Viewing profile — monopede

Note that Dalvik is actually not a very good trace JIT. There's a recent paper comparing Dalvik to an embedded version of Hotspot. The Dalvik interpreter was slightly faster (~5%),…

I don't think assemblers written in assembly were that bad. LuaJIT 2 uses direct threading (not new at all), register-based bytecode (relatively new), and manually optimised regist…

I was using the "bc" command line calculator. Turns out it's rounding the exponent. The revised number is correct, though.

Moore's law: Transistor count doubles every 18 months. Assuming 40 years at the company (it's a bit less) that's: 2^(40/1.5) = 67,108,864 The 62 Core Xeon Phi has 5 billion transis…

Would make sense. Michael Bender is a co-author on that paper and he apparently works for Tokutek, judging by this presentation: http://www.bnl.gov/csc/seminars/abstracts/Bender_Pr…

As I understand this, this wouldn't automatically protect you from race conditions. If you have a shared variable x then a statement like x += 5 may be fine depending on whether it…

"I'm thinking of doing a PhD in Germany" I'm not discouraging, but once you're considering a particular position, please try and talk to previous PhD students of your prospective s…

The blog author didn't actually have two factor authentication enabled. The headline is wrong.

Actually, she just spend a few weeks practising with an Olympic competitor, i.e., nowhere near 6 months. I'm not an expert on these things, but it seemed to vary from scene to scen…

You can build a library for doing Erlang-style programming, but there are lots of features that you can't reproduce. (1) In C++ you may get hard crashes, so to get reliability you …

That depends on the kind of scientific computing you want to do. Haskell has the repa library [1] which is very nice for working with (multi-dimensional) arrays at a high level. Pe…

Small correction: "Plankalkül" which translates to "plan calculus"

Or create a (resizeable) image that is case-sensitive. Not sure what the performance overheads of that will be, though.

I think he/she meant that birds can't survive in space. The pigs at least seem to have some sort of bowl around their head.

Note that in many dynamic languages (and I think that includes PHP), syntax checking is done right before you try to run it, and type checking is performed at runtime. When you're …

Yes, for the AI class they promised to give you a signed statement of accomplishment. IIRC, this statement will also tell you how well you did in relation to all other students (in…

Well said! I don't think I found a argument in that article that I would agree with. The mentioning of Perl as a great example is probably the worst. The purpose of a programming l…

That will most likely bite you since you're giving a pure type to a non-referentially transparent function. There is a reason why random functions are in a state monad or IO.

That's very easy to explain. A low-pause GC requires a concurrent garbage collector. Writing a correct concurrent garbage collector is VERY tricky, so you usually start with someth…

Sorry to break the stream of cheers, but I have my concerns about this design. Yes, it's a neat idea and already quite well-implemented. Looking at the video I can't help but feel …

Hm, this doesn't mention support for lexical closures (not turned on by default, of course) which supposedly has been merged into the master branch. I sure hope this will make it i…

There is an interesting book, "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that makes a very strong argument that in developed cou…

I understand that this is meant just as an experience report, but I have to say this article didn't convince me in any way that this rewrite was a good idea. Obvious questions: 1. …

English is my second language and I got ~13,500 words. I was surprised that this was only half the average. I read a lot of scientific papers in my field and almost never come acro…

Given that some people have separate accounts for games, I wonder how accurately that number reflects the actual number of users.