globalrev

Did I manage to miss the point?

I'm not saying that computer science is all day P vs NP philosophy. I'm just saying that you have to know complexity and algorithm theory to work in the field just as you have to understand the hardware, you might get by most of the time without it but when you don't, if you don't even know where to start, you'll have a mountain to climb rather than a little tree.

* However your remark about how this should be abstracted away and people shouldn't have to know it in the same way people don't have to know assembler now, that's not the same thing at all.

Weird prank though since it seems fairly elaborate.

No matter the type of programming complexity and algorithms is involved.

So it is more like saying "not understanding how a car works will make it very hard for you to design or build one".

People how can't do proper Big-O-analysis are forever doomed to suck at programming.

Where are the actual podcasts? I have to download something?

"Both factorial and fibonacci are examples of tail recursion.

Tail recursion is considered a bad practice in languages like Python, however, since it uses more system resources than the equivalent iterative solution."

Uh no, those implementations were plain recursion. Tailrecursion is basically the same as iteration but Python doesn't optimize tail-calls so the stack will blow anyway. He defines tail-recursion something along the lines as "if the last statement ina function is a recursive call". NO! From wikipedia: "In computer science, tail recursion (or tail-end recursion) is a special case of recursion in which the last operation of the function is a recursive call"

And while the solution he presents in the next chapter: previous = {0: 0, 1: 1} def fibonacci(n): if previous.has_key(n): return previous[n] else: new_value = fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2) previous[n] = new_value return new_value

works the simple idiomatic way is simply: def fib(n): a, b = 1, 0 while n: a, b, n = b, a+b, n-1 return b

jDome was awesome, I have kind of lost interest in gaming but this brought it back a little bit. In the presentation you can even enjoy english with a swedish accent :) .

Saying language X does Y in 4 lines instead of language Zs 5 lines just doesn't say much unless you put it in a bigger perspective.

(And I like Python very much and hate Java).

There is a pdf released about it from Google here: http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html

Distributed emacs, business idea?

I guess YCombinator make money when their companies receive funding?

Anyway, congrats and good luck!

However it is fine from a technical standpoint, it is just not visually appealing.

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"13 comments:

Anonymous said...

    Remember, Dr. Phil has a best selling DIET book.
    August 12, 2008 7:27 AM"

Since it is very expensive to patent all over the world is there some way you can do something like the GNU license?

So I can say I invented this and anyone can use it however they want and noone can prevent anyone from using it.

And that would be free and hold up all over the world?

HN has been around a lot longer than that though but perhaps it is growing fast lately?

How can it be the land of freedom if something like this would have been ok? It is f*g absurd.

I'd rather die standing than live on my knees and I will fight this anti-freedom bullshit til I die.