alephnil

8 ms·

31.
by alephnil 6y ago
Yes, software can be used as a cover for abuse like in this case, but that happens because some people in power let it happen. For other pieces of software that have consequences for people with more power than prisoners, the society will n
32.
by alephnil 6y ago
The ENIAC was originally not Turing complete, and as you say, had to be rewired for each new problem. In 1948 it was rewired to a stored program computer, which made it Turing complete in the sense that it was essentially programmed to emul
33.
by alephnil 6y ago
Julia has the focus on scientific and numerical computing, and is overtaking the python/numpy combo in that niche. In addition to being considerably faster than python, it also has quite some innovative libraries in the area. This can
34.
by alephnil 6y ago
How much math you need for programming does not have a single right answer. Often you can get away with very little math, but if you know math, you may be able to see patterns in the domain you are working in that allows you to come up with
35.
by alephnil 6y ago
Not really. The browser need to read the header to know where the video frames are in the file. The table with pointers to all the frames cannot be made before all the frames are encoded and their size is known. Then you can shuffle the fil
36.
by alephnil 6y ago
My impression is that the order of the authors is extremly important in medical research, very important in releated fields like biochemistry and molecular biology and still quite important in bioinformatics, while in fields like mathematic
37.
by alephnil 6y ago
> Lithuania had to shut down Ignalina nuclear power plant, this was a required condition from the EU or Lithuania wouldn't be able to join the Union > which is funny, 40% of Sweden's power comes from nuclear I think the issu
38.
by alephnil 6y ago
At the level the article look at, it is not even worth doing better, since the potential gain is minuscule compared to the available disk and memory, and this has been the case at least since the late 80s. That does not mean that it is alwa
39.
by alephnil 6y ago
Code like you describe is of often the result when a program is written by someone that does not have programming as their main profession. I have seen code like you describe in code written by scientists (in other disciplines than computer
40.
by alephnil 6y ago
All national radio stations have exclusively used DAB since late 2017, and while there remains a few holdout local radio stations on FM, I would consider the transition finished.
41.
by alephnil 6y ago
The Smith-Waterman algorithm they made an accelerator for was probably chosen because it is highly parallelizable. On a CPU it is more accurate but a lot slower than the BLAST algorithm, which is more commonly used to search for similar DNA
42.
by alephnil 7y ago
Patents are not required to cover implementation details, and in fact, it is not even required to lay out any detail of the mechanism. As an extreme example of this physicist Leo Szilard was granted a patent on nuclear chain reaction in 193
43.
by alephnil 7y ago
Actually signal processing is already used for most machine learning of audio signals, including speech recognition. The reason is that ML algorithms, including deep learning has a hard time learning the information you can get from a discr
44.
by alephnil 7y ago
He was actually the person that discovered radioactivity. He did so when studying phosphorescence, and discovered that uranium salts (that are phosphorescent too), also exposed a photographic plate even when they not had been exposed to lig
45.
by alephnil 7y ago
In addition to the background, if you can see earrings, that is usually a giveaway. The generated faces seems to always have different earrings in each ear. Also glasses disappear into the skin, and ears are often different on each side and
46.
by alephnil 7y ago
The sbox is a part of the definition of AES. If you change it it is no longer AES, and the new algorithm (that may well have vulnerabilities) is no longer compatible with the cryptographic protocols that specifies that they use AES as a cip
47.
by alephnil 7y ago
The instruction set architecture has no concept of it either, nor about instruction level parallelism, branch prediction or speculative execution. There is no way of getting this right other than knowing about how the processor is implemen
48.
by alephnil 7y ago
The git man pages is famously inaccessible if you don't already know the concepts and jargon of git. The following auto generated satire is both hilarious and sad if you have read the actual git man pages: https://git-man-pa
49.
by alephnil 7y ago
This is the recording of a live stream where the camera was turned on well in advance. The talk starts at 10:45 into the video.
50.
by alephnil 7y ago
While I know you have the hype around 3D-printing in mind, there is no sign that this guy consider this anything else than a hobby. But of cause, this article does in many ways highlight the problems with current 3D-printing technology, and
51.
by alephnil 8y ago
The joke is actually about FORTRAN, where variables don't have to be declared, and is implicitly declared as Integer if it's first letter is in the range I-N and otherwise implicitly declared as the type Real (usually 32-bit float
52.
by alephnil 8y ago
In fact, it is much harder to tinker with technology than it used to be. Not only is it more complex, but phones are also locked down so you are not really able to control your own device, or it does at least require quite some effort to do
53.
by alephnil 8y ago
> It was a “phantom reference” that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier’s desired reference format. I think that explains a lot. Some authors cut and paste the reference into their document to have an example, and then forget
54.
by alephnil 8y ago
Which of these forms you use does not matter all that much. They both have the same semantics where a file is opened, and it is up to the programmer to remember to close it. What actually is a an improvement is Common Lisp's with-open-
55.
by alephnil 8y ago
That some businesses have figured out how to exploit people's irrationality does not mean that economists have a good model for how actual people behave, and how it differs from rational behaviour.
56.
by alephnil 8y ago
Estonia's oil is not normal petroleum, but surface mined oil shale. It is just as bad or worse than Alberta's tar sand in that regard.
57.
by alephnil 8y ago
There is no way to avoid all effects of climate change, but there is a significant difference between a two degree increase in global temperature and a six degree increase, which will be truly catastrophic. Thus everything that is done to r
58.
by alephnil 8y ago
You could easily have written an equally negative article about Americans, which for the longest time created systems that only worked with ASCII. Even a small deviation from that, like Europeans that had name with accented letters could ca
59.
by alephnil 8y ago
The presence of Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 has also been used to reveal art forgeries. Before atomic bombs were tested, these isotopes did not exist in nature. Art produced before 1945 will not contain these isotopes, while art produced af
60.
by alephnil 8y ago
Netflix is in fact working very hard to optimize the quality per bandwidth at low bitrates. Megha Manohara from Netflix had a conference talk about it last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E9xUbcYAM Their goal is to

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