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• Testing When Correctness is Poorly Defined?

  - by dsimcha

  I generally try to use unit tests for any code that has easily defined correct behavior given some reasonably small, well-defined set of inputs. This works quite well for catching bugs, and I do it all the time in my personal library of generic functions. However, a lot of the code I write is data mining code that basically looks for significant patterns in large datasets. Correct behavior in this case is often not well defined and depends on a lot of different inputs in ways that are not easy for a human to predict (i.e. the math can't reasonably be done by hand, which is why I'm using a computer to solve the problem in the first place). These inputs can be very complex, to the point where coming up with a reasonable test case is near impossible. Identifying the edge cases that are worth testing is extremely difficult. Sometimes the algorithm isn't even deterministic. Usually, I do the best I can by using asserts for sanity checks and creating a small toy test case with a known pattern and informally seeing if the answer at least "looks reasonable", without it necessarily being objectively correct. Is there any better way to test these kinds of cases?

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• Creating huge images

  - by David Rutten

  My program has the feature to export a hi-res image of the working canvas to the disk. Users will frequently try to export images of about 20,000 x 10,000 pixels @ 32bpp which equals about 800MB. Add that to the serious memory consumption already going on in your average 3D CAD program and you'll pretty much guarantee an out-of-memory crash on 32-bit platforms. So now I'm exporting tiles of 1000x1000 pixels which the user has to stitch together afterwards in a pixel editor. Is there a way I can solve this problem without the user doing any work? I figured I could probably write a small exe that gets command-lined into the process and performs the stitching automatically. It would be a separate process and it would thus have 2GB of ram all to itself. Or is there a better way still? I'd like to support jpg, png and bmp so writing the image as a bytestream to the disk is not really possible.

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• Fast, Vectorizable method of taking floating point number modulus of special primes?

  - by caffiend

  Is there a fast method for taking the modulus of a floating point number? With integers, there are tricks for Mersenne primes, so that its possible to calculate y = x MOD 2^31 without needing division. Can any similar tricks be applied for floating point numbers? Preferably, in a way that can be converted into vector/SIMD operations, or moved into GPGPU code. The primes I'm interested in would be 2^7 and 2^31, although if there are more efficient ones for floating point numbers, those would be welcome.

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• Integration tests - "no exceptions are thrown" approach. Does it make sense?

  - by Andrew Florko

  Sometimes integration tests are rather complex to write or developers have no enough time to check output - does it make sense to write tests that make sure "no exceptions are thrown" only? Such tests provide some input parameters set(s) and doesn't check the result, but only make sure code not failed with exception? May be such tests are not very useful but appropriate in situations when you have no time?

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• Implementing Transparent Persistence

  - by Jules

  Transparent persistence allows you to use regular objects instead of a database. The objects are automatically read from and written to disk. Examples of such systems are Gemstone and Rucksack (for common lisp). Simplified version of what they do: if you access foo.bar and bar is not in memory, it gets loaded from disk. If you do foo.bar = baz then the foo object gets updated on disk. Most systems also have some form of transactions, and they may have support for sharing objects across programs and even across a network. My question is what are the different techniques for implementing these kind of systems and what are the trade offs between these implementation approaches?

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• What's the purpose of the empty string?

  - by Max Toro

  To me, as a developer and as a user, I find the empty string ("") useless and the cause of much confusion, it's like saying string == char[] Maybe computers need the empty string, so I'd like to learn why.

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• Do similar passwords have similar hashes?

  - by SLC

  Our computer system at work requires users to change their password every few weeks, and you cannot have the same password as you had previously. It remembers something like 20 of your last passwords. I discovered most people simply increment a digit at the end of their password, so "thisismypassword1" becomes "thisismypassword2" then 3, 4, 5 etc. Since all of these passwords are stored somewhere, I wondered if there was any weakness in the hashes themselves, for standard hashing algorithms used to store passwords like MD5. Could a hacker increase their chances of brute-forcing the password if they have a list of hashes of similar passwords?

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• What do you enjoy about programming?

  - by Earlz

  Some of us here(or is it just me?) enjoy programming. Even if we're not being paid for it, and in some cases, even though the end result will not do anything for us. For example, many people do the Project Euler problems just for fun, and in the end nothing was really "accomplished" materially. What is it that makes us enjoy programming? How is programming different from another job? You don't see an accountant going home to do some accounting on their own time just for the pure joy of it. How are we different? (also, if anyone has some ideas on how to tag this, then please do correct it for me.. )

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• Is there a website to lookup already common code functions?

  - by pinnacler

  I'm sitting here writing a function that I'm positive has been written before, somewhere on earth. It's just too common to have not been attempted, and I'm wondering why I can't just go to a website and search for a function that I can then copy and paste into my project in 2 seconds, instead of wasting my day reinventing the wheel. Sure there are certain libraries you can use, but where do you find these libraries and when they are absent, is there a site like I'm describing?

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• Is it kEatSpeed or kSpeedEat?

  - by bobobobo

  I have a bunch of related constants that are not identical. What's the better way to name them? way #1 kWalkSpeed kRunSpeed kEatSpeed kDrinkSpeed Or, way #2 kSpeedWalk kSpeedRun kSpeedEat kSpeedDrink If we evaluate these based on readability understandability not bug prone with subtle errors due to using wrong variable name I think way #1 wins readability, they tie for understandability, and way #2 wins for not bug prone. I'm not sure how often it happens to others, but when variable names like this get long, then its easy to write kSpeedEatingWhenInAHurry when you really meant kSpeedEatingWhenInHome, especially when using autocomplete. Any perspectives?

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• Consuming services that consume other services.

  - by phthomas

  What is the best way to confirm that these consumed services are actually up and running before I actually try to invoke its operation contracts? I want to do this so that I can gracefully display some message to the customer to give him/her a more pleasant user experience. Thanks.

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• How do I generate a random string of up to a certain length?

  - by slavy13

  I would like to generate a random string (or a series of random strings, repetitions allowed) of length between 1 and n characters from some (finite) alphabet. Each string should be equally likely (in other words, the strings should be uniformly distributed). The uniformity requirement means that an algorithm like this doesn't work: alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" len = rand(1, n) s = "" for(i = 0; i < len; ++i) s = s + alphabet[rand(0, 25)] (pseudo code, rand(a, b) returns a integer between a and b, inclusively, each integer equally likely) It doesn't work because shorter lengths are as likely as longer ones, meaning it's more likely to generate a shorter string than a longer one, so the result is not uniform.

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• Flow Based Programming

  - by Software Monkey

  I have been doing a little reading on Flow Based Programming over the last few days. There is a wiki which provides further detail. And wikipedia has a good overview on it too. My first thought was, "Great another proponent of lego-land pretend programming" - a concept harking back to the late 80's. But, as I read more, I must admit I have become intrigued. Have you used FBP for a real project? What is your opinion of FBP? Does FBP have a future? In some senses, it seems like the holy grail of reuse that our industry has pursued since the advent of procedural languages.

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• What should I tell kids about how great it is to be a programmer?

  - by Sara Chipps

  I am putting a presentation together. I thought about illustrating with websites like Facebook, and MySpace. Does anyone have children around that age that could tell me what they are into? How to hold their attention? Ways to illustrate what we do? Get them interested? Your ideas are greatly appreciated, I really want to be able to convey how fun this is :). I don't have access to a digital projector... which really stinks. I do have access to an old transparency overhead, though. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/207278/career-day-how-do-i-make-computer-programmer-sound-cool-to-8-year-olds

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• Starting a code library.

  - by Rob Stevenson-Leggett

  Hi, I've been meaning to start a library of reusable code snippets for a while and never seem to get round to it. I think my main problems are: Where to start. What structure should my library take? Should it be a compiled library (where appropriate or just classes I can drop into any project? Or a library project that can be included? In my experience, a built library will quickly become out of date and the source will get lost. So I'm leaning towards source libraries that I can export from SVN and include in any project. Intellectual property. I am employeed, so a lot of the code I write is not my IP. How can I ensure that I don't give my own IP away using it on projects in work and at home? I'm thinking the best way would be to licence my library with an open source licence and make sure I only add to it in my own time using my own equipment and therefore making sure that if I use it in a work project the same rules apply as if I was using a third party library. I write in many different languages and often would require two or more parts of this library. Should I look at implementing a few template projects and a core project for each of my chosen reusable components and languages? Has anyone else got this sort of library and how do you organise and update it?

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• Serializing persistent/functional data structures

  - by Rob

  Persistent data structures depend on the sharing of structure for efficiency. For an example, see here. How can I preserve the structure sharing when I serialize the data structures and write them to a file or database? If I just naively traverse the datastructures, I'll store the correct values, but I'll lose the structure sharing. I'd like to be able to save data-structures with shared components to a file, restore them, and still have most of the structure shared in the restored data.

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• Randomly sorting an array

  - by Cam

  Does there exist an algorithm which, given an ordered list of symbols {a1, a2, a3, ..., ak}, produces in O(n) time a new list of the same symbols in a random order without bias? "Without bias" means the probability that any symbol s will end up in some position p in the list is 1/k. Assume it is possible to generate a non-biased integer from 1-k inclusive in O(1) time. Also assume that O(1) element access/mutation is possible, and that it is possible to create a new list of size k in O(k) time. In particular, I would be interested in a 'generative' algorithm. That is, I would be interested in an algorithm that has O(1) initial overhead, and then produces a new element for each slot in the list, taking O(1) time per slot. If no solution exists to the problem as described, I would still like to know about solutions that do not meet my constraints in one or more of the following ways (and/or in other ways if necessary): the time complexity is worse than O(n). the algorithm is biased with regards to the final positions of the symbols. the algorithm is not generative. I should add that this problem appears to be the same as the problem of randomly sorting the integers from 1-k, since we can sort the list of integers from 1-k and then for each integer i in the new list, we can produce the symbol ai.

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• Tree-like queues

  - by Rehno Lindeque

  I'm implementing a interpreter-like project for which I need a strange little scheduling queue. Since I'd like to try and avoid wheel-reinvention I was hoping someone could give me references to a similar structure or existing work. I know I can simply instantiate multiple queues as I go along, I'm just looking for some perspective by other people who might have better ideas than me ;) I envision that it might work something like this: The structure is a tree with a single root. You get a kind of "insert_iterator" to the root and then push elements onto it (e.g. a and b in the example below). However, at any point you can also split the iterator into multiple iterators, effectively creating branches. The branches cannot merge into a single queue again, but you can start popping elements from the front of the queue (again, using a kind of "visitor_iterator") until empty branches can be discarded (at your discretion). x -> y -> z a -> b -> { g -> h -> i -> j } f -> b Any ideas? Seems like a relatively simple structure to implement myself using a pool of circular buffers but I'm following the "think first, code later" strategy :) Thanks

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• How to learn to program 20 questions?

  - by Pselus

  Anyone have any advice for learning to program a 20 questions game? Something that could learn in the future but doesn't necessarily need to learn right away.

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• Can knowing C actually hurt the code you write in higher level languages?

  - by Jurily

  The question seems settled, beaten to death even. Smart people have said smart things on the subject. To be a really good programmer, you need to know C. Or do you? I was enlightened twice this week. The first one made me realize that my assumptions don't go further than my knowledge behind them, and given the complexity of software running on my machine, that's almost non-existent. But what really drove it home was this Slashdot comment: The end result is that I notice the many naive ways in which traditional C "bare metal" programmers assume that higher level languages are implemented. They make bad "optimization" decisions in projects they influence, because they have no idea how a compiler works or how different a good runtime system may be from the naive macro-assembler model they understand. Then it hit me: C is just one more abstraction, like all others. Even the CPU itself is only an abstraction! I've just never seen it break, because I don't have the tools to measure it. I'm confused. Has my mind been mutilated beyond recovery, like Dijkstra said about BASIC? Am I living in a constant state of premature optimization? Is there hope for me, now that I realized I know nothing about anything? Is there anything to know, even? And why is it so fascinating, that everything I've written in the last five years might have been fundamentally wrong? To sum it up: is there any value in knowing more than the API docs tell me? EDIT: Made CW. Of course this also means now you must post examples of the interpreter/runtime optimizing better than we do :)

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• Using regex to add leading zeroes

  - by hgpc

  I would like to add a certain number of leading zeroes (say up to 3) to all numbers of a string. For example: Input: /2009/5/song 01 of 3 Output: /2009/0005/song 0001 of 0003 What's the best way to do this with regular expressions?

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• Parsing: How to make error recovery in grammars like " a* b*"?

  - by Lavir the Whiolet

  Let we have a grammar like this: Program ::= a* b* where "*" is considered to be greedy. I usually implement "*" operator naively: Try to apply the expression under "*" to input one more time. If it has been applied successfully then we are still under current "*"-expression; try to apply the expression under "*" one more time. Otherwise we have reached next grammar expression; put characters parsed by expression under "*" back into input and proceed with next expression. But if there are errors in input in any of "a*" or "b*" part such a parser will "think" that in position of error both "a*" and "b*" have finished ("let's try "a"... Fail! OK, it looks like we have to proceed to "b*". Let's try "b"... Fail! OK, it looks like the string should have been finished...). For example, for string "daaaabbbbbbc" it will "say": "The string must end at position 1, delete superflous characters: daaaabbbbbbc". In short, greedy "*" operator becomes lazy if there are errors in input. How to make "*" operator to recover from errors nicely?

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• Why use buffers to read/write Streams

  - by James Hay

  Following reading various questions on reading and writing Streams, all the various answers define something like this as the correct way to do it: private void CopyStream(Stream input, Stream output) { byte[] buffer = new byte[16 * 1024]; int read; while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0) { output.Write(buffer, 0, read); } } Two questions: Why read and write in these smaller chunks? What is the significance of the buffer size used?

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• Determining the order of a list of numbers (possibly without sorting)

  - by Victor Liu

  I have an array of unique integers (e.g. val[i]), in arbitrary order, and I would like to populate another array (ord[i]) with the the sorted indexes of the integers. In other words, val[ord[i]] is in sorted order for increasing i. Right now, I just fill in ord with 0, ..., N, then sort it based on the value array, but I am wondering if we can be more efficient about it since ord is not populated to begin with. This is more of a question out of curiousity; I don't really care about the extra overhead from having to prepopulate a list and then sort it (it's small, I use insertion sort). This may be a silly question with an obvious answer, but I couldn't find anything online.

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• What is a typical algorithm for finding a string within a string?

  - by Courtney85

  I recently had an interview question that went something like this: Given a large string (haystack), find a substring (needle)? I was a little stumped to come up with a decent solution. What is the best way to approach this that doesn't have a poor time complexity?

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