zwegner

26 ms·

181.
by zwegner 12y ago
Hey, thanks for the critiques, a lot of them I don't really have a good answer for. A lot of these issues are not fully clear in my head (I haven't really CPU design either besides very basic college level VHDL stuff), and I'
182.
by zwegner 12y ago
The article doesn't really seem to answer the question the title says it does. Of course there's the well-known reasons, nonlinearity of power vs frequency scaling, diminishing returns in hardware design, etc. But there are others
183.
by zwegner 12y ago
Depends on the application, of course. Haswell introduced some really cool new instructions (both the Bit Manipulation set as well as the Software Transactional Memory set). Don't have any numbers off-hand, but these can definitely spe
184.
by zwegner 12y ago
Another good example is C++, std::map is (usually) a red-black tree.
185.
by zwegner 12y ago
Huh? Alanis Morissette is a master of irony. She wrote an entire song about irony that doesn't contain a single ironic situation. It's so thick you can taste it.
186.
by zwegner 12y ago
> Very cheap for the companies. But at least a good precedent to discourage such practices in the future. does not compute
187.
by zwegner 12y ago
Seems like it might be an appropriate place for representative democracy. Every year or so, everyone votes on a new CEO, etc. There's probably a lot of decisions that could still be left up to workers, but I agree that having some clea
188.
by zwegner 12y ago
I agree with most of the points of the article (finding a balance for testing, naming, writing readable code, etc.) I'm not a fan of the tone, though. I might consider myself a "rockstar" programmer, if not for the fact that
189.
by zwegner 12y ago
Consider me nerd-sniped. I typed the last post on my phone, but just had to bust out the laptop to check. Noticed a couple bugs I had: the for-loop initializers need to be set, and there needs to be an empty statement after the cont: label.
190.
by zwegner 12y ago
All those if statements inside loops... would be a lot cleaner (and faster!) to just use a single goto statement: goto cont; for (; ; ++z) for (; x <= z; ++x) for (; y <= z; ++y) { if (x*x + y*y == z*z) return
191.
What's Wrong With GNU Make?(conifersystems.com)
6 points by zwegner 12y ago|0 comments
192.
by zwegner 12y ago
Speaking of "real autonomy", did you put any further thought into your idea of Autonomy Funds[0]? I thought it was very intriguing, if perhaps hard to get off the ground. Definitely would be a good antidote to the kind of SV crazi
193.
by zwegner 12y ago
Awesome! I've been waiting for a long time for the HN guys to implement this (though dang notes in a sibling comment it's probably coming, sweet!), didn't even think about greasemonkey... I've made a few tiny edits so th
194.
by zwegner 13y ago
That runs into the scalability problem that I mentioned--someone (say, a Mechanical Turk user) can solve that problem once, and put it in a database. To avoid this, there needs to be a way to generate them cheaply, so you pretty much need a
195.
by zwegner 13y ago
That's what I was referring to with services only allowing one (or N) accounts per person. A spammer could use the signature multiple times, but would need new email providers for every single account. And as an uncle (?) comment point
196.
by zwegner 13y ago
Presumably a service would only allow one (or a few) accounts per actual person. The end user will still need some amount of security. I had in mind some challenge-response mechanism, like: Person signs government ID number with public
197.
by zwegner 13y ago
Good point. I imagine that detecting such behavior will also be pretty difficult. It's one thing in a forum, where you'd maybe want to discriminate against idiots (but that would still leave you open to the problem of shills/
198.
by zwegner 13y ago
This particular issue (AI performance on captchas) is really quite fascinating. It's an arms race, but the problem is, only one side can win. Google is claiming they have improved their system in some (understandably) unspecified way,
199.
by zwegner 13y ago
Oops, just realized I mixed up dynamic/lexical scoping, and it's too late to edit. Python uses lexical scoping.
200.
by zwegner 13y ago
The "consuming generator" problem is a good point, but their workaround misses a better solution. In Python 3, range() returns a range object, which has a __contains__ method, so you can use "in" just fine without consum
201.
by zwegner 13y ago
Yep. One of my favorite examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis Part of a pretty cool Wikipedia category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mind-altering_parasit...
202.
by zwegner 13y ago
As it will be then. Two big advantages are referential transparency and memory aliasing. The sort of reordering of loops/memory/whatever like described on the Halide page is just the beginning of the kind of optimizations that are
203.
by zwegner 13y ago
I'm not going to say it's trivial, but I will definitely claim that beating C is very doable, and will happen in less than ten years, if I have any say in the matter. Obviously this claim should be taken with a grain of salt, but
204.
by zwegner 13y ago
That looks pretty sweet, thanks for the link. This is where I feel functional languages will have a huge advantage in coming years. As side effects are reified and put in the compiler's control, they can be modified and optimized autom
205.
by zwegner 13y ago
Don't forget those rootkits... (For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... )
206.
by zwegner 13y ago
The reason you're wrong is that I wasn't talking about C :) Yes, for any current programming language, humans do have some advantage by being able to utilize both low- and high-level semantic information that simply cannot be comm
207.
by zwegner 13y ago
Absolutely--I see this as a failure of current programming languages and compiler technology, though, and not a fundamental barrier. We should aim to take away all the impediments to the compiler's job, like the aliasing problem you po
208.
by zwegner 13y ago
> I'm pretty sure that generating perfectly efficient SSE from SSE intrinsics is an NP-complete problem. So a clever programmer will always be able to boost performance more than a compiler. Being NP-complete doesn't really hav
209.
by zwegner 13y ago
Well, I definitely prefer the rebasing route, but with the caveat that everyone's working on the same branch, so there's not much divergence. The only rebasing occurs when somebody commits before you do, and it's only your ow
210.
by zwegner 13y ago
Ha, nice, there's two options that definitely would've simplified my code (--numstat and --no-merges).

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