Viewing profile — sbanach

Happens all the time. Here's another good one: https://www.nbim.no/ (the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund) Is a <1s live ticking number implausibly high frequency? Of course, it's j…

LDPE (thicker, 'bag for life' etc) is about 4 times as bad, paper bags 3 times, vs HDPE (thin) bags assuming no reuse. The below UK gov study investigates impact of each (and other…

With Java vs C++, the experience seems similar. In C++, memory allocation is slow, so you worry about memory allocation up front. In Java, GC is a pain so you worry about memory al…

The compression format is really smart, there's a neat trick to make the logarithm calculation fast, and there's a concurrent thread handoff mechanism so you can swap out a histogr…

Google claims 3.5 billion queries per day, so approaching 1% of that.

Congratulations!

High frequency trading?

That's pretty interesting. Is there a concrete example of a quorum definition where the probability of an outlier is improved vs majority quorum? I'm struggling to come up with one…

EM Forster took your thought experiment to it's logical conclusion for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

On hotspot: There are two bits in the header of every object. This is enough for an object that's never been used as a contended lock, CAS operations on the header can be used to h…

Quick question: What's the draw of using Netty vs pure java.nio? The latter (Selectors, Socket/DatagramChannels, ByteBuffers etc) seems reasonably straightforward to use, so I've n…

The distinction arises when the full text of a clause is not possible to claim by law, but some weakened or lesser version is OK: If you missed the 'maximum extent permissible' par…

Yes, given the solarflare I was expecting the article to end up with a receiver coded against ef_vi, which exposes the NIC memory directly (but you have to do the IP/UDP yourself)

So arm compilers must prefer to, for example, XOR with 0x10000000 rather than AND with 0xEFFFFFFF?

My hours are pretty heavy: 55ish hours is an easy week, bad weeks can get a lot worse. It really varies team to team and I think a lot of people in my firm do 9-6 consistently, so …

80k base, 130k last bonus. I'm 2 years into doing mostly Java, Python and C++ in a hedge fund. I left a small non-finance software firm where after a few years I was on 25k.

It's also the shortest C program that you can link at all.

Sensationalist headline. "Top industries" - when ranked by environmental impact. Kinda renders the article a tautology?

Do you have any visibility on what it was that triggered your change? I don't mean to pry, achieving a genuine change of outlook is rare, fascinating and to be celebrated. A lot of…

You know this includes all recent Intels right? AMD64 here means "the 64 bit extension to x86 that's not the Itanium one"

Normally a curmudgeon, I love everything about this story. The original comic is brilliant, and the various HN takes on it are getting better and better. Thanks everyone!

Agreed. I "proved my point" but I didn't do it "by supplying 0.1 in a binary floating point format", because that wasn't what my point was.

Sure adaml_623, 0x3dcccccd in IEEE 754-2008 (binary32) corresponds to the interval (0.09999999776482582, 0.10000000521540642) - which contains 0.1. Disclaimers: I worked this out w…

Sure it does - in that any floating point scheme is a well defined partition of the real line in the range [-FLT_MAX, +FLT_MAX] into 2^n intervals (less two Infs, a load of NaNs an…