Viewing profile — brianhempel

Correct: if adding a variable for a literal used as a parameter for a function call, the argument name in the function definition is used (provided we can figure out which function…

Warner/Chappell has submitted a response arguing that it's not quite a smoking gun. Copyright divestment by failing to put a proper copyright notice must happen with the "consent o…

I like the colors. Most browsers these days implement window.crypto.getRandomValues() so you could use that and do the generation client-side in Javascript. That way, I don't have …

Author here. There are other services that do this sort of thing, but none that accomplished all these goals: 1. Browser-encrypted so the server cannot decrypt it. The decryption k…

Police are trained only to shoot to kill because pulling the trigger needs to be a big event. If you think that "shoot to wound" is an option, then of course you're going to pull t…

For full text search, the only global frequency information Postgres uses is the stop-word list. It does not do TF-IDF ranking. [1] For example, if you search for "Bob Peterson", P…

As the IRFY creator, I freely admit that site needs some love. Also, technically, it's a Ruby benchmark. The Rails version is going to be locked to 3.1.3 for as long as possible. T…

Website author here. On the contrary, you have nailed it. Noob-friendlyness is a valuable part of a language ecosystem.

Comparing across languages was originally part of the long-term goal. However, I haven't yet come across any good, multi-language, real-world benchmark.

The variance is sometimes due to RVM troubles. The benchmark is partly a test of the entire Ruby ecosystem. If RVM is bugging, then people are installing sub-optimal implementation…

I agree. However, when I sat down two years ago to make a benchmark, I couldn't think of anything better to benchmark than Rails. Micro-benchmarks don't predict large application p…

Rails was only about 5-6% faster in the last few nights of development builds (based on what is installed with rvm reinstall ruby-head). I would be surprised if the released 2.1.0 …

Indeed, the $25,000 PDF is also available as one of the free samples on IDC's website. "Download Samples Now" on this page: http://www.idc.com/MarketScape/index.jsp

The video is not demonstrating an in-place merge sort. Notice how the sorted pairs suddenly merge. There's another buffer (not included in the visualization) where each merged list…