stiff

73 ms·

601.
by stiff 14y ago
There is an article on the same topic by Professor Donald Knuth which I find much more insightful: http://mathdl.maa.org/images/upload_library/22/Ford/DonaldKn...
602.
by stiff 14y ago
I am not sure if I disagree with the central thesis of the article, but the argumentation seems rather weak in many places, for example he says: Let's take the example of the number of people who walk into a store and buy a certain product
603.
by stiff 15y ago
We of course can do better then random mutations when it comes to designing systems, but I think the point here is that we can not rewrite our systems from scratch all the time to get the design correct each time a new constraint or require
604.
by stiff 15y ago
I would say how unique the fingerprint really is is actually an important issue, I wonder how much traffic / time does it take before collisions start to occur. In the current setting it would probably suffice if the fingerprint generated o
605.
by stiff 15y ago
Desktop environments on Unix systems on which GIMP was primarily supposed to run have always had virtual desktops, and with virtual desktops you can easily distribute the little tool windows to one desktop and the image windows to other des
606.
by stiff 15y ago
Many people do not mind the multi-window interface and the reason there wasn't a single-window one isn't some stagnation in progress but probably either opposition by the past maintainers to the idea of switching to a single-window one or n
607.
by stiff 15y ago
I think the real issue in the whole debate is that 95%+ of people programming do not understand how programming languages are implemented and haven't been exposed to basic theoretical stuff e. g. to the fact that languages can be ambiguous,
608.
by stiff 15y ago
It is hard for me to understand how one could make so many things in a programming language completely arbitrary - I mean it is natural for a language designer to have some vision of how the language will be used by other people, how will t
609.
by stiff 15y ago
I second this recommendation, actually even if you do not program in Java nor on the JVM. Like no other book it taught me a particular kind of foresight - to analyse the consequences of each small decision being made during implementing som
610.
by stiff 15y ago
Cool article, but I am not a particular fan of using lousy metaphors from physics or mathematics as a way to give more credibility or importance to ideas (regardless of the intentions, this is the result those metaphors end up having on som
611.
by stiff 15y ago
Just save your time and read V. I. Arnolds "On teaching mathematics" instead: http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html He said everything I could possibly want to say as a reply here but probably better then I ever will be able t
612.
by stiff 15y ago
Instead of automatically throwing a 500 on a random, unimportant, uncaught exception, PHP makes a best effort, and most of the time the result is fine. And how precisely does PHP "know" which exceptions are important and which are not? In
613.
by stiff 15y ago
Honestly, what the hell are you talking about? He spend his life explaining why non-free software is unethical and providing free software, what this has to do with liking or not liking and what is arrogant about that? There are objective c
614.
by stiff 15y ago
If you do not find it interesting, do not up-vote it. I find your opinion really boring. Interesting maybe for Bill Patriankos fanatics, but barely explained. Did people just see Patriankos and up vote? Come on.
615.
by stiff 15y ago
The very next sentence in this response from Russ Cox is: "Or maybe all the 32-bit systems will be replaced by 64-bit ones.". So, they do not admit this is a serious problem that needs attention, it is not clear whether they will fix it, wh
616.
by stiff 15y ago
Well, since the people behind Go did not up front say anything about the language/compiler being specifically targeted at 64-bit platforms, I would expect someone more mature from the Go team to step up and say something like "We are sorry,
617.
by stiff 15y ago
The problem itself seems quite serious and I would seriously reconsider using Go if I was interested in it in the first place, but after seeing the way this is treated by the Go "community", I am pretty sure I will never ever even think abo
618.
by stiff 15y ago
Yes, I understand combinatorics is different from probability theory and yes, he is somewhat mistaken in not distinguishing combinatorics from probability theory, but on the other hand the article is clearly meant to be informal, it isn't a
619.
by stiff 15y ago
How is probability theory decidedly non-discrete? As far as I know as long as the number of possible outcomes is discrete (and in CS applications this is the common case) the integration of density functions turns into simple summations and
620.
by stiff 15y ago
This is a rather simplistic account. Newton and Leibniz neither started nor finished the development of calculus, they just happened to make the connection between differentiation and integration which opened up the way for the spectacular
621.
by stiff 15y ago
Unfortunately, at least in my experience, most textbooks are rather unfriendly for self-teaching (including the ones very frequently recommended), especially in the more theoretical fields like algorithms, theory of computation etc. (no sol
622.
by stiff 15y ago
To me it is not bike-shedding, but being rightfully indignant with decisions being made not by merit but from a position of "authority", completely ignoring the opinion of the majority of people presenting pretty logical arguments in favour
623.
by stiff 15y ago
They haven't just "found single neurons which trigger memory". They found the only neurons that were active while experiencing a specific situation and memorizing it and they managed to show that activating only those neurons is enough to t
624.
by stiff 15y ago
Here is a simple explanation of the experiment: 1. The set of neurons that was active only during learning was determined. 2. The genes activated in those neurons were determined. 3. Genetic engineering was done to make the activation of th
625.
by stiff 15y ago
Self-documenting or not, I think the point stands, the standard stuff is very well documented via many means (a nice tutorial, a very comprehensive manual, an emacs lisp tutorial and an emacs lisp reference all ship with Emacs in addition t
626.
by stiff 15y ago
It's hard to expect a really detailed analysis from someone still in high school. On the other hand, it is good to see how the various languages look like from a fresh perspective of someone with relatively little preconceptions from years
627.
by stiff 15y ago
Except the work Steve Wozniak is most remembered for was done with Steve Jobs, so he did in fact work in a team. I think the quote is just a rant against the pains of pushing innovation in corporate environments, that any engineer could wri
628.
by stiff 15y ago
You miss two things here I guess: 1. If your P3P policy is not restrictive enough IE will still refuse to accept cookies. Just having any P3P policy is not enough, so in E and F you have no way to implement the functionality. 2. If there wo
629.
by stiff 15y ago
They in fact cannot even display a message, there is no way AFAIK to distinguish between this situation and someone simply not being logged-in. Even if they could, they would still leave IE users without some functionality. Again, I do not
630.
by stiff 15y ago
The article makes it sound a bit like the big companies are doing something very evil to the users data just because they are evil and greedy. I encountered this problem in my development work, and in reality it's much more complicated, whi

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