That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
As a TA, I've seen adults try to pass initial college calculus many times (and failing - you were allowed to try several times) with enormous effort. It's not a small multiplier
And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
Good for you. Those people likely didn’t have a true enthusiasm to learn the content, they just stressed and tried to cram themselves by. Kinda proves my point really.
We identify the real number 2 with the rational number 2 with the integer 2 with the natural number 2. It does not seem so strange to also identify the complex number 2 with those.
If you say "this function f operates on the integers", you can't turn around and then go "ooh but it has solutions in the rationals!" No it doesn't, it doesn't exist in that space.
You can't do this for general functions, but it's fine to do in cases where the definition of f naturally embeds into the rationals. For example, a polynomial over Z is also a polynomial over Q or C.
> C++ doesn't take longer to compile if you don't abuse templates.
Surprisingly, this is not true. I've written a C++ file only to realize at the end that I did not use any C++ features. Renaming the file to .c halved the compilation time.
On some compiler toolchains (IIRC MSVC was the main offender) you get a lot more code pulled into your source file when including a C stdlib header (like <stdio.h>) in C++ mode versus C mode. Basically a couple hundred lines in C mode versus thousands of lines in C++ mode.
I agree it shouldn't really matter if there's no C++ features in play, but I suppose third party headers could bite you if they use #ifdef __cplusplus to guard optional C++ extensions on top of their basic C interface. In that case the compiler could be dealing with dramatically more complex code when you build in C++ mode.
Maybe it is similar for the same compiler (but one should check, I suspect C could still be faster), but then there are much more C compilers. For example, TCC is a lot faster than GCC.
tcc is 8x faster, twice as fast isn't doing it justice.
As for the header thing, that'd could potentially be true if the compile time was something like 450ms -> 220ms, but why bother saying it when you're only saving a few hundred milliseconds
Going from 220 to 450 ms would be a disaster in my project. It has many thousands of files. Recompilation of almost everything happens from time to time.
If those made-up numbers were true, they would be very significant and an argument in favor of keeping the code in C
A 200ms difference is adding or removing 200lines lines of implementation, and spliting it up into a file can make it slower because of include overhead. You completely made up C being twice as fast as C++.
> This makes no sense. Buybacks and dividends are how companies give money to investors
Dividends are totally fine (from my perspective), while. buybacks are problematic from a place where executives are bonused on share price and earnings per share, both of which can be manipulated by buybacks.
More philosophically, I think that dividends are better for society as they allow investors to realise a stream of value from well run companies rather than needing to sell their share to acquire this value.
This is obviously just my opinion though, I don't know if it matches to what the OP cares about.
Yeah I know, I just think that's a poor use of tax policy. The only case where buybacks make sense to me is for companies that give employees RSUs, in which case buybacks compensate for the dilution.
Notionally there's not a difference between dividends and buybacks. (That's somebody's theorem... Modigliani maybe?) The fact that our tax laws treat them so differently doesn't make much sense.
Dividends in effect force you to sell while buybacks redistribute to people who want to sell/realize it. They are also more efficient tax wise.
The only good reason to pay out dividends instead of announcing buybacks is a view that your shares are overpriced. Then you can't buy them back without facing a potential lawsuit (you are making a company buy something you know is overvalued).
Why does it matter if people have to sell their shares to unlock value? Is it just the friction of small orders?
Buybacks for manipulating share prices and earnings per share are indeed silly. But they should also be trivial to compensate for by normalising on market cap instead of a single share.
Agreed. But these things have a way of not working out, and one the sadness, one forgets to celebrate the intermediate victories. I wanted to share an intermediate victory before reality crushes the joy.
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