yyqux

5 ms·

1.
by yyqux 13y ago
Alternative title: "American public paranoid, susceptible to leading survey questions".
2.
by yyqux 13y ago
Total bollocks. The statement simply discloses some more specific numbers about procedures that were never secret to begin with. The fact that a law enforcement agency could get a court order for an individual's data was never secret
3.
by yyqux 13y ago
Right, and a house is a liability as well as an asset: at that sort of price, the main cost of owning the house is the ongoing maintenance, utilities, etc.
4.
by yyqux 13y ago
No. There's mixed evidence about whether coffee is moderately good/moderately bad/neutral for you in sane quantities (i.e. a few cups a day). There's plenty of evidence that eating salty/sugary sodas and snacks is bad for you in similar q
5.
by yyqux 13y ago
This is a great optimization technique to have up your sleeve. The downside of course is that if you're dynamically allocating and freeing nodes you can end up having to write your own memory allocator.
6.
by yyqux 13y ago
Asymptotically, sure, you're right. Constant factors are often important in practice, and simple cost models (e.g. ones that don't model cache locality) will no longer give you a decent estimate of constant-factor differences in performanc
7.
by yyqux 13y ago
They're pretty good at using the right tool for the right job. There are plenty of places where they use arrays or other data structures too. In a lot of cases they really want to be able to do O(1) inserts/deletes at the beginning/end of
8.
by yyqux 13y ago
Linked lists are a good fit for functional languages, and arrays aren't a great fit: this can be a major obstacle to writing Haskell code that is both idiomatic and efficient.
9.
by yyqux 13y ago
This is pretty reasonable advice. There was a time when linked-lists didn't have such a massive performance disadvantage compared with more contiguous data structures, but that time has passed and I'm not sure that the programming communit
10.
by yyqux 13y ago
In 2001 we'll all be playing Duke Nukem Forever on our SPARC desktops running GNU Hurd.
11.
by yyqux 13y ago
Why do you automobile engineers keep talking to each other about pistons and transmissions, and all that nonsense, it's absurd. I just want a car that gets me from A to B and doesn't use too much gas. I don't see what that has to do with
12.
by yyqux 13y ago
The biggest problem with TED is that people leave the talks thinking they understand more about a topic than they actually do. There's a big difference between having a general sense of the problems a field is dealing with, and actually un
13.
by yyqux 13y ago
I found this remarkably unconvincing: none of the arguments really seem to address the actual concerns with deflationary currencies, but seem to be directed at some (vaguely implied) strawman. I mean, why is the fact that there is a liquid
14.
by yyqux 13y ago
Tel Aviv is in Europe now?
15.
by yyqux 13y ago
It's the only language that has quality, actively-developed compilers, excellent support for multidimensional arrays and can be very effectively optimized. The libraries are a bonus, but support for proper multidimensional arrays (i.e. not
16.
by yyqux 13y ago
I think it would be a bit premature to call MariaDB superior to MySQL. Also it should be noted that the InnoDB storage engine was developed outside of MySQL AB. InnoDB is a helluva lot better than MyISAM for most applications because of pe
17.
by yyqux 13y ago
Yep, I'm not in love with Java, but it's turned out to be the language I'm using on a couple of larger projects. And you know what, I'm perfectly productive in it, even though its more verbose. For shorter scripts it is a pain compared t
18.
by yyqux 13y ago
I've seen dramatic speedups reducing an array from ~10mb to ~1mb. The problem was that the algorithm did multiple passes over the array, and each pass it would pull in blocks from main memory, only to evict them later on before they could
19.
by yyqux 13y ago
R&R's defense strategy seems currently to pretend that they weren't claiming anything in particular by the paper originally: "hey man, I was just putting it out there. I didn't, like, mean anything by it." But their own public pronounc
20.
by yyqux 13y ago
And then the bytecode is interpreted. It's faster than interpreting the AST or source directly, but it's still pretty slow. Java compiles the bytecode on the fly. Back in older JVMs where Java interpreted the bytecode it was also slow as
21.
by yyqux 13y ago
There is a large variance in how well departments look after their students. Some will give you a decent stipend and some security of income. Others you will be totally dependent on the good-will of your advisor, or have to fight for teac
22.
by yyqux 13y ago
If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a
23.
by yyqux 13y ago
I wonder how this will work long-term as you accumulate an archive of old rarely-accessed data.
24.
by yyqux 13y ago
I don't see the correlation between income and usage. E.g. look at Missisippi and Minnesota. I don't think the article was saying that here was any connection between political beliefs, they were just presenting it in the same way as polit
25.
by yyqux 13y ago
Government sucks since it's inefficient and bureacratic and wastes people time. In order to remind people of this fact we must ensure that it remains this way so that people don't get the incorrect idea that government can be efficient.
26.
by yyqux 13y ago
So taxes are morally equivalent to stealing? I think taxes are ok, so stealing must be ok too. I'll be over at your house to take your stuff in a jiffy!
27.
by yyqux 13y ago
Yes, it works fairly well, but unfortunately has crushed the capitalist Ubermenschen who never had a chance to build TurboTax Australia under the government's boot heel. I've actually had my return automatically amended a couple of times to
28.
by yyqux 13y ago
Lol, first time I've heard a libertarian arguing for more paperwork and government programs.
29.
by yyqux 13y ago
The argument seems to be that Americans don't sufficiently resent paying taxes already because it's too efficient, so we have to make their lives even more inconvenient. The amount of complaining about taxes I hear on a day to day basis I
30.
by yyqux 13y ago
Yes, I went to the DMV in Illinois to get my license and managed to complete the eyesight, written and driving tests and walk out the door with my new license in maybe an hour and a half. I didn't even have an appointment. I'm aware this i

More ›