Subset of an afternoon playlist from a year ago and change:
Regular Expression Matching in the Wild:
I spent the summer of 2006 building Code Search, which lets programmers search for source code using regular expressions. That is, it lets you grep through the world's public source code. We originally planned to use PCRE for the regular expression search, until we realized that it used a backtracking algorithm, meaning it is easy to make searches take exponential time or arbitrary stack depth. Since Code Search accepts regular expressions from anyone on the Internet, using PCRE would have left it open to easy denial of service attacks. As an alternative to PCRE, I wrote a new, carefully reviewed regular expression parser wrapped around Ken Thompson's open source grep implementation, which uses a fast DFA.
What's grey? A melted penguin.
Wikipedia - State (computer science):
In computer science and automata theory, a state is a unique configuration of information in a program or machine.
Computation, itself, requires MutableState because computation is the process of calculation (performing transformations over values) as carried out in a physical world -- values need representations, and physical transformations must occur over state in order to properly reflect the useful transformations over the values that said state represents. Thus, at the very least, physical or wave-form states must be mutated within the processing unit.
Steve Dekorte, "The Tao of Programming":
At some point in the development of most programmers, it becomes clear that the fundamental problem of programming is dealing with the complexity that arises from interactions between state and behavior.
Sometimes, there's something revealing about your first-pass approach to a given problem.
In this case, it might just be that I shouldn't drink Dale's Pale Ale before deciding to answer questions asked in programming reddit titles.
So my roommates are in the other room watching a film about Liam Neeson running around hurting people amidst a lot of yelling because his daughter has been stolen.
I have some thoughts about this.
a) We on the left frequently express the conviction that torture is evil.
b) They on the right frequently express the conviction that torture is a justifiable and desirable thing for governments and government-sponsored individuals to do to people, and that anyway torture isn't really torture.
c) Hollywood, or perhaps more correctly the film industry, is generally understood in America to be situated somewhere on the cultural and political left. Particularly by those on the cultural and political right, who devote much fevered invective and many column inches to the idea of a systemic media bias.
d) The only group of people I can think of who devote more public energy to depicting torture as a viable and righteous activity than right-wing ideologues are the people who make mass-market movies.
