• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.

    It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.

    Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.



  • As the size of the pyramid increases the obvious algorithm (walking all the routes down the tree) is going to fall afoul of the time limit pretty quickly, as are several alternative algorithms you might try. So a pyramid 100 or 1000 levels deep very rapidly falls out of the time limit unless you choose the right algorithm because there are 2^(n-1) paths for a n-level pyramid. I’d suggested a…much bigger dataset as one of the judgement datasets One that took my reference implementation about 15 seconds.

    This was a contest for high school kids c. 2001 and was going to involve 4 problems across 6 hours. The prof making the decision thought it was a bit much for them to figure out why the algorithm they were likely to try wasn’t working in time (noting that the only feedback they were going to get was along the lines of “failed for time on judgement dataset 3 with 10000 layers”, that it was because it was a poor choice of algorithm rather than some issue in their implementation, and then to devise a faster algorithm and implement and debug that all ideally within 1.5 hours.

    For example, the algorithm I used for my reference solution started one layer above the bottom of the pyramid, checked the current number against either child it could be summed with, replaced the current number with the larger sum and continued in that fashion up the pyramid layer by layer. So, comparison, add, store for each number in the pyramid above the bottom layer. When you process the number at the top of the pyramid, that’s the final result. It’s simple and it’s fast. But it requires looking at the problem upside down, which is admittedly a useful skill.


  • See, when I was a comp sci undergrad 20-odd years ago our department wanted to do a programming competition for the local high schools. We set some ground rules that were similar to ACS programming competition rules, but a bit more lax - the big ones were that it had to run in command line, it had to take the problem dataset filename as the first parameter and it had to be able to solve all datasets attempted by the judges in less that 2 minutes per dataset, noting that the judgement datasets would be larger than example ones.

    Some of the students were asked to come up with problem ideas. I was told mine was unfair, but mine was entirely about choosing the right algorithm for the job.

    It went like this - the file would contain a pyramid of numbers. You were supposed to think of each number as connecting to the two numbers diagonally below it and all paths could only proceed down. The goal was to calculate the largest sum of any possible path down.







  • In order to decree this unconstitutional, SCOTUS would have to make a majority decision that what Trump did doesn’t fall under insurrection.

    No, they wouldn’t. They would just have to accept a due process argument, essentially that the opinion of a CO state judge is not the appropriate venue or process for determining if someone is an insurrectionist. Probably calling for either Congress or criminal courts to establish that.

    This is notably different than the CSA, as CSA officers were openly and publicly members of an organization that openly and publicly waged a war against the US.




  • Are these morons suggesting that the union will take over for management?

    Some unions make disciplinary processes and who can be terminated under what conditions part of the contract. In the worst cases this creates a scenario where bad workers are functionally impossible to fire and the people there actually trying to get their work done have to deal with it, because the bad apple hasn’t been written up for identical violations on at least 3 different dates in the last 90 days, then been provided with explicit written directions of how not to do what they’ve been doing in a meeting with management and the union rep, then given another month before reevaluating if they’ve corrected the issue, then suspending them if they haven’t, then doing the whole process over again before being allowed to fire them. Passing the improvement plan evaluation resets the whole thing. Presuming what they’re doing isn’t an immediate risk of injury or death, that is (that has an expedited process).