okmjuhb

6 ms·

1.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
Let's say you wanted to implement I/O in a language without side effects. You could put all your interactions with the world in a special "World" object. Every time you called world.putString("foo"), you'd get back a new world object that r
2.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
"Assuming the US Mint and my bank weren’t trying to scam me, that only left myself as the scam artist and I knew I wasn’t trying to cheat anyone, so that took care of that concern." I guess if ignorance of the way he's hurting people counts
3.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
The argument "well, passing by reference gets compiled to passing a pointer by value so really there is no passing by reference" is silly because passing by reference is a description of language semantics and function call evaluation. Your
4.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
"No the real problem is that you fail to understand that Java gets to call these things what ever it likes because language has context." This is silly; "pointer" and "reference" both had meanings before Java came along. If Java called poin
5.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
This is not at all correct because passing by reference and value have defined and distinct meanings. Consider the difference between C++, which has actual pass by reference: void swap(int& x, int& y) { int t = x; x = y; y = t; }, a
6.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list
7.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
I suppose Hacker News is the only place where people might relate to this comment: Did anyone else look at the first picture and wonder why Mendel Rosenblum was on the set of Star Trek?
8.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
The history behind this actually goes the other way if I remember correctly; it was unclear for a time whether or not this sort of thing was allowed. The standard was modified so that Duff's device would be legal code after it was being use
9.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
"This tells us that the person's reputation can be adversely affected. Threat of bad press could maybe get him in line." Under no circumstances should you make threats like this without talking to a lawyer.
10.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet what I regard as the key reason decorators are useful: they maintain the property that you can always find the definition of a function named "foo" by textually searching for "def foo". Lots of alterna
11.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
Baby Rudin is a great choice, especially for self study, since there are a number of study guides for it that go through solutions, additional explanation of material, etc. I'd recommend against the chapters on differential forms, though, j
12.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
The much more self-serving reason to spend time learning about activities outside of your specialty: applying techniques of your discipline to another discipline is a great way to crank out some easy papers for the second discipline's journ
13.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
The interesting thing about compiler writing is the drastic reduction in complexity that's happened. There are essentially off-the-shelf tools that can be used to handle everything before semantic analysis and everything after conversion to
14.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
That's pretty reasonable with MIX, given that it's a terrible language that was obsolete before it was invented and that all the algorithms are described in English as well.
15.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
That's still in progress (and, given that Knuth is more than seventy years old and still has at least 3 books to go before he will begin to revise them, odds are such a revised set will never be released).
16.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
Not really "brand new" at all. It wouldn't be out of place in the first week of an Algebra course. You don't really need much math background to understand the proof. At the top, where he writes pi = (top line of numbers, bottom line of num
17.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
On a related note, most people today associated ancient Roman art with their statues. In fact painting and portraiture was a widely practiced art; it's just that statues stand the test of time better. There's some roman paintings here: htt
18.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
I almost couldn't make it through without going crazy: >Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and waiters job security for life. Not only that, because you
19.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
CreateProcess can't implement fork() semantics. To my knowledge there's no good way to fork() on Windows.
20.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
The solution would be then to do autoconversions as appropriate or return an error. The compiler already deals with this issue with the ?: operator. It's a readability and maintenance problem there, too. It'd be easy to do; the language des
21.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
To be more specific: the return type of the lambda can be omitted for a lambda whose body is just "return {expression}". The compiler could, if it wanted, always deduce the return type (since implementing type inference would be easy). The
22.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
I always do my first draft of any nontrivial large system by writing the code out longhand, after having heard it recommended by multiple people I respect. My perception is that the resulting code is cleaner and better documented, and that
23.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
Assume we encode the data on acid free paper with color-retaining ink using colored squares of size 1/64" x 1/64", using one of 64 colors in each square. There are then 4,096 of the squares in 1 square inch, so (assuming we print on 8"x10"
24.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
It's worth mentioning that they're writing for DSP systems. More mainstream CPUs have a larger instruction cache (and smarter eviction policies), but the size of the hot code paths are (I imagine; I'm not terribly familiar with DSP) likely
25.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
A few loosely related thoughts as to why I'm fond of the University system (in response to the negative tone of some of the comments here and at techcrunch): - It's the only socially acceptable way to spend years simply learning as a full t
26.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
Measuring stock performance by looking at one of the biggest bubbles in recent years and comparing it to one of the biggest crashes in recent years is a little bit dishonest. Given that this article is writing to young people interested exp
27.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
In general I don't like the idea of credit checks before employment, but there's a few obvious cases where it's useful. If I'm hiring an employee who will be handling cash, or who will control purchasing decisions, or who will have access t
28.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
I wonder how many Hacker Newsers really remember what it was like back before the GPL and the FSF. The availability of a high-quality open source unix system is pretty much the defining quality of modern computing, and it took us out of the
29.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
"Programming Collective Intelligence" is quite good. I like "The Ruby Programming Langauge" if it's something you're interested in. "Learning Python" is probably beneath you but it'd be a good gift for someone who wants to learn programming
30.
by okmjuhb 16y ago
const only means that the function is not allowed to change memory through that reference. It says nothing about aliases to the same memory. But the "what if another thread changes the string" issue is a red herring. The question to keep in

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