Viewing profile — PDoyle

Nonsense. Graph databases pre-date SQL. The relational model was created to overcome the limitations of graph databases.

Uh, that's not what NIMBY means. "NIMBY" means we all agree that something a Good Thing™, but I want it placed in someone else's neighborhood instead of mine. It doesn't apply to a…

That depends on whether you think "unscrambling" counts as "solving".

Yeah, they're using a rather naive human-oriented algorithm. It would be straightforward to improve this with a software upgrade.

No, to me it looks like it did CFOP with an orange cross on the table, and the white cross when he held it in his hand.

Mill is awesome. I'm afraid it has too many revolutionary ideas in one package, though, which could impede its widespread adoption.

Your proof is flawed. The CPU has access to the complete current program state, and also complete knowledge of its own hardware. A static compiler has neither. Therefore, it's not …

Nice, I hadn't looked at RISC-V before. The operation of FENCE.I scares me a little: > FENCE.I does not ensure that other RISC-V harts’ instruction fetches will observe the local h…

No. The point of the article is that it's ok to undo an abstraction that has done more harm than good. Abstraction and DRY is still a good default mode of thinking.

Agreed. To me, the real point is not to be afraid to undo an abstraction that has proven to be more trouble than it's worth. DRY is still a good default mode of thinking.

However, let's not go too far: I think DRY is a good default for new programmers. They can learn to break that rule as they gain experience.

Yep, always talk to the person who made a WTF-inducing change. It's even possible they've thought of something you didn't.

Right. I think this is the promise of Java generics: we promise we'll warn you if you're relying on dynamic type checking because we can't prove all dynamic type checks will pass. …

Ever worked at a startup?

People forget that the proverb says it's easier , not better , to ask forgiveness.

Pre-emptive runtimes are hard. Inserting yield points judiciously in loops isn't that incredibly difficult, and neither is reducing the cost of a yield point. It's far harder to ma…

Ah, mutable data. Is there any abstraction it can't ruin?

I'll just leave this here: https://xkcd.com/927/

Yep. In fact, this is how it formed in the first place.

Here's a cool site where you can ask questions like this: http://www.google.com

You're mis-reading it. The blue line is subsequent 10-year performance, so it's already shifted back (left) several years from its natural alignment on the chart.

Wow, really interesting read. Thanks for the link. Only trouble is that once people find patterns like this, they have a habit of disappearing. Hopefully this one is based on solid…

--minor spoilers-- But John Wick Chapter 2 is not a period piece. The VIC-20 is not meant to be a modern computer there. As I recall, they have women dressed as 1940s switchboard o…

Cool, thanks for the link. My mistake--I thought "regions" meant some sort of interprocedural "code regions". I suspect the state of the art in GC has moved in the last 15 years si…

Ok, so you analyze "regions". Then what? Modify the data structures to use some kind of efficient headerless representation? Then stop the world and rewrite the whole heap if a new…