tmoertel

42 ms·

481.
by tmoertel 13y ago
The point I'm hoping to make is that there is no universal < operator on workflows that lets us rank them in a way that makes sense for most teams. Different teams necessarily have their own, widely varying < operators, and apply
482.
by tmoertel 13y ago
I wasn't contesting the original article's workflow (which is rather like the one I use most often), but picking one of the hotly contested battlegrounds of the Git Workflow Wars – To Rebase or Not To Rebase – and using it as an
483.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Thanks for your comment. To clarify, my comment was about " discussions of Git workflows." For example, the very discussion occurring here on HN in the wake of the original post. In this discussion, you will find numerous commen
484.
by tmoertel 13y ago
The perennial problem with discussions of Git workflows is the underlying belief that there exists, if only we can find it, the One True Workflow. This belief is false. Git is a powerful, general tool that lends itself to just about any wo
485.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Incredible! That C64 archive is immense . From the collection description [1]: There are an astounding 134,000+ disk, cassette and documentation items in this Commodore 64 collection, including games, demos, cracktros, and compilations.
486.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Another great book, starting with the basics and then exploring a wide range of mathematical subjects, is The Princeton Companion to Mathematics : http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html It's fun to just flip
487.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Even if you can't go any functional, knowing FP has benefits. As an example, 25 years ago I did work on 8-bit video games. About as far from FP as you can get. Back then, I filled many sheets of paper convincing myself that rearrangi
488.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Why should you care about functional programming? Here are a few reasons: 1. It's different, especially from what it seems you're already doing. Therefore it is likely that if you do FP in earnest, you will learn new problem-sol
489.
by tmoertel 13y ago
> It's quite hard to, for example, change the system time when running a test which often means that you have to abstract out that part from the method you're testing and pass it through as a parameter. Passing the time into yo
490.
by tmoertel 13y ago
You have a quick mind to spot that edge case! See footnote 2 of the article for how we handled it.
491.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Thanks for this insight! I never would have seen it had you not told me. (I'm an engineering guy and switching between time-per-unit and units-per-time is so automatic for me that I didn't realize it wasn't automatic for eve
492.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Thanks for your feedback. (Author here.) By my calculations (which I'll machine-check now with Maxima), the 30% and 70% speed-up claims are sound. First, let's fire up Maxima: $ maxima Maxima 5.30.0 http://max
493.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Yes! Haskell is a delight for optimization because you can use algebraic reasoning and calculation to derive more efficient code. For example, if I had the following code: (concat . reverse . map reverse) strs I could easily rep
494.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Even if the buffers were vanilla Strings, and there were no pre-allocation, the patch would still have fixed the quadratic-runtime problem. Consider that, for vanilla Strings, the buffer ops are implemented like so: buf_append bufOps
495.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Yes. And for the same reason, that's why you sometimes have to do things in assembly. No compiler is going to go against its own grain when generating code. Yet, sometimes, that's what you must do to eke out the necessary performa
496.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Actually, in the US military, it's common to refer to the first hour of the day as zero. As in, "zero hundred thirty hours" for 30 minutes after midnight.
497.
by tmoertel 13y ago
The original question asked about C++, but in the old days of assembly language, accessing "out of scope" data from the stack was fairly useful. For example, Apple II computers had a series of slots into which expansion cards coul
498.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Here's the thing. Software is profitable at much lower quality levels than the hardware market will tolerate. As a result, most hardware is designed through a process that could accurately be called engineering, even though most softw
499.
by tmoertel 13y ago
Software-development estimates are regularly off by a large margin for two reasons. First, the problem is inherently hard. Second, social and business pressures bias the estimates downward. Why is the problem inherently hard? To see why, le
500.
by tmoertel 13y ago
The files we have today on the computer contain font programs . These programs can be interpreted in software to yield the needed fonts (= face-size combinations) on demand. Edited to add: But none of this changes the fact that Adobe Garam
501.
by tmoertel 13y ago
UPDATE: I descended into the basement to retrieve my copy of Cleeton, Pitkin, and Cornwell's General Printing , 3rd edition, 1963. (Back then Glen U. Cleeton was the Dean of the School of Printing Management at the Carnegie Institute
502.
by tmoertel 13y ago
The article seems to get it wrong. It claims, for example, that Garamond 3, Adobe Garamond, and ITC Garamond are "all the same typeface, but each is a different font." They are actually different typefaces, each based on Garamon
503.
by tmoertel 13y ago
If you want a nice fire hose of computing papers and books, check out ACM Computing Reviews: http://computingreviews.com/
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by tmoertel 13y ago
I like this rule for one reason beyond those the author mentioned: it benefits the people you're asking for help, by sharing with them problems that have been pre-qualified as interesting.
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by tmoertel 13y ago
When writing about technical subjects, however, you often need redundancy. People sometimes misunderstand concepts. When they do, the only thing that will alert them to their error is the second explanation crashing into the first.
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by tmoertel 13y ago
It should be pointed out that what's actually being discussed is whether TDD is better than not writing tests. What's not being discussed is whether, if you commit to writing tests, there are more effective ways of doing it.
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by tmoertel 13y ago
Arbitrarily label the two envelopes A and B. Assume that no envelope is empty. Let «X» denote the amount of money in envelope X. We are told that either «A» = 2«B» or «B» = 2«A». Because these propositions are exhaustive and mutually exclu
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by tmoertel 13y ago
I've used prefix trees to represent matching rules for network-routing rulesets. They're also handy when you need to compute intersections because you can perform a parallel depth-first search over two prefix trees and prune from
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by tmoertel 13y ago
The original article uses Java, which makes it harder to see how simple it can be to make and use prefix trees. For comparison, here's the Python code to create a prefix tree from a set of words: def prefix_tree(words): d
510.
by tmoertel 13y ago
I can understand how people can read an article like this and think it's too much work or money to get a good cup of coffee. And many folks, including lots of programmers, view coffee as a utility beverage and are okay drinking anythin

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