weberc2

72 ms·

751.
by weberc2 7y ago
> Services provided by governments optimize for vastly different outcomes than the private sector. It also seems that many people harshly judge government services while they ignore real problem that occur when those services are privati
752.
by weberc2 7y ago
Who do you suppose hired those contractors? Why does the government have worse luck than the private sector when it comes to hiring competent contractors? Why is there a meme among contractors about how easy it is to overcharge the public s
753.
by weberc2 7y ago
You're right that people only notice the things that don't work well, but I think it's a lot more than going to the DMV and taxes. Road construction that cones-off 2 lanes out of 3 for 40 miles and 6 months while there's
754.
by weberc2 7y ago
Earnest question: do econ departments advertise themselves as a pure science?
755.
by weberc2 7y ago
> Many people think there is no inherent value in government because that has been sold to them for the past 50+ years. I think most Americans' experience with government is bad. Especially with taxes--they won't even tell yo
756.
by weberc2 7y ago
Your argument is puzzling. Reference counting is a particularly slow kind of GC. It makes you spend more time freeing memory, not less. And it does nothing to reduce the cost of allocations either. On the contrary, a generational GC can all
757.
by weberc2 7y ago
> I don't think anyone does outside of American media In what way does the American media "believe" Jesus is white?
758.
by weberc2 7y ago
The Celts used to live all over Europe; they were displaced and assimilated during various migrations, especially the Germanic tribes migrating south. "Ancestral Journeys" by Jean Manco provides a great overview based on linguisti
759.
by weberc2 7y ago
Thanks for sharing that wiki link. This paragraph was particularly interesting to me. > In 2010, Hawaii became the first state to ban the possession, sale and distribution of shark fins. The law became effective on 1 July 2011.[95] Simil
760.
by weberc2 7y ago
Only for Java, not Python. And in any case, the cache performance will still be worse, but that’s a more minor cost.
761.
by weberc2 7y ago
Well said, although that's not the only thing at issue; the prominent tradeoff for that generally smaller (or less powerful) set of recourses is that you have easy, automatic memory management for the default case. I.e., you don't
762.
by weberc2 7y ago
Agreed, although to pick a nit (because it's an interesting nit IMO) "Classes" is orthogonal to allocation. In C++ you choose where you allocate your class and in Java the escape analyzer chooses for you. C# and Go have a GC
763.
by weberc2 7y ago
> And the lack of evidence in this area suggests to me that the safety benefit is indeed negligible. It should only suggest to you that it is prohibitively expensive to control for all of the different variables in order to provide a rem
764.
by weberc2 7y ago
Rust's type system supports any type of resource, not just memory. The same isn't true for garbage collectors (and no, "finalizers" is not correct resource management). Also, real enum types (including optional) and patt
765.
by weberc2 7y ago
Do you have evidence for this? Specifically C++ and Rust tend to be written for applications where tight control over memory is necessary and so any sample like you're describing is going to be biased by these carefully tuned C++/
766.
by weberc2 7y ago
C++ still needs to allocate and free memory too and for all we know naive C++ might spend more time in memory management code than a GC language.
767.
by weberc2 7y ago
It’s more safe than those languages because of its type system. Memory safety isn’t the only kind of safety, after all. :) NOTE: maybe the parent edited his comment between my reply and yours?
768.
by weberc2 7y ago
Could be. I’m not that familiar.
769.
by weberc2 7y ago
Thanks for the explanation; I hadn't heard that term before. :)
770.
by weberc2 7y ago
That could be. Although I'm not familiar with any languages that are fast and have a GC and easy C interop. At least none of the major VM languages or (non-embedded) scripting languages. Maybe D or some other similarly non-mainstream l
771.
by weberc2 7y ago
Does this hold for Go? The tracing is the only relevant cost and tracing is very, very fast, so I would expect this to be negligible? Or am I misunderstanding the hypothetical scenario?
772.
by weberc2 7y ago
Wasn't trying to be pedantic; whatever is "entirely clear in context" is not entirely clear to me at all. Did he use a term that I'm unfamiliar with or did he use the term I'm familiar with in a way that is incongru
773.
by weberc2 7y ago
The speed isn't from "not checking things that other compilers do"; it's from not performing more agressive optimizations.
774.
by weberc2 7y ago
Well said. Also worth noting that most of the languages like CPython are very slow because many optimizations are now prohibitively difficult given the "easy C-interop" constraint.
775.
by weberc2 7y ago
I do wish Go would do this. The fast compiler thing is fantastic, but I think we can have the best of all worlds by supporting a --release flag, and I think Go is large enough now that we can justify the extra maintenance cost of dealing wi
776.
by weberc2 7y ago
I occassionally hit this bug, but it's pretty easy to spot after I introduced it a couple of times. Allocations in Go are slow enough that I usually do this by default unless I know that performance absolutely will never be critical (e
777.
by weberc2 7y ago
This isn't simpler at all. Managing CGo is many times more difficult than a little optimizing. If you're able to write the hot path more performantly in C or similar, then you're perfectly capable of optimizing the Go version
778.
by weberc2 7y ago
What are "higher order programming languages"? Did you mean "higher level programming languages"? If so, no, the point is that you can program more abstractly, almost always at the expense of performance. EDIT: Downvoter
779.
by weberc2 7y ago
This is pretty much what the environmentalists were preaching when I was growing up. Not sure why to be honest. In retrospect it certainly seems like "but the landfills!" is the lesser of all evils.
780.
by weberc2 7y ago
Ugh. Sorry for the typos. Missed the “edit” window...

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