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traviswatkins

30 karma · joined December 12, 2016

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traviswatkins··on Finger Trees: A Simple General-Purpose Data Structure (2006)
Finger trees are an example of a truly elegant functional data structure that can be used for just about everything. The problem is they don't match the memory model of real hardware so for all of their elegance and theoretical performance in reality they're too slow to be useful.
traviswatkins··on Why are browsers so slow?
Firefox is going for at most N+1 cores worth of processes, as I understand it (one per core for websites and one extra for compositing and the UI) and is doing to use cooperative threading (Quantum DOM) to improve responsiveness within those processes without the overhead of running a process per website.
traviswatkins··on Apple 13" MacBook Pro review: the best computer you shouldn’t buy
If you switch to the preview releases of Windows they've upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 and you can easily execute Windows applications from the Ubuntu shell. The stock terminal is also a lot better (24-bit color!) but I'm using wsltty instead which, aside from not having the ability to use my preferred keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift-C/V for copy/paste) works great. I have kotlin projects open in IntelliJ in Windows and can also run gradle in my Ubuntu environment to work with them.
traviswatkins··on Apple 13" MacBook Pro review: the best computer you shouldn’t buy
I was in the same boat, waiting for this update to finally upgrade my 2011 MacBook Pro. After seeing this new machine and trying it out in a store I ordered a Thinkpad t460s. I considered running Ubuntu on it but I wasn't a fan of the way the touchpad was working there and decided it wasn't worth the hassle. I'm now running Windows 10 insider preview so I can use Ubuntu 16.04 on Windows to get my terminal on and still run my IDEs and such on Windows.