seppoastian

Workers can fade through units (unless they are sieged) when they collecting resources (minerals, vespene). So Idra commanded his drones to mine minerals and canceled the command shortly after.

This is common technique, mostly used to get scouting drone back through a walloff (own unit stands on "hold" in a small choke) or when a mineral line is under siege (e.g. Siege Tank, Liberator), the player can select all his workers to mine a single mineral patch (has to be spammed, otherwise workers redistribute) outside of the siege range until they siege is cleared up.

According to the developer the upcoming release will be faster even for small blocks

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1060718409296437249

"Middle-earth: Shadow of War" comes to mind. To beat the endgame you either had to grind really hard, or just buy loot boxes (to get best Orcs, Equipment and Buffs). They said that the lootboxes didn't have an influence on the game "difficulty", but after they removed the lootboxes the endgame was also patched to adjust for normal play.

They also had a PvP element where you could attack other peoples strongholds, but with the lootboxes it was also pay to win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

"Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems considered to be unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation; it was quickly recognized by Indian mathematicians."

I got nearly the same ratio as the github example. (CPU is overclock to ~4 GHz)

  $ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name' | uniq
  model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz
  
  $ go version
  go version go1.9.1 windows/amd64
  
  $ go test -bench . --benchtime 10s
  goos: windows
  goarch: amd64
  Benchmark_AllocWithMake-12    20000  870349 ns/op
  Benchmark_AllocWithAppend-12  30000  561120 ns/op