dfan

14 ms·

91.
by dfan 8y ago
Oh, geez, I'm not going to go find some specific section of music that perfectly meets all these constraints. Often the pitches are at the same octave, by the way; I don't think that makes the connection any smaller. And often the
92.
by dfan 8y ago
In a lot of classical music, especially since 1900, pitch classes play a really fundamental role. When, say, G is a prominent pitch class for a while, and then I hear it come back a few minutes later, that lets me understand the structure o
93.
by dfan 8y ago
My pitch started to drift in middle age too. Like you, I do better or worse based on timbre; piano is great (it's my instrument, which must help), stringed instruments are pretty good in general, wind instruments are not so great, orga
94.
by dfan 8y ago
Science fiction futures exist in a two-dimensional space; one axis is the time the story is set in, and the other axis is the time the story is written. You just have to get used to the fact that "2000 as written in 1950" is diffe
95.
by dfan 8y ago
I have a system set up in C++ to make it trivial to add new unique kinds of IDs (wrappers around ints) as well as vectors that can be indexed only with that kind of ID. So you can have a ShoeVec containing Shoes that is indexable only by Sh
96.
by dfan 9y ago
Oh, that EDMS! I had totally forgotten its code name. Seamus's physics system was really ahead of its time, but unfortunately a ton of the work of getting a physics system to work in a real game is dealing with edge cases, numerical st
97.
by dfan 9y ago
Done.
98.
by dfan 9y ago
EDMS = Electronic Document Management System? Like source control? I honestly don't remember. These source files all have rcsid tags so probably we were using CVS? In our previous project (Ultima Underworld) our computers weren't
99.
by dfan 9y ago
This is a trip, seeing code I wrote 25 years ago. It's actually kind of scary how identifiable my style is; in a lot of ways I am still the same coder, although I tend to work at a much higher level of abstraction now. There was a cert
100.
by dfan 9y ago
Yes, this is so useful when it is present. Whenever I read an even moderately mathematical paper I end up making one myself (including the meanings and types of all the variables).
101.
by dfan 9y ago
It looks to me like it's pitched approximately at third-year undergraduates who have a couple of years of a college math background, and is meant to pull them up to a level where they can fluently work with the more advanced concepts u
102.
by dfan 9y ago
I tried this on some of my (fairly neat) handwritten physics notes and it was mostly pretty impressive. Failures: a lot of lowercase deltas became 8s and it had no idea what to make of hbar (converting it to n, pi, k, or most often refusing
103.
by dfan 9y ago
I usually recommend Effective C++ as the C++ book that everybody should read second. I'm still not sure what the best book to read first is, though...
104.
by dfan 9y ago
As someone who programmed in "classic C++" for decades, I feel like modern C++ is pretty different, and that it's not just syntactic sugar to make some ugly things easier. The biggest example is that my natural inclination to
105.
Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe) (1996)(wired.com)
2 points by dfan 9y ago|1 comments
106.
by dfan 9y ago
If you have enough knowledge of quantum computation to be annoyed by that sentence, you will not get anything out of the rest of the article.
107.
by dfan 9y ago
There's a good MOOC on Coursera on applied discrete optimization that uses MiniZinc: https://www.coursera.org/learn/basic-modeling
108.
by dfan 9y ago
I agree that this article came off as a bit condescending. Pearl has a more general-audience book coming out this year coauthored with Dana Mackenzie called The Book of Why: The Science of Cause and Effect. I'm hoping that it will be a
109.
by dfan 9y ago
The game came to Europe and America from Japan, and for decades the only translated foreign literature on it was Japanese. Whenever I do a google search I use "baduk" instead. I think most people writing about go are smart enough
110.
by dfan 9y ago
Here is the latest publicly available draft of the 2nd edition (June 2017, 538 pages): http://incompleteideas.net/sutton/book/bookdraft2017june19.p...
111.
by dfan 9y ago
Crosswords are pretty tough, partially because many puzzles (such as the Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday puzzles in the New York Times) have enough wordplay in their answers (not just the clues) that they break normal crossword rules, in a sp
112.
by dfan 9y ago
It's odd to me that the author describes CLRS as graduate-level. It (back when it was CLR and in its first edition) was the text in my undergrad Introduction to Algorithms class (taught by L!). I agree that Sedgewick belongs in this co
113.
by dfan 9y ago
The 50-move rule was extended for certain types of endgames, but then it was felt that keeping a list of exceptions like that was kind of silly, and they reverted back to the 50-move rule in all situations.
114.
by dfan 9y ago
All that the 50-move and threefold repetition rules do is permit one player to claim a draw; the game may continue if both players wish to play on. (It has happened, particularly threefold repetition where the repetitions are spaced far apa
115.
by dfan 9y ago
In order to run Apple Pascal on my Apple ][+, I had to buy a "language card". This was bigger than an index card (maybe 3 by 6 inches) and added sixteen whole kilobytes to your computer's RAM, beefing it up to a massive 64K
116.
by dfan 9y ago
My first job was doing programming / game design / writing / composing / audio design at a startup computer game company in the 1990s. No one really had a title. When we finally decided that we should really have busines
117.
by dfan 9y ago
Garry Kasparov is a Fomenko fan! As conspiracy theories go, I have to admit that it is pretty good.
118.
by dfan 9y ago
The closest thing in English is Tesuji by James Davies ( http://senseis.xmp.net/?TesujiTheBook ). It already presumes that you know a bit about Go, though (the very simplest tactics are taken for granted).
119.
by dfan 9y ago
Carlsen himself certainly realizes he would have no chance in a match against the top computer engine. Its effective rating is probably at least 400 Elo above his.
120.
by dfan 10y ago
Seasoned Clojurians: is (every? #(= % “success”) (map :status (:state task))) actually considered crappy code? It looks perfectly natural to me, but my Lisp background is more generic.

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