zhemao

48 ms·

481.
by zhemao 13y ago
Red Hat and VA Linux gave him stock options back in the day. Once they IPOed, Linus became a very wealthy man. Source: Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_torvalds#Later_years )
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by zhemao 13y ago
Could you explain how setup is more difficult on a Mac than on Windows? Other than a decent beginner's text editor, everything you mentioned comes pre-installed on OSX. Trying to install 3rd-party Python libraries on OSX is kind of a p
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by zhemao 13y ago
That's actually hilarious. Very clever. I don't think the people complaining about the name in this thread will appreciate the joke, though.
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by zhemao 13y ago
How on earth did you get any of that from the illustrations? I got the "Snow Leopard is a loner" reference (hah), but I don't see anything deprecatory towards Python or anything suggesting the book will actually teach Ruby sy
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by zhemao 13y ago
Despite the title, I don't think the book actually teaches Ruby. It seems to be more about general programming concepts, with the main character being named Ruby because a) the author herself likes Ruby, and b) Ruby is both the name of
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by zhemao 13y ago
FWIW, there is a Julia library that allows you to call out to R ( https://github.com/lgautier/Rif.jl ). I'm not sure how well-developed it is though. There are also a lot of R-inspired Julia libraries, such as Dataf
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by zhemao 13y ago
Well, most of the syntax he shows here is just calling functions. A lot of dynamic languages have similar syntax for functions calls. But you're right that Julia's syntax is superficially similar, with function definitions like
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by zhemao 13y ago
Welcome to the world of Wired articles. They seem to have a formula of taking open source projects which are interesting in their own right and sensationalizing and overblowing them to ridiculous proportions.
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by zhemao 13y ago
You could also take the cheapskate's way out and open the link in incognito mode. I don't know what the NYT was thinking when they developed such an easily circumventable paywall.
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by zhemao 13y ago
Even when conducting a selfless act, you still want your action to accomplish some goal. Snowden's goal was that the American public would know about the government's activities. This group's goal, presumably, is to give Nort
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by zhemao 13y ago
It's not cheating, it just doesn't really help you. There's a lot of noise. You have to use grep, sed, etc. to find the text that's actually important.
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by zhemao 13y ago
You get some interesting box patterns if you use bitwise operators.
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by zhemao 13y ago
Yeah, that's what I thought. These days you can't even carry a rice cooker around without people freaking out. Imagine the chaos that would ensure from people carrying around concealable "guns" and "shooting" e
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by zhemao 13y ago
> its (C's) lack of any intrinsic support for concurrency If you are writing the operating system kernel, who is going to give you concurrency support? Does rust running on the bare metal still have "spawn" and the other c
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by zhemao 13y ago
I think that is the definition of "systems" the class is using though. If you look at the programming assignments, they are all about implementing programs in userspace and not hacking on the kernel. Yeah, I was confused at first
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by zhemao 13y ago
The additional marginal cost/unit is pretty low, but the non-recurring engineering cost is pretty high, even without having to deal with suppliers and the FCC. Once you've chosen a wi-fi module, where do you put it on the board? H
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by zhemao 13y ago
Oh cool! I did not know that. I'll still be sticking to Arch Linux though. I'd have a hard time adapting to using a non-tiling window manager full time.
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by zhemao 13y ago
Thanks for the clear explanation. And great job on writing a high-performing Bignum library. From these benchmarks, it looks like the go-to for a high-performing, permissively licensed Bignum library.
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by zhemao 13y ago
Speaking of which, is anyone working on allowing Homebrew itself to do binary package management? The lack of binary package management is one of the main reasons I give when people ask me why I mainly use Linux on my Macbook Air. I underst
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by zhemao 13y ago
It took me a few seconds to realize that this was about the pharmaceutical industry and not the Haskell programming language.
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by zhemao 13y ago
I tried that. It's an improvement, but libtommath is still much slower than the other two. digits = 100: 4.31597e-05 s digits = 1000: 0.000249898 s digits = 10000: 0.00252304 s digits = 100000: 0.0618554 s digits
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by zhemao 13y ago
A bunch of people have been asking for benchmarks of LibTommath for comparison. I've ported this benchmark to tommath at https://gist.github.com/zhemao/8204404 . Here are the runs on my machine BSDNT digits =
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by zhemao 13y ago
Not that compilers don't already make these optimizations. But it's pretty hard to map sequential languages like C to a many-core processor with really large SIMD units. Any abstraction that tries to make code still look sequentia
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by zhemao 13y ago
As far as architectural improvements for increasing single-core performance go, we've already reached somewhat of a dead end. Intel x86 chips already do crazy things like rearranging instructions and executing 3-4 instructions at a tim
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by zhemao 13y ago
We already do have to worry about quantum effects. Electron tunneling is a real concern and one of the causes of chip degradation over operating lifetime. Essentially, an excited electron can jump across the transistor gate oxide and get tr
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by zhemao 13y ago
what do you mean by "pretending that voltage numbers and current numbers cancel out in certain ways"? The problem is certainly not that our mathematical models are insufficient. Transistor I-V characteristics have been quite compl
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by zhemao 13y ago
Depends on the ARM CPU. Some variants of ARMv7 architecture have an integer divide function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Arithmetic_in...
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by zhemao 13y ago
The problem with MOOCs is that they have a pretty low retention rate. Sure you can repeat the material until you know it, but how many people actually will? The benefit of having a physical class is that you can turn to the professor or TAs
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by zhemao 13y ago
I think it's also great because it encourages students majoring in other science and engineering fields to learn CS and see how it is applicable to their field of study. I also like how they try to make it fun. My intro CS classes were
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by zhemao 13y ago
Oh I know that a college degree is helpful in general, but I meant this program specifically. Aggregate statistics can sometimes be misleading.

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