shasta

70 ms·

661.
by shasta 15y ago
Without arguing with your specific wording of "completely unambiguous and free of arbitrary cutoffs etc.", I think the implicit point you're making that a group of highly intelligent people couldn't sit down and come up with a significantly
662.
by shasta 15y ago
It's not just "oops, typo", but also "oops, someone checked in something proprietary." Being able to scrub the version history before you publish it is more or less is almost a requirement in certain environments.
663.
by shasta 15y ago
The library author needs to remember to use RAII, but the client doesn't need to remember anything (as in his examples). Whereas with 'with' it's the opposite - the client has to remember to use it.
664.
by shasta 15y ago
How do you figure? There isn't an implicit conversion from auto_ptr<T> to T *.
665.
by shasta 16y ago
Well, I think "obviously" was right, since my algorithm would never terminate if no source is ever found that matches the generated binary (there are infinitely many possible programs for most idealized languages). For your idea of modifyin
666.
by shasta 16y ago
Non-termination of some compiler inputs is a red herring. The only modification required to the original algorithm is that the search proceed in parallel (such that every input eventually makes arbitrary progress). I agree with your point
667.
by shasta 16y ago
I think he had in mind that the language is fixed, but not the compiler.
668.
by shasta 16y ago
And yet, if the output you are decompiling is known to come from a particular compiler, the search will terminate.
669.
by shasta 16y ago
We typically reserve the term "undecidable" for the case where there is a mathematical function we are interested in, but it isn't computable by any algorithm. Inverting a many-to-one function is just impossible.
670.
by shasta 16y ago
Self-modifying code doesn't change my argument (see my response to kenjackson for my understanding of the problem) so long as it was produced by the compiler.
671.
by shasta 16y ago
You're right. I initially took the problem to be "given this (specific) compiler output, determine the corresponding compiler input." That seems like a reasonable interpretation of "decompiling". If the problem is instead "determine whet
672.
by shasta 16y ago
I'm still doubtful. I think you're trying to invoke Rice's theorem here, but I don't think it really applies. Compilers don't apply arbitrary transformations that preserve behavior - they only employ transformations that are understood to
673.
by shasta 16y ago
Decompilation is undecidable? "you cannot write an algorithm that would decompile every possible piece of code" I'm not sure what claim is actually being made here, but decompilation of any particular compiler is trivially decidable
674.
by shasta 16y ago
Right, he could donate it to a cause that he feels strongly about. Perhaps an organization that would use the money to advance the state of mathematics. Morally, this seems like what he should have done: he should have taken the money, p
675.
by shasta 16y ago
Productivity isn't necessarily the wrong term here. In the context of individual productivity, your Input is always going to be a unit (say, a day) of your time. While you can split your time between a number of different tasks, your over
676.
by shasta 16y ago
Thank you for coming forward. It's so rare these days to run into someone who would accept a million dollars.
677.
by shasta 16y ago
People commonly make this same mistake when stating "the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack."
678.
by shasta 16y ago
If teachers with experience aren't any better then they shouldn't be paid more for experience (not exactly true with a finite teacher supply, but close enough). Shifting money to newer teachers is going to drive newer teachers away from te
679.
by shasta 16y ago
Right, and yet courts affirm patents where the only novel component is something that can be expressed in software. The reason they do, in my non-expert opinion, is that they see the slippery slope - every invention can be decomposed into
680.
by shasta 16y ago
I don't know that a court would have to rule that way. On your very first step, where you decide the algorithm is not patentable subject matter, I think they could instead take into account the generality of the algorithm in making that de
681.
by shasta 16y ago
Suppose that instead of just programming a general purpose computer, algorithms are oneday developed to program general purpose robots. Should those algorithms be patentable? Or is "a program to separate seeds from cotton" just a mathemati
682.
by shasta 16y ago
You should think of the legal system as a paraconsistent logic. Laws are globally inconsistent, and so arguments are favored that align most closely with established precedent. Arguing that murder for hire is covered by freedom of speech wo
683.
by shasta 16y ago
Here's my algorithm: Return false
684.
by shasta 16y ago
Very long winded article that doesn't really do a good job of laying out a case against software patents. Despite its length, the article doesn't address the core false dichotomy: software is both an encoding of a pure mathematical entity
685.
by shasta 16y ago
I think you might improve this scheme by doing it twice. First, a random sampling of votes cast are used to create a candidate pool. Next, one lucky voter's vote is selected to pick a candidate from the pool. The upside to this is that i
686.
by shasta 16y ago
[...people voting out of curiosity...] If voting reveals the score, then there would need to be a new way to abstain and reveal the score.
687.
by shasta 16y ago
They could still do something. In cases where they have reason to suspect this is going on (which could be based on file usage patterns), they could start asking clients to send the file. Clients that start an upload and then disconnect w
688.
by shasta 16y ago
Dropbox has a simple technical recourse to prevent de-duplication from being used for file sharing - issue a random challenge (a slightly more sophisticated version of "ok, what is the 100th word in the file?") before acknowledging a collis
689.
by shasta 16y ago
It's obviously a rejection, but not obviously for the reason stated. From his point of view, he's just received a forward of an "open letter" that some blogger he's never heard of has already published seeking to gather attention at his ex
690.
by shasta 16y ago
Just to toss out an idea that addresses some of the complaints I've seen: you could always reveal the total score after votes are placed (and you could replace the score with a question mark until then, clicking on which would indicate "I d

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