xamuel

99 ms·

811.
by xamuel 9y ago
The only way to make C safe without losing performance would be to accompany your C code with a formal proof that it avoids undefined behavior, and use a compiler which refuses to compile the code if the formal proof doesn't validate.
812.
by xamuel 9y ago
>Having them in your toolbox is certainly an advantage over having no choice I disagree. Dependencies, or coworkers, will use them despite your decision not to use them. When a dependency does use them, chances are the documentation is p
813.
by xamuel 9y ago
I was reckless and wrote papers unrelated to my dissertation and submitted without going through my advisor. Fortunately, the bad ones were rejected. The good ones ended up making me well-recognized in some extremely tiny niches, and ultima
814.
by xamuel 9y ago
Not to defend peer review as it is now, but one of the things I've come to value from editorial gatekeepers is that they put the brakes on me publishing things that in later years I might regret. I wrote some pretty mediocre papers as
815.
by xamuel 9y ago
Idea for a novel: Faced with a fierce job market, young academics scramble for prison jobs. To cut costs, they are roomed and boarded with the very prisoners they're there to teach...
816.
by xamuel 9y ago
Could this be used like a poor man's personal hotspot, when data providers refuse to allow tethering?
817.
by xamuel 9y ago
It's worth the learning curve. I can't count the number of times some horrible multithousand-line pandas contortion has been replaced by a dozen lines of Q. After working in Q for awhile, you go look at someone's R code or Pa
818.
by xamuel 9y ago
My IT department got suuuuuper confused just by the "db" in "kdb". It's a database! That means it must have roles and schemas and basically be a clone of Oracle! Here, fill out these 5,000 pages of paperwork!
819.
by xamuel 9y ago
That's a great point. It shines a positive light on the gentleman I spoke with, and a negative light on the industry as a whole (if bs is so rampant that merely admitting not knowing something makes someone shine)
820.
by xamuel 9y ago
Thinking more, it's the misleading names ("machine learning", "AI") that rustle my jimmies so much. Sure, you don't need to know the halting problem to approximately solve MNIST by fitting a million-parameter c
821.
by xamuel 9y ago
Amended that to "undergraduate computer science"
822.
by xamuel 9y ago
For one thing, it suggests that they are actually technicians, not the scientists they're selling themselves as. That's fine if you want a technician (and if they're charging technician's rates).
823.
by xamuel 9y ago
The other day I met with someone who was visiting my city to attend a big ML conference. In the course of our discussion, it transpired this person did not know the Halting Problem. He'd "heard of" Turing machines, but noth
824.
by xamuel 9y ago
"Premature generalization is the root of all evil."
825.
by xamuel 9y ago
Solution: create the pdfs with spaces replaced by underscores. Then as the very last command in the relevant makefile section, insert a bash command to replace those underscores with spaces.
826.
by xamuel 9y ago
Most simple things can be dealt with at a clinic in less time (in-the-door to out-the-door) than you'd spend merely filling out the initial hospital paperwork.
827.
by xamuel 9y ago
In a phrase like "information theory", "theory" means "body of literature", not "unproven hypothesis". Information theory isn't really something that can be invalidated, no more than the Pythagor
828.
by xamuel 9y ago
For me it was GW-BASIC on a Tandy 1000 our family found next to the university dumpster. Kids these days with their fancy-schmancy dropdown menus!
829.
by xamuel 9y ago
Sounds like a recipe for really, really wealthy landlords.
830.
by xamuel 9y ago
Minor correction: many publishers don't even coordinate the reviewers. That's usually left to editors. Editors are generally unpaid, or are paid some trivial insignificant amount.
831.
by xamuel 9y ago
>fundamentally the same closed model prevalent in tech They're totally different. If tech were like academic publishing, software would be developed in publicly-subsidized studios and then given, for free, to for-profit distributors
832.
by xamuel 9y ago
It's not just about laymen. There are quite a few PhD-holders working outside academia. Many of them cannot even access their own papers without paying ridiculous fees.
833.
by xamuel 9y ago
This. When "left-pad" messes up some Facebook-for-dogs startup, that's bad. When "left-pad" messes up the social security system, the army, etc., that's really really bad.
834.
by xamuel 9y ago
Think you might be on to something. When I was growing up, the counter-culture was liberal. Now, liberal is mainstream and the counter-culture is conservative. Never thought I'd see the day when a suit and tie would be the daring, non-
835.
by xamuel 9y ago
ES5 was a trainwreck, but ES2015+ is actually a very good language, if you take the time to study it in depth.
836.
by xamuel 9y ago
The metagame is theoretically more interesting than that. Is it more efficient to initiate the game with one random guess (as people usually do), or is it more efficient to initiate the game by rapidly clicking N random squares and accepti
837.
by xamuel 9y ago
The only thing that would accomplish would be to make people less aware of the problem so when the actual bad guys do actual bad things, fewer people would spot it.
838.
by xamuel 9y ago
Minesweeper has an interesting metagame that gets lost with these "improvements". The metagame is played over many boards and the goal is to get the fastest record. Part of doing that efficiently is quickly identifying boards that
839.
by xamuel 9y ago
>banning glitches How can you even define glitches? In the original Super Mario Brothers, you could dash and then crouch and then slide through narrow tunnels while crouching. It wasn't documented in any official manual or anything
840.
by xamuel 9y ago
Reminds me of a controversial technique discovered in the TAS community. Start saving your savefile, then cut the power mid-write. Usually creates a savefile with a bad checksum, but with certain timing on certain games, can result in playa

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