Viewing profile — miloshasan

These claims are false. We can get savings on a small number of "low-hanging fruit" problems, which are easy to approximate on practical instances - bin packing with many small ite…

Umm... I thought it was a pretty good introductory article, listing well-known and uncontroversial stuff. Yes, a polynomial algorithm might not be actually practical. Everybody kno…

If an idea saves you a month of work, its value is exactly equal to the value of a month of work, right?

From what I could tell, the links you posted are no evidence to the contrary. First, child abuse is beyond what most would call "parenting"; that term is mostly applied to things l…

The author points out something he may not have even intended: that parenting might not matter at all, despite the raging discussions about which parenting style is better. In fact…

You are comparing top startups to mediocre Ph.D.'s. Top academia is very high-risk and very competitive. You take on very difficult research problems in the hope of becoming famous…

The premise that Ph.D. degrees are supposed to be mainly training for academic careers is wrong, at least in technical/engineering fields. It is very common for people to enter e.g…

I would expect that an oversupply of lawyers would make them cheaper to hire and nicer to deal with. If we instead have a small group of lawyers that are expensive and unpleasant, …

Of course... read my reply again please. I am not disagreeing with you, I am saying that I would love to see a better data-parallel language than C (or CUDA to be precise), but it …

> It would make a lot of sense to have something like StarLisp or APL for CUDA right now. Trying to do data parallelism in C is about the most brain-damaged idea ever. I don't know…

I suspect that the inability to bring down power isn't just "laziness" on Intel's part. Decreasing power consumption is (more or less) equivalent to increasing performance per watt…

Ah, OK... I thought he was comparing more "CPU-like" to "GPU-like" designs, rather than CISC to RISC.

The article does not contain the word "CISC"...

You'd be surprised how many people walk around with terrible vision, without knowing it. My guess is that computer-related jobs require good vision, so people in these jobs are mor…

Python is awfully close to being a superior (and free) replacement for Matlab, but there are a few annoyances that keep preventing me from switching forever. Unfortunately, these a…

So you're saying that the "language is a tool" metaphor breaks down because C is "complete" in a way that a hammer isn't. True, but that's taking the metaphor too far; it's origina…

Well, describing oneself as a working programmer (as opposed to a computer scientist) is a valid position, but why does it invalidate the "programming language as tool" metaphor? A…

Ah, yes - of course decorators do not fundamentally increase the expressive power of the language (and neither do lambdas, obviously). It's all just a matter of convenience and ele…

The decorator can do introspection on the function object. This project uses the idea to execute (some) Python code on the GPU: http://code.google.com/p/copperhead/

Didn't downvote you, but the difference is that lambdas can only be executed (i.e. applied to something) while decorators let you analyze the code of the function and do something …