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mrami | 6 years ago | on: An Antique Toaster That's Better Than Today’s [video]

I imagine the solution is going to be some sort of parallel to open source, that I can't quite visualize atm.

Maybe the next generation beyond 3D printing will be able to do multi-component assembly tasks, and you can get/print your own high quality components, and assemble your own high quality toaster... Maybe

mrami | 6 years ago | on: Visualizing and exploring sorting algorithms in two dimensions

I'm not sure what conditions you have in mind, but in the selection sort, the comparisons are O(n^2), and the assignments are O(n).

If comparisons are a fixed, non-zero cost, and assignments are a fixed, non-zero cost, then the comparisons in your selection sort will always overwhelm the assignments, and I can tell you at exactly which input size.

https://gist.github.com/mrami4/56d6e234f34787b8c5daf543a299a...

mrami | 6 years ago | on: Visualizing and exploring sorting algorithms in two dimensions

> If swaps are the only thing you are counting, selection sort is O(n).

And if you ignore the bottom half of the centaur, it's just a dude playing a flute. :)

"In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of time it takes to run an algorithm." [1] We shouldn't be confusing people that actually want to learn about this stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_complexity

mrami | 6 years ago | on: Why we're ending support for MySQL

Funny, since you mention Postgres: 1996 is only PostgreSQL's first release. POSTGRES goes back even further [0]:

> POSTGRES has undergone several major releases since then. The first "demoware" system became operational in 1987 and was shown at the 1988 ACM-SIGMOD Conference. Version 1, described in The implementation of POSTGRES , was released to a few external users in June 1989. In response to a critique of the first rule system ( A commentary on the POSTGRES rules system ), the rule system was redesigned ( On Rules, Procedures, Caching and Views in Database Systems ), and Version 2 was released in June 1990 with the new rule system. Version 3 appeared in 1991 and added support for multiple storage managers, an improved query executor, and a rewritten rule system. For the most part, subsequent releases until Postgres95 (see below) focused on portability and reliability.

Your point stands, nonetheless. There are no whippersnappers present.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/history.html

mrami | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What was the Internet like before corporations got their hands on it?

My first experience on the Internet was when I got to college in the fall of 1992.

I had done lots of BBSing before that, and I treated the Internet the same way - a bunch of different tools to get the same sort of social experience.

Email w/ pine. BBS message boards became Usenet w/ trn. Gopher. Finding random people with finger, and chatting with ytalk. Once talked with a random girl named Thuy in Perth, which blew my mind at the time. Some shlub in the US sending messages live to Australia. Downloading all sorts of freeware from wuarchive.wustl.edu.

It felt smaller then, and something inviting (to me at least). You'd recognize email addresses from one corner popping into a new one, and it gave the whole Internet a sense of continuity. It was a place I wanted to interact with.

Usenet, in particular, was usually a pretty good source of information. As a matter of course, people attached their email address to each posting. And they usually only had one - HoTMaiL and its ilk wouldn't come around until '96 or so. If you saw an email address you recognized, you'd have an idea of trustability.

Today, I really don't contribute much. I don't surf r/new or whatever, so somebody else has usually said anything I want to say. C'est la vie.

mrami | 7 years ago | on: SICP Goodness – Why you don't need looping constructs

To be fair, Scheme implements tail recursion, which converts properly prepared recursion into an iterative loop. Usually converting the recursive call into a GOTO. So if used correctly, recursion in scheme isn't a stack issue.

That said, I love my for loops, too.

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