scott_s

7 ms·

31.
by scott_s 1y ago
It's not as obvious a win as you may think. Keep in mind that for every binary that gets deployed and executed, it will be compiled many more times before and after for testing. For some binaries, this number could easily reach the hun
32.
by scott_s 2y ago
Murder in the First is one of them, and it is a long favorite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X42yOL5Ah4E&list=PL7Eup7JXSc... It has the best performance I've ever seen by Kevin Bacon, and a solid perfor
33.
by scott_s 2y ago
Look at the Linux kernel. It uses gotos for exactly this purpose, and it’s some of the cleanest C code you’ll ever read. C++ destructors are great for this, but are not possible in C. Destructors require an object model that C does not have
34.
by scott_s 2y ago
I think you overestimate the ability of a tiny community of curators to generate examples to meet the curiosity of students.
35.
by scott_s 2y ago
My first program was indeed C++. In 1998, my high school had a computer lab setup with Turbo C++, and I took a non-AP computer science class. In college, starting in 1999, after entering as a computer science major, we were guided to use Vi
36.
by scott_s 2y ago
I actually think Scratch is fine for 10ish year olds, mainly because all of my above holds true: scratch.mit.edu is an online community where kids can copy, tweak and in general be inspired by and learn from what other kids have done. Your
37.
by scott_s 2y ago
I find the core position of the author unconvincing - that is, the author advocates for non-professional languages for beginners, instead using languages designed specifically for teaching. The main argument put forward in favor of professi
38.
by scott_s 2y ago
Allocating virtual memory is distinct from actually consuming physical memory (RAM). If a process allocates many pages of virtual memory, but never actually reads or writes to that memory, then it's unlikely that any physical memory ba
39.
by scott_s 2y ago
Agreed with the technical content and conclusion. However, I think it is worth pointing out that since C++11, it has had a mechanism to specify (maybe) compile-time computations that are written in plain C++: constexpr, https://
40.
by scott_s 2y ago
Yes, the technique is obviously predated by Ultima Online. The question we're trying to answer is specifically about the etymology of sharding in the database context.
41.
by scott_s 2y ago
I found that paper title as well when looking into this exact question. That paper does not have the number of citations I would expect if it is the source of the term. It's possibly the source, but it's not obviously the source.
42.
by scott_s 2y ago
Potentially. I was also skeptical of this four years ago, and said as much on here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972538 ). However, I then dug into it a bit. From my digging 4 years ago ( https://news.yco
43.
by scott_s 2y ago
I'm less likely to continue this conversation over email. Such is life. :) I think that bringing in CSS is a bridge too far for the case of writing a book. Authors are no longer just writing HTML, they're writing HTML and CSS. A
44.
by scott_s 2y ago
That construct has been called a “record” since, I believe, 1970 in Pascal.
45.
by scott_s 2y ago
If I understand you correctly, you want to throw out rST, and just have users write HTML directly? I see two issues with that: 1. HTML is designed for representing webpages, not books. Your intermediate representation will become HTML'
46.
by scott_s 2y ago
I love the code-first approach. It was a revelation to me when I first read Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python ( https://diveintopython3.net/ ).
47.
by scott_s 2y ago
In case the author reads this: please explicitly cite all of Nystrom's figures. A link is not enough. Even with a citation, I'm not quite comfortable just reusing someone else's figures so many times when they're doing s
48.
by scott_s 2y ago
The author wrote an entire article explaining their use case which answers your question. Short version: they’re writing a book which they want to render to multiple formats with semantic linking between items and different rendering based
49.
by scott_s 2y ago
First, "computer engineering" is already a name for an established discipline. And regarding academic computer scientists, a significant amount of them are on the "systems" side; it would be inaccurate to call their work
50.
by scott_s 2y ago
A similar thing happened to me recently with Target. What I received was obviously damaged, broken seal, broken canister, formula spilling out. I initiated a "damaged product" problem, and they wanted me to return it. So I dumped
51.
by scott_s 2y ago
I read the article, and I think the take you're replying to is still valid. As a company, you need good quality control. What this incident reveals is that Amazon does not do good quality control. If you outsource that part of your b
52.
by scott_s 2y ago
Any source on that? It sounds unlikely to me. There was a supercomputer that IBM built for Los Alamos that used the Cell processor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrunner_(supercomputer)
53.
by scott_s 2y ago
Yes. My research lab in grad school had a cluster of 24 PS3s. The back of that rack was hot .
54.
by scott_s 2y ago
I found the arguments compelling. The discussion on "Effective types" and C not having a proper concept of objects is key. Another way to think about it: even if you had defined constructors and destructors for a struct, you have
55.
by scott_s 2y ago
Many computer scientists could literally show you a git history. All of the papers I have written were done so in Latex, and tracked in some version control system. More recent ones have been git.
56.
by scott_s 2y ago
Ah, in my context, N is the number of live allocated objects that the memory allocator knows about. If you use a data structure like a red-black tree to track the metadata, the work you do traversing and maintaining the tree will grow log N
57.
by scott_s 2y ago
I'm really not sure what you're overall point here is. Yes, I agree with you. Your function is O(2^64) which is technically O(1). Your point, which I agree with, is that's completely useless information. It does not help our
58.
by scott_s 2y ago
This function is O(1): https://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/streamflow.... . All other tree operations are also constant, because the fact that it is a 3-level tree is hardcoded. Asymptotic bo
59.
by scott_s 2y ago
> In a general purpose allocator, you can just store allocation metadata next to a payload so the lookup from a pointer address becomes O(1). Yes, but the downside is that now allocator metadata pollutes the cache. It's super effici
60.
by scott_s 2y ago
> For that it would be necessary to make a reverse lookup from pointer address to allocation handle, which would require something like a red-black tree covering the address space, which would no longer be 0(1). If anyone has ideas on th

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