I'm confused. The CEO of Persado is quoted as saying "interest rates are low," while the article says that Metamarkets is paying 14% on a loan cut in Oct--for comparison, the Merrill Triple-C-Rated index ("extremely speculative" junk bonds) is under 12%. So while it's true that UST base rates are low, that doesn't seem to be a factor in this funding. Sounds like a story about a few banks goosing earnings with risky loans and company insiders/VCs getting more upside "if things work out" and far less of those pesky loses if they don't, very much like the speculative real estate development loans in the 80s that made for a big but very short party.
I agree that reading code is extremely important for improving as a programmer, but the code has to be read analytically. That’s hard work, because it means understanding the problems and subproblems that the code is solving. For example, you may have seen the longest identical subsequence algorithm used by diff, but analyzing the implementation in V7 Unix is a different learning experience. Or if you’ve studied interpreters, you could look at the awk sources maintained by Kernighan to see how a fairly complex interpreter fits together.
There's plenty of 20th century organ music, a lot of it is religious (my father was an organist). It's hard to record pipe organs, particularly the low bass, and without excellent playback equipment the presence is lost. You might be interested in Messiaen's organ works or in the music of his predecessors Franck and Dupré.
Why are you so sure it was written by dmr? The coding style looks like ken's to me: a) no space after if/while/for/etc b) use of "botch".
Yes, calloc is used in lex, but that is not part of v6...at least not the official distribution, I don't know when he started development. But since he also uses fopen and friends why shouldn't he be using malloc as well? changing 'calloc(n, m)' to 'malloc(n*m)' doesn't sound like such a huge change.
It obviously depends on background and goals. People who come to programming with only HS math would probably benefit most from studying (not just reading) an introductory discrete math text such as Biggs or Rosen. For calculus, linear algebra and so on one could look at MIT Opencourseware. For most people, actually learning the material requires a significant time investment, and one of the hardest things to fake is a knowledge of math.
The obvious symmetrical question is whether there has been a pro-American dictator who actually improved the lives of the citizens. But 'improving the lives' is extremely vague. Measured by what? Literacy, GNP, health care, growth of a middle class, civil liberties, respect for contracts, life expectancy, public safety, etc.?
Sedgewick did animations of quicksort and other algorithms back in the 80's. He coincidentally did his PhD on quicksort under Knuth. Jon Bentley gave a Google Talk about quicksort and inputs that drive it to O(n^2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvgYAQzg1z8 His implementation of a production quicksort with McIroy is widely used. It's in BSD, glibc (non-recursive version--some here are saying that glibc qsort is a mergesort, but at least in the code I've read that's not true. Perhaps there's some confusion over the memory allocated by glibc qsort for the pointer stack it creates to avoid recursion). The paper by Bentley and McIlroy called ``Engineering a quicksort'' fills in many details that Bentley omits in his Google Talk.
The one time I was in a casino I accompanied a coworker who gambled to one of the low dollar casinos in Colorado. What I noticed were poor people who came with $100 and wanted--or needed--to leave with $200, and of course the business model says that very few of them did. I bought a $10 bucket of quarters out of boredom and after 10 or so minutes I had $11.25, which is an incredible annualized return but not what gamblers are looking for. I noticed people going from one machine to another--"this one is cold", "maybe this is the right one", etc. It was very sad, and I learned that low dollar gambling can be insidious when the players are poor and look to the casino for money they need. The big dollar losses may make better headlines, but the self-delusion and suffering are the same.
The difference is when you have no savings and minimum wage is $10/hr (or whatever), you can recoup a $100 loss in a couple days. I used to play poker with a woman whose husband lost decades worth of savings.
Not to minimize that person's loss, but 60% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and I don't assume that the people I observed only went once to the casino. Minimum wage earners tend to have nothing left over by the end of the month. My point was only that it's not the dollar magnitude of the loss that matters, it's the ability of the gambler to sustain the loss whatever the dollar amount.
Interesting reaction to the quote from Robert Gordon of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. PCI is an umbrella lobby for insurers; their website says they represent writers of 42% of automobile policies in the U.S. Since insurers are in the business of understanding and quantifying the risks they insure against, I'm willing to assume that he and PCI are knowledgeable about this issue.
