Viewing profile — yyqux

Alternative title: "American public paranoid, susceptible to leading survey questions".

Total bollocks. The statement simply discloses some more specific numbers about procedures that were never secret to begin with. The fact that a law enforcement agency could get a …

Right, and a house is a liability as well as an asset: at that sort of price, the main cost of owning the house is the ongoing maintenance, utilities, etc.

No. There's mixed evidence about whether coffee is moderately good/moderately bad/neutral for you in sane quantities (i.e. a few cups a day). There's plenty of evidence that eating…

This is a great optimization technique to have up your sleeve. The downside of course is that if you're dynamically allocating and freeing nodes you can end up having to write your…

Asymptotically, sure, you're right. Constant factors are often important in practice, and simple cost models (e.g. ones that don't model cache locality) will no longer give you a d…

They're pretty good at using the right tool for the right job. There are plenty of places where they use arrays or other data structures too. In a lot of cases they really want to …

Linked lists are a good fit for functional languages, and arrays aren't a great fit: this can be a major obstacle to writing Haskell code that is both idiomatic and efficient.

This is pretty reasonable advice. There was a time when linked-lists didn't have such a massive performance disadvantage compared with more contiguous data structures, but that tim…

In 2001 we'll all be playing Duke Nukem Forever on our SPARC desktops running GNU Hurd.

Why do you automobile engineers keep talking to each other about pistons and transmissions, and all that nonsense, it's absurd. I just want a car that gets me from A to B and doesn…

The biggest problem with TED is that people leave the talks thinking they understand more about a topic than they actually do. There's a big difference between having a general sen…

I found this remarkably unconvincing: none of the arguments really seem to address the actual concerns with deflationary currencies, but seem to be directed at some (vaguely implie…

Tel Aviv is in Europe now?

It's the only language that has quality, actively-developed compilers, excellent support for multidimensional arrays and can be very effectively optimized. The libraries are a bonu…

I think it would be a bit premature to call MariaDB superior to MySQL. Also it should be noted that the InnoDB storage engine was developed outside of MySQL AB. InnoDB is a helluva…

Yep, I'm not in love with Java, but it's turned out to be the language I'm using on a couple of larger projects. And you know what, I'm perfectly productive in it, even though its …

I've seen dramatic speedups reducing an array from ~10mb to ~1mb. The problem was that the algorithm did multiple passes over the array, and each pass it would pull in blocks from …

R&R's defense strategy seems currently to pretend that they weren't claiming anything in particular by the paper originally: "hey man, I was just putting it out there. I didn't, li…

And then the bytecode is interpreted. It's faster than interpreting the AST or source directly, but it's still pretty slow. Java compiles the bytecode on the fly. Back in older JVM…

There is a large variance in how well departments look after their students. Some will give you a decent stipend and some security of income. Others you will be totally dependent o…

If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and plac…

I wonder how this will work long-term as you accumulate an archive of old rarely-accessed data.

I don't see the correlation between income and usage. E.g. look at Missisippi and Minnesota. I don't think the article was saying that here was any connection between political bel…

Government sucks since it's inefficient and bureacratic and wastes people time. In order to remind people of this fact we must ensure that it remains this way so that people don't …