Viewing profile — sbi

Heapsort has poor cache performance though. Its asymptotic complexity depends on the assumption that memory access is O(1), which is not borne out in practice.

Webster's Dictionary does not discuss the pejorative use of the word "ghetto" and in any case is not an arbiter of racism.

What charming casual racism. "It's pretty ghetto" ... "The ghetto way is just to run this on a machine" ... "The ghetto reversing is to run strings."

Thanks for explaining that to me. To add to the confusion, tabasco is also a pepper cultivar named after the Mexican state.

Tabasco is a state in Mexico, though; how were its trademark owners able to obtain the name?

There are many different versions of awk: gawk, (BSD) nawk, mawk, etc. I think OS X uses nawk, but mawk is reputedly faster. Gawk is definitely slower than both mawk. I'm not surpr…

Probably not, but in some cases sed and AWK might be faster. I am a big fan of AWK. It is limited in some ways that make it impractical to use for really serious programs, but it i…

The data from the study are available on the PLoS website. The authors coded incomplete documents as mistakes---some participants submitted empty LaTeX documents for the table exer…

Looking over their data, it seems that they coded incomplete text as an error. So, for example, participants 34 and 37 completed none of the table exercise and were coded as having…

Doesn't std::list generate different code for each type T, at least naively? The generated code could end up taking up more space even if the data structures on which it operates l…

This article correctly observes that "many resources are not plain memory" and then goes on to advise users to close() a file in a destructor. However, one of the ways that files a…

The Kelly criterion doesn't quite apply in this problem, since you are asked to optimize a more conservative strategy, namely to guarantee (with high probability) a certain amount …

Typically you wouldn't use lgamma to compute exact values of factorials at all. For a real world example of this function in action, look at John D. Cook's blog: [1]: http://www.jo…

I explained this in a reply below, but this is a linear-algebraic technique. The matrix A = [0 1; 1 1] satisfies the relation A^2 - A - 1 = 0. (In fact, if you think of A as a lag …

You are correct that this code uses "Russian Peasant Multiplication." The question is: what is being exponentiated? One choice is the matrix A = [0 1; 1 1], whose powers are A^n = …

Thank you for the reference. The algorithm in the parent comment is not actually matrix exponentiation but the "fast doubling algorithm" in Minase's terminology, where you exponent…

Which reference?

The "right" way to generate Fibonacci numbers is not via the closed form, but by exponentiation of the matrix A = [0 1; 1 1] that defines Fibonacci numbers as an element of its end…

There are tools for standardizing C formatting. Another poster mentioned indent. Clang-format [1] is very good, works with C++ as well as C, and has great editor integration. You c…

Thanks; I had searched on pgp.mit.edu for the primary key but forgot to add the hex prefix 0x. Curiously, the 1024 bit DSA key used for some previous releases (0x7f4d66451ebcab3a) …

I see that Mozilla is now signing hashes of Firefox downloads with a 4096-bit RSA key. But the key used to sign firefox-23.0.tar.bz2 (id 0x057CC3EB15A0A4BC) is only self-signed and…

The "5,031" statistic is ludicrous. At least that many people were killed by lynching alone, not to mention Wounded Knee.

These are quotes from the Bolt drama "A Man for All Seasons," not Sir Thomas More himself.