xkcd

troyp

Out of curiosity: What are some use cases of a % b where b is negative? EDIT: What I would expect for b > 0 is that x -> x % q is a homeomorphism from Z to Z_q. If we're assuming % is a mod here (as in Haskell mod or python/ruby % ), then: a -> a % -b maps Z to {-1,...,-b} ... ( for b in Z + ) I do...

troyp

Yeah, like, you've got three equations of which you can only satisfy two: ⋅ a = (a/b)*b + (a%b) ⋅ (-a)/b = a/(-b) = -(a/b) ⋅ a%b is always between 0 and b And I'm also not sure why it's the first equation in particular that must be true. The other two seem way more use...

troyp

That's the usual div/mod definition... It is, isn't it? Huh... Sorry, I could have sworn it was doing something weird, but I must have been confused. I never really use negative moduli, personally. Negative divisors are fine, but I don't find it natural to think in terms of negative moduli. I tend ...

troyp

Nice choice of modula arithmetic Java. Zero out of ten. Go back and get it right this time... IIRC, Java's integer division is sensible enough, it's just quot-rem division rather than div-mod. The real issue is that most languages don't have both (although I guess div-mod would be preferable if the...

troyp

Zathura is an excellent lightweight PDF viewer if you don't need advanced features. It should be available on MacPorts.

troyp

I didn't know make would make an executable with no makefile! That's handy. Is that a built-in thing with GCC languages, or does it use some sort of global config/makefile?

troyp

This makes me want to draft a language where it is syntactically impossible to typo valid code. Or, at the very least, create a syntax checker that can spot the most common typo/errors. I've been tutoring students in Java for some time now, and I can't tell you how many times I've seen the pointles...

troyp

I've bookmarked the site to check out the other games later. (Actually, I'm sure I've come across this site before, a couple of times. I remember the name.)

It's pretty cool that he's compiled the same C code to Java applets, Javascript and native code on 3 platforms.

troyp

This article claims that fingerprints are unhashable, since you need to accept near misses. That can't be right, can it? You could have a hash function that maps small displacements to small displacements within a certain range, but then reverts to unpredictable "all-over-the-place" behav...

troyp

Xanthir wrote:It's also an enjoyable puzzle game.

That's actually a lot easier than it looks (I guess that's not surprising if it's a linear time algorithm). There's something oddly satisfying about it, though.

troyp

Packt have been offering a free coding or sysadmin ebook each day. You just need a (free) account. The book is stored in your account, so you can read it in their viewer or download it whenever you want in pdf, epub or mobi format. Some of the titles are quite good. About a week ago, they had the 2n...

troyp

0xfdfd is a MSVC stack canary. It is also the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basmala Unicode code point. They rolled a whole sentence into one code point? Those crazy muslims, what'll they'll do next? I love Arabic calligraphy so much. It really is beautiful as calligraphy. Not so much as an 11-point...

troyp

I'm curious, what features make a text editor "decent"? Well... quite a lot, really. I mean, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of essential functions a text editor requires. It needs an infrastructure for handling text, files, buffers, window management, keymaps, history, registers, ma...

troyp

Personally, I can't understand how people tolerate IDEs. I mean, sure, I understand using them for debugging. That's what they're good for. But writing code? You get stuff like prettier autocompletion that's configured out of the box, but in exchange you have to write code without a decent text edit...

troyp

Yeah... they handle the installation via Windows Update, but if there are no updates waiting, the functionality isn't available. You just have to wait for updates. That's what Windows Help says, anyway. I don't know if there's any way around it. It's hard to believe they know about such a massive, h...

troyp

Software customization, MS style... Language packs are available through Windows Update as optional updates. They aren't installed automatically. 1. Open Windows Update by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button. In the search box, type Update, and then, in the list of results, click W...

troyp

Quot and rem are for integer division. That's pretty useful. AI-controlled ninja frogs can quickly jump distance Y forward or backward. They can also waddle forward or backward at a much slower speed. What is the fastest way for a ninja frog to charge a player without exposing themselves by leaping ...

troyp

To be fair, looking at the section expr.mul in the C++14 Draft, they're called "quotient" and "remainder" rather than div and mod, and the behaviour is correct for those operators. Both pairs of operators are useful at different times. FT. Python is the only language that introdu...

troyp

The context was some time-series data a colleague was working on that includes what was described as two kinds of null values, one of which means "don't add any data to the time series" and the other of which means "reset the entire time-series to null". That kind of reminded me...

troyp

One reason for the contradictory information is probably the different types of batteries that are (or have been) used for laptops. I think older laptops often used NiCad batteries, and after that NiMH batteries. These two types (especially the former) are prone to the "memory effect", whe...

troyp

OK, I suppose I agree with that, but I think when you get to the point where that becomes the best option, you should probably also take a step back to consider the design choices you made that led to that point. In any case, a few circular imports here and there almost certainly aren't, by themsel...

troyp

troyp : frankly, if you need code like that, that's probably a sign you're doing it wrong. ;) I don't think that's true at all. Surely you realize static imports are extremely limited. We often don't notice it, since we tend to focus on the solutions that are available given the tools we have, but ...

troyp

Python modules are just objects, so you should be able to do whatever you want with them, dynamically. I'm not sure how portable it would be though. Basically, you can use the imp module to create a module, place members into its __dict__ directly and then and shove it into sys.modules to make it av...

troyp

I didn't realize UX experts were ever sober... Is anyone familiar with the "separator" characters from ASCII (you know, file separator, group separator, etc)? And the other control codes, for that matter? I was just looking at the Awk manual on multidimensional arrays and it describes the ...

troyp

@YSN: Your link is broken (by a spurious '=' at the end). Fixed:
Vim Wiki: Creating your own syntax files

troyp

You could look at using generic-mode in Emacs*. That's pretty suitable for this sort of thing. There are various completion options like company-mode available (although you might get by with just yasnippet and dabbrev-expand). And there are basically no limits to what you can do in Emacs. * If you ...

troyp

Nine logical connectives implemented with NAND, four combinators, and no named parameters. Simplifications welcome, especially something that gets rid of the 'over' combinator, which I think is a bit of a cheat. The over combination is awesome (did you make up that name or hear it somewhere?). This...

troyp

Basically, it depends on how well I'm used to the relative precedence of the operators involved. Although in 1) I would know the evaluation order without parens too, but I just find it counter-intuitive to have the division first. Also, my preferences are recursive, so if and a/b/c is complex, its ...

troyp

I can't help but notice that you could have written: !(bool_1a ^ bool_1b ^ bool_2a ^ bool_2b) Without context, it's not actually possible to tell if this is a point for or against XNOR (especially since neither variant is particularly clear). (The XNOR variant would actually be much more clear if y...

troyp

@ahammel: I think that's a horrible expression (or as horrible as a 3-operation expression can be) , but not because of the compact syntax. It's actually really easy to read (it takes me 1-2 seconds, and I'm not a fast thinker). The issue is the meaning itself is complicated and unintuitive. The nic...

troyp

In most programming languages != is more "correct" as ^ involves a cast to int and back in most programming languages. I think "most" is a great exaggeration. In C bools are ints, so I can't see any objection. In most other languages I can think of offhand, ^ is either overloade...

troyp

Um? I just answered your question. I'm not sure what religious-warry about that. I expect a certain level of sanity here though. :P Oh, I see. You weren't accusing me of religious-warring... just being insane. Well, I guess that's okay then. But your solution only causes me problems when I want to ...

troyp

It's terrible for any situation. "Just test for it" means that every time you use it, you must test for it or you have introduced a new opportunity for error. Further, in many strongly typed languages, you probably can't use one in place of another. And this is not support for using a wea...

troyp

You'd just test it. If it's a string, you convert it to a 1-element array. Then you check input against each element of the array and if it matches any, accept it. That said, I admit it'd be a bit silly to allow either. An interface like that's just a convenience for the user, so they can pass multi...

troyp

( @phlip: hey, your Life-in-Life video's on proggit. ) I don't know why everyone's talking about hard to read code and lots of shit on one line. jaap's code was just return !( hasSomeProperty(X) ^ isRunFooMode ); (and the other example was reducing 3 logical operations to one.) I think it would be h...

troyp

I've seen "extension" used to both include and exclude the dot. Personally, I tend to agree with most people that it should exclude the dot, and use "filetype suffix" to include it. I think it's sensible to have a FILE_EXTENSION_PDF constant to standardize the extension used for ...

troyp

Maybe it originally used a more baroque scheme involving objects which could be Boolean.TRUE , Boolean.FALSE or null , with an else-clause, and they changed it to primitive booleans and removed the else-clause? They might have used Boolean.TRUE / FALSE because if they just used if(predicate) it woul...

troyp

They arguing su peruser vs s uper u ser. Oh, okay. I guess that's plausible (although it seems a lot more likely they're just the first two letters). Personally, I don't think it matters what it stands for either way, and even if su did originally mean superuser, it makes more sense as switch user ...

troyp

I saw the following code construct today if (predicate == Boolean.TRUE) {...} else if (predicate == Boolean.FALSE) {...} This rustled my jimmies. If `predicate` is true, does Java autobox it in that code? (I know it would autounbox a Boolean.TRUE in an if-statement, but I'm not sure if it does the ...

troyp

I don't have any evidence for the idea that the U in "su" is the first letter of the word "user", as opposed to the letter following the S, but that's my intuition, and that's what I base my beliefs on. If you can find some evidence to the contrary (similar to Steve Wilhite and ...

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