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• What's the most comprehensive and comprehensible overview of statistics for programmers?

  - by jemfinch

  I'm looking for a book (or other media) which provides an overview of statistics that is both comprehensive (covering all the basic/intermediate concepts) and comprehensible (which, for me, means not being weighed down with unnecessary and especially un-introduced mathematical symbology). Can anyone offer suggestions?

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• Why is this not a bug in qmail?

  - by jemfinch

  I was reading DJB's "Some thoughts on security after ten years of Qmail 1.0" and he listed this function for moving a file descriptor: int fd_move(to,from) int to; int from; { if (to == from) return 0; if (fd_copy(to,from) == -1) return -1; close(from); return 0; } It occurred to me that this code does not check the return value of close, so I read the man page for close(2), and it seems it can fail with EINTR, in which case the appropriate behavior would seem to be to call close again with the same argument. Since this code was written by someone with far more experience than I in both C and UNIX, and additionally has stood unchanged in qmail for over a decade, I assume there must be some nuance that I'm missing that makes this code correct. Can anyone explain that nuance to me?

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• Best Dijkstra papers to explain this quote?

  - by jemfinch

  I was enjoying "The Humble Programmer" earlier today and ran across this choice quote: Therefore, for the time being and perhaps forever, the rules of the second kind present themselves as elements of discipline required from the programmer. Some of the rules I have in mind are so clear that they can be taught and that there never needs to be an argument as to whether a given program violates them or not. Examples are the requirements that no loop should be written down without providing a proof for termination nor without stating the relation whose invariance will not be destroyed by the execution of the repeatable statement. I'm looking for which of Dijkstra's 1300+ writings best describe in further detail rules such as he was describing above.

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• How do I rename a process on Linux?

  - by jemfinch

  I'm using Python, for what it's worth, but will accept answers in any applicable language. I've tried writing to /proc/$pid/cmdline, but that's a readonly file. I've tried assigning a new string to sys.argv[0], but that has no perceptible impact. Are there any other possibilities? My program is executing processes via os.system (equivalent to system(3)) so a general, *NIX-based solution using an additional spawning process would be fine.

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• Is there a shorthand term for O(n log n)?

  - by jemfinch

  We usually have a single-word shorthand for most complexities we encounter in algorithmic analysis: O(1) == "constant" O(log n) == "logarithmic" O(n) == "linear" O(n^2) == "quadratic" O(n^3) == "cubic" O(2^n) == "exponential" We encounter algorithms with O(n log n) complexity with some regularity (think of all the algorithms dominated by sort complexity) but as far as I know, there's no single word we can use in English to refer to that complexity. Is this a gap in my knowledge, or a real gap in our English discourse on computational complexity?

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