sbanach

6 ms·

1.
by sbanach 7y ago
Happens all the time. Here's another good one: https://www.nbim.no/ (the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund) Is a <1s live ticking number implausibly high frequency? Of course, it's just spooling out numbers on a
2.
by sbanach 7y ago
LDPE (thicker, 'bag for life' etc) is about 4 times as bad, paper bags 3 times, vs HDPE (thin) bags assuming no reuse. The below UK gov study investigates impact of each (and other alternatives like cloth bags) and also considers
3.
by sbanach 8y ago
With Java vs C++, the experience seems similar. In C++, memory allocation is slow, so you worry about memory allocation up front. In Java, GC is a pain so you worry about memory allocation up front. As Daniel points out, there are a few ext
4.
by sbanach 8y ago
The compression format is really smart, there's a neat trick to make the logarithm calculation fast, and there's a concurrent thread handoff mechanism so you can swap out a histogram without disturbing the thread you're measu
5.
by sbanach 8y ago
Google claims 3.5 billion queries per day, so approaching 1% of that.
6.
by sbanach 9y ago
Congratulations!
7.
by sbanach 9y ago
High frequency trading?
8.
by sbanach 9y ago
That's pretty interesting. Is there a concrete example of a quorum definition where the probability of an outlier is improved vs majority quorum? I'm struggling to come up with one. I've always assumed majority is optimal, si
9.
by sbanach 10y ago
EM Forster took your thought experiment to it's logical conclusion for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
10.
by sbanach 10y ago
On hotspot: There are two bits in the header of every object. This is enough for an object that's never been used as a contended lock, CAS operations on the header can be used to handle the locking and that's that. As soon as you
11.
by sbanach 11y ago
Quick question: What's the draw of using Netty vs pure java.nio? The latter (Selectors, Socket/DatagramChannels, ByteBuffers etc) seems reasonably straightforward to use, so I've never really looked at a framework - am I miss
12.
by sbanach 11y ago
The distinction arises when the full text of a clause is not possible to claim by law, but some weakened or lesser version is OK: If you missed the 'maximum extent permissible' part, your clause would be completely invalidated. It
13.
by sbanach 11y ago
Yes, given the solarflare I was expecting the article to end up with a receiver coded against ef_vi, which exposes the NIC memory directly (but you have to do the IP/UDP yourself)
14.
by sbanach 13y ago
So arm compilers must prefer to, for example, XOR with 0x10000000 rather than AND with 0xEFFFFFFF?
15.
by sbanach 13y ago
My hours are pretty heavy: 55ish hours is an easy week, bad weeks can get a lot worse. It really varies team to team and I think a lot of people in my firm do 9-6 consistently, so if it's a dealbreaker then just ask about it explicitly duri
16.
by sbanach 13y ago
80k base, 130k last bonus. I'm 2 years into doing mostly Java, Python and C++ in a hedge fund. I left a small non-finance software firm where after a few years I was on 25k.
17.
by sbanach 13y ago
It's also the shortest C program that you can link at all.
18.
by sbanach 13y ago
Sensationalist headline. "Top industries" - when ranked by environmental impact. Kinda renders the article a tautology?
19.
by sbanach 14y ago
Do you have any visibility on what it was that triggered your change? I don't mean to pry, achieving a genuine change of outlook is rare, fascinating and to be celebrated. A lot of time the internal struggle is worsened because there doesn'
20.
by sbanach 14y ago
You know this includes all recent Intels right? AMD64 here means "the 64 bit extension to x86 that's not the Itanium one"
21.
by sbanach 14y ago
Normally a curmudgeon, I love everything about this story. The original comic is brilliant, and the various HN takes on it are getting better and better. Thanks everyone!
22.
by sbanach 14y ago
Agreed. I "proved my point" but I didn't do it "by supplying 0.1 in a binary floating point format", because that wasn't what my point was.
23.
by sbanach 14y ago
Sure adaml_623, 0x3dcccccd in IEEE 754-2008 (binary32) corresponds to the interval (0.09999999776482582, 0.10000000521540642) - which contains 0.1. Disclaimers: I worked this out with double precision, and if you care about if the endpoints
24.
by sbanach 14y ago
Sure it does - in that any floating point scheme is a well defined partition of the real line in the range [-FLT_MAX, +FLT_MAX] into 2^n intervals (less two Infs, a load of NaNs and a spare zero), one of which absolutely contains 0.1
25.
by sbanach 14y ago
Uh, because with a drawn symbol you wouldn't need their thirty dollar notebooks?
26.
by sbanach 14y ago
My point is that should there exist some higher level structure in the brain that is more amenable to simulation than the equivalent quantity of low-level synapses and neurons, then all bets are off about exactly what sort of computer is re
27.
by sbanach 14y ago
Presumably you're referring to the neuron-level simulations that crop up in the news every time some university gets a new supercomputer? Maybe there are some shortcuts. Just like 10 years ago the only conceivable way of rendering diffuse l
28.
by sbanach 14y ago
Apple do the 2x stuff on iOS so that the large set of handcrafted, bitmapped 1x apps can map precisely to pixels when you upscale them. OSX doesn't have the same issue, since there's no existing default screen size that is designed for.
29.
by sbanach 14y ago
Really? requiring a shell alias or a one line shell script to shorten your invocation makes the entire language 'totally unusable'?
30.
by sbanach 14y ago
In other news a Knight Capital programmer's fat fingers cost exactly the amount of money required to build a Space Shuttle.

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