derf_

36 ms·

1. 331.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   This is correct. When I was a Ph.D student I was told that it was very rare for someone to fail their thesis defense, because their advisor will not let them defend until they know they are going to pass. It does happen, but it takes a spec
2. 332.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   I applied this to some pieces of Daala's entropy coder: https://review.xiph.org/763/#msg2 The output needs a bit of manual review (see the mixing of 32-bit and 16-bit accesses to the same register in the second ex
3. 333.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   It's worse than that. Competition drives price to zero. That means DRM providers need to get their revenue from some other way. The obvious way is to exploit (track, or worse) the user.
4. 334.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   This is the progress for the past year: https://arewecompressedyet.com/?r[]=master-2016-01-01-082473... Select "Entire curve (old method)" to see BD-rate numbers (the new method requires data overlap in all three
5. 335.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   > HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. On desktop, at least, you can fix this by making your browser window wider (just resize the window: you'll find a threshold past which the hierarchy appears or disapp
6. 336.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   ...if after swapping buffers around, our input cursor hits the mark again, we just hit the refill path again to generate more zeroes. (This is why the copying code uses memmove). This misses one more optimization: if you consume bits by s
7. 337.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   I was lucky---when I was born in 1930, I won the ovarian lottery. You know, I was born in the United States. The odds were 30 or 40 to one against that. I was born white. If I had been born black, my life would have been different. I was b
8. 338.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   You can also change the memory layout to that of a binary heap, instead of the usual sorted order. That puts the next index at either (2 i + 1) or (2 i + 2). With proper alignment, those will be in the same cache line up to 4 iterations in
9. 339.▲
   by derf_ 11y ago

   In the search for new models I've always been partial to the inclusion of credit (marked to market) as a factor in predicting inflation, instead of just money supply. This at least correctly predicted low-to-no inflation post-financial
10. 340.▲
    Inflation and Deflation Revisited (2009)(economicsjunkie.com)

    7 points by derf_ 11y ago|0 comments
11. 341.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    This is basically a solved problem for supersonic ammunition (not fired from a silenced weapon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_%28countermeasure%29 (not to suggest in any way that the proposal is practical on
12. 342.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    When I was a grad student, I was explicitly advised to make such citations uncritical. Instead of saying, "Researchers A, B, and C failed to consider cases X, Y, and Z, which we address here," you would say, "Researchers A, B
13. 343.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    For those who want a bit more than "we trade bandwidth for latency" and a bit less than a 43-page paper (not to discourage anyone, it's very well-written): In a binary-heap ("Eytzinger") layout, the next node to con
14. 344.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    Don't be ridiculous. Tin-foil hats amplify exactly the frequencies used by the US government and large multinationals for GPS and mobile phone tracking: https://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http:/&#
15. 345.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    I was in Paris last week. On Monday, trying to head to the airport from Porte de Clichy (on the 13 line), I failed to board two subway trains in succession. They were so jam-packed with people I could not physically get on the cars. It was
16. 346.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    It is important to point out that access to security bugs (the ones that contain descriptions of unpatched vulnerabilities) is not automatically granted to all Mozilla employees, so simply having an @mozilla.com e-mail is not enough to ge
17. 347.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    I don't know what gdb does, but even on x86 a conditional breakpoint can be ridiculously slow. On a loop that executes a few hundred thousand times before meeting the condition, it can take minutes to evaluate something that executed
18. 348.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    Please see the "Other disclosures" section on https://www.opus-codec.org/license/ You may also be interested in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/defending-opus/ (warning: cont
19. 349.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    We ran the Opus license terms by the FSF before publishing them, and they confirmed that the terms were compatible with the GPL (v3 or otherwise).
20. 350.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    We are absolutely talking with Apple, and hope they will decide to join.
21. 351.▲
    Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video(blog.mozilla.org)

    200 points by derf_ 11y ago|59 comments
22. 352.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    Hello, I'm the Daala tech lead. One of the things that made Opus a success was the contributions of others. We certainly don't have a monopoly on good ideas. We'll take pieces of Daala and stick them in Thor and pieces of Tho
23. 353.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    I've seen a lot of comparisons to Berkshire. Not every large conglomerate is Berkshire. Berkshire is composed of pre-existing businesses that were themselves successful before being purchased. They are not experimental ventures that ne
24. 354.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    https://www.boston.com/entertainment/2015/07/28/man-claims-c... So much for no lawsuits.
25. 355.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    My first question was: how did the statistics he's quoting change in the subsequent dozen years? Charts of 2007-2015 Q1: https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/intinv/intinv... More detailed data
26. 356.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    Well, that is not quite true. You also need definitions for the words used in the claims, which may require reading the description to understand properly. But certainly the claims are where you start your analysis.
27. 357.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    "According to two new papers, the crucial variable that separates relatively harmless frenzies from disastrous ones is debt." Also according to, like, Irving Fisher in 1933: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs&#x2
28. 358.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    "That's the ten-word answer my staff's been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words
29. 359.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    What the parent said still applies in your case. You just make a wrapper function that does the cleanup. I have used this pattern many times: static int foo_impl(int arg, int **resource1, int **resource2) { *resource1 = (int *)mallo
30. 360.▲
    by derf_ 11y ago

    Any reasonable compiler will implement x%256 using bitwise arithmetic, but C semantics require that x == d*(x/d) + (x%d), which means that if x is negative (x%256) must be negative, while (x&0xff) will be positive. This difference