocean compared to the abuse of antibiotics in agriculture. 2. The advice to finish the cours
449.
by rwallace 10y ago
Empirically, it doesn't just shuffle the problem around, it dramatically reduces it. On Google Code, every time you tried to create a project, the name would always be taken. On Github, every time you try to create a project, you can g
450.
by rwallace 10y ago
One of the factors driving insane real estate prices is low density, partly to accommodate cars. Another factor is bad zoning laws, tolerated on the assumption that cars will be used. And if the bus service in your neighborhood is bad, that

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