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Comment Re:embarrassing what qualifies as a programmer (Score 1) 143

C is fundamentally not designed to make avoiding them possible

A software engineer says, "Yes, I've developed techniques for avoiding entire classes of bugs in C, but there are a few types I'm still struggling with."

Someone who has not yet developed the engineering mindset immediately comes up with excuses. "We can't do that."

An engineer looks for solutions, not excuses. It's easy to tell the difference once you recognize it.

Comment Re:Can someone help explain "perfect" randomness? (Score 1) 139

They claim each outcome has precisely the same probability. For contrast, a die has small imperfections making some outcomes more likely than the others, or a coin is not perfectly weighted making very small imbalances in the probability.

I don't understand how they did it, but that is what they are claiming.

Comment Re:Does that mean perfect randomness is predictabl (Score 1) 139

Even in a truly random sequence, you could flip a coin 50 times and land on heads each time. You can also calculate the probability of that happening.

In a truly random sequence, every number has the same probability of being next.

In a less random sequence, some numbers are more likely than others. For example, in a binary sequence the next number could have a 10% chance of being 1, and 90% chance of being 0.

In a random sequence, there is a higher probability of getting a 1, and a lower probability of getting a zero. But that is only in comparison with a non-random sequence. Compared to the other numbers in the random sequence, each has the same probability of being next.

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