Viewing profile — okmjuhb

Let's say you wanted to implement I/O in a language without side effects. You could put all your interactions with the world in a special "World" object. Every time you called worl…

"Assuming the US Mint and my bank weren’t trying to scam me, that only left myself as the scam artist and I knew I wasn’t trying to cheat anyone, so that took care of that concern.…

The argument "well, passing by reference gets compiled to passing a pointer by value so really there is no passing by reference" is silly because passing by reference is a descript…

"No the real problem is that you fail to understand that Java gets to call these things what ever it likes because language has context." This is silly; "pointer" and "reference" b…

This is not at all correct because passing by reference and value have defined and distinct meanings. Consider the difference between C++, which has actual pass by reference: void …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list

I suppose Hacker News is the only place where people might relate to this comment: Did anyone else look at the first picture and wonder why Mendel Rosenblum was on the set of Star …

The history behind this actually goes the other way if I remember correctly; it was unclear for a time whether or not this sort of thing was allowed. The standard was modified so t…

"This tells us that the person's reputation can be adversely affected. Threat of bad press could maybe get him in line." Under no circumstances should you make threats like this wi…

I'm surprised no one has mentioned yet what I regard as the key reason decorators are useful: they maintain the property that you can always find the definition of a function named…

Baby Rudin is a great choice, especially for self study, since there are a number of study guides for it that go through solutions, additional explanation of material, etc. I'd rec…

The much more self-serving reason to spend time learning about activities outside of your specialty: applying techniques of your discipline to another discipline is a great way to …

The interesting thing about compiler writing is the drastic reduction in complexity that's happened. There are essentially off-the-shelf tools that can be used to handle everything…

That's pretty reasonable with MIX, given that it's a terrible language that was obsolete before it was invented and that all the algorithms are described in English as well.

That's still in progress (and, given that Knuth is more than seventy years old and still has at least 3 books to go before he will begin to revise them, odds are such a revised set…

Not really "brand new" at all. It wouldn't be out of place in the first week of an Algebra course. You don't really need much math background to understand the proof. At the top, w…

On a related note, most people today associated ancient Roman art with their statues. In fact painting and portraiture was a widely practiced art; it's just that statues stand the …

I almost couldn't make it through without going crazy: >Imagine you ran a restaurant. A very prestigious, exclusive restaurant. To attract top talent, you guarantee all cooks and w…

CreateProcess can't implement fork() semantics. To my knowledge there's no good way to fork() on Windows.

The solution would be then to do autoconversions as appropriate or return an error. The compiler already deals with this issue with the ?: operator. It's a readability and maintena…

To be more specific: the return type of the lambda can be omitted for a lambda whose body is just "return {expression}". The compiler could, if it wanted, always deduce the return …

I always do my first draft of any nontrivial large system by writing the code out longhand, after having heard it recommended by multiple people I respect. My perception is that th…

Assume we encode the data on acid free paper with color-retaining ink using colored squares of size 1/64" x 1/64", using one of 64 colors in each square. There are then 4,096 of th…

It's worth mentioning that they're writing for DSP systems. More mainstream CPUs have a larger instruction cache (and smarter eviction policies), but the size of the hot code paths…

A few loosely related thoughts as to why I'm fond of the University system (in response to the negative tone of some of the comments here and at techcrunch): - It's the only social…