ErsatzVerkehr

5 ms·

1.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
Ahhh - now it makes so much more sense. :-)
2.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
The Google etymology thing (I didn't even know it existed - just search for "stuff etymology" and you get a nice little graph) tells me that the word "stuff" came to English from Greek ( stuphein ) via Old French (
3.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
I thought this was interesting (both that the space shuttle still used core memory, and that the challenger memory was retrieved and its contents recovered): > Core memory is non-volatile storage—it can retain its contents indefinitely w
4.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
It always pains me to see the space program justified on the basis of its spin-offs. The main (civilian) problems that the space program solved were in getting to space, putting a man on the moon, developing a re-usable orbiter, and buildi
5.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
> Is it 500EUR per week or per month? I LOL'd at this - only someone in the SF bubble could mistake EUR 500 for a weekly rent. My one-bedroom apartment in Germany is around EUR 350 per month.
6.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
Do you really consider the iPhone 4/4S obsolete? To me this sounds like an unrealistic idea of real-world upgrade schedules. The iPhone 4S was released in October 2011. I would hope that a device of cost O($1000) would last more tha
7.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
In German, the word "Land" is used for both states (as in the federal states of Germany, Bundesländer ) and countries. Berlin is a City-State in Germany, entirely surrounded by the state of Brandenburg. Thus it's not too s
8.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
Important details are really hidden on the webpage. For example, who are the mentors? Second: unlike the Hacker School, it's not free. Both of these items should be addressed under "The Essentials".
9.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
> A nautical mile at the pole would be quite short, a nautical mile at the equator would be quite long. No, this is emphatically not the case. You're confusing a minute of curvature -- a minute along a great circle path -- with a mi
10.
by ErsatzVerkehr 12y ago
"Successful people affirm the consequent" - Not sure what you mean here; you're linking to a description of a logical fallacy.
11.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
> Why not have an atomic (nuclear) battery that will be able to send out sonic pings for a year? Are you really proposing to have every commercial airliner fly around with a relatively large lump of plutonium?
12.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
This article makes no sense.
13.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
LIGO has not failed. The second generation of LIGO detectors, called "advanced LIGO", is currently under construction. It will be around ten times more sensitive than the earlier configuration of LIGO, and is very much expected
14.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
I completely accept and agree with your criticism of my criticism. My gut sense is that this proposal is simply too amateurish to be worth the effort of thoroughly debunking. Floating point is kind of like cryptography: the pitfalls are su
15.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Also, he defines 0*NaN=0, but 0+NaN=NaN.
16.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
> In any case, I don't think DEC64 is intended for those users that need to use cos() et al He apparently has other ideas: "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming language
17.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Just curious, what is your use-case in which you need better support for fractions?
18.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Worse: > DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.
19.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
> I think float will be around for a while, what with the blinding speed in today's processors, and the availability of 80 bit intermediate precision. ...and well-understood numerical behavior...
20.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
As a "specification" this document is laughable. For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed. The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coefficient field (usually called 'mantissa&#x27
21.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Integers are also exactly represented in the standard floating point formats, so this isn't even a particular advantage of DEC64. What is "int truncation" anyway? Overflow?
22.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
The answer is, "Yup."
23.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud
24.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
> The Jersey notes are not legal tender in the United Kingdom but are legal currency, so creditors and traders may accept them if they so choose.
25.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
At best, your signal will improve linearly with the number of antennas (N), while the noise will be completely incoherent and scale like sqrt(N). Thus your signal-to-noise ratio will improve like N/sqrt(N)=sqrt(N). You're going
26.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
"corrected" I love this teleological market-speak.
27.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Dumb Starbucks is a parody of parody. A meta-parody.
28.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
> software-defined-radio Can you conjure up a software-defined 70-meter parabolic dish? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Network#Antennas
29.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
I would love to try a "signals hacking" capture-the-flag.
30.
by ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
TeX is written in WEB, a "literate programming" language designed by Knuth, which a pre-processor turns into Pascal. There should be nothing inherently slow about Pascal. In practice, it's compiled using "web2c" w

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