From the original interview:
"The only advantage you had over a newcomer was that you were prepared to read the manual."
So true still today. I am always astonished by how much time some programmers are wasting by not reading manuals and how much of a competitive advantage even basic reading comprehension and willingness to do so is.
Variants of large scale Passive Radar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar
was supposed to beat first generation stealth.
I suppose it's a closely guarded secret if it still does for the more modern systems.
This also disrupts the standard tactics of taking out the radars first to let non stealthy planes follow.
They optimize away unnecessary monitoring inside the traces once the types have been propagated there. So only slow path code does the monitoring. All the active traces should get stable types without extra monitoring at some point.
Essentially it's moving doing type propagation in "batch"
to a "dynamic trigger" system. How effective that is really depends on the programs (or the programing style) and how often they really change types.
I hope it's not just optimized for the usual benchmarks, but some real code.
Apparently that gets spent on all kinds of things, just not the actual education the students need. At >30k a year you could really expect that they would hire enough real teachers.
Less jobs for lawyers generally seems like a good thing to me. Like investment banks lawyers do not create much (any?) value. That's a good sign for society. There may be some hope left.
Now it's not good for those who wasted a lot of money on a law school. They made a bad decision and will adjust.
Really good point. That always annoys me with most formulas. I have to dig back several paragraphs (with no scope/indexing tool) to figure out what the individual variables mean.
And a lot of papers do not even bother to explain some variable but just assume the reader already knows it.
One of the earlier commenters made this mistake very prominently enthusing over Maxwell's equations.
Yes of course the formula looks better shorter when you already know what it means. But that completely misses the point that it was written down to explain it to someone who doesn't already know what it means. If you already do you're the wrong target audience.
Longer variable names would help. Or for online paper just have a tooltip that opens the paragraph that explains what the variable mans when you hover over it would also help a lot.
Or maybe some color coding to easily find it (there was a recent link here recent explaining FFT which used this trick very successfully)
But I guess most Mathematicians don't bother because they only write for a small circle of colleagues anyways.
Don't use a off the shelf database. They are overkill for this.
This only needs a very single table key->value store where every transaction is only a single access. I would just map it to a hash table mapped directly to the raw disk. Doesn't need transactions with a log if done right.
The hash spreads out the allocation, no information leaks for the allocation. If you don't have a log there are no time stamps.
Modern disks are big enough that you dont need to worry about resizing the hash table. And the random salt makes collisions unlikely enough.
Don't do your own locking. Let the caller pass in state. Push locking to the caller. Don't have your own global state that would need hidden locks, but instead let the caller handle it with arguments.
That is similar how the STL does it, but not like stdio
I'm not sure I fully agree.
- For simple libraries it's likely good advice.
- But it encourages big locks and poor scaling. It may be right for desktop apps, but not necessarily for server code that needs to scale. For some things that's fine, but you don't want that for the big tree or hash table that your multi threaded server is built around on.
- It avoids the problems of locks being non composable, that is the caller may need to know which order the locks need to be called, to avoid deadlock. Actually it doesn't avoid it, just pushes it to someone else.
However if you make sure the library is always the leaf and never calls back the library locks will be generally at the bottom of the lock hierarchy.
True for the html layout, but not the content (the projects/code). For a code site layout in the end is very secondary.
Besides github is doing its best to compete on the "largest number of useless buttons/toolbars on the webpage" front with sf. I also found that finding something based on keywords works better on sf than on guthub.
Not sure about sourceforge. It lost its lustre to github, but there are still a lot of good project there.
freshmeat/freecode is really great. Lots of great software there (I liked the old name better)
Browsing the freecode frontpage is far more satisfying than the HN page because it's all about real code that does something and very little hype and BS.
Universities are still extremely expensive, just with the people (grad students and post docs) who do most of the actual science getting very little of the money. It's just extremely unfair and calling it a "pyramid scheme" is charitable.
Overall universities are just extremely inefficient. Where does all the money go to?
The person in the article who went into an administrative job may have been onto something.
Part of the problem is also the biology/chemistry bubble.
In the 90ies these areas expanded extremely and now they are downsizing to more reasonable levels again.
Reminds me of that old quote
"social media had popularized non-fact based reality"
Macro is a mac developer, his friends are mac developers and he somehow determines Microsoft development is dead because he doesn't do it. And we are supposed to believe him in that.