dfan

17 ms·

151.
by dfan 11y ago
With an equal-tempered n-tone scale, two pitches that are x units apart have a frequency ratio of 2^(x/n). "Nice-sounding" intervals have small integer frequency ratios. It so happens that 3/2 = 1.5 is very close to 2^(7
152.
by dfan 11y ago
Yes, exactly. Assuming that the error was not in the rendering system, which took the bulk of the CPU time and which was isolated as much as possible, the recording could even be replayed at high speed by omitting the rendering of most fram
153.
by dfan 11y ago
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri. 1996, so it predated Quake 3.
154.
by dfan 11y ago
My techniques probably are somewhat due to having started 30 years ago. I rarely enter an interactive debugger. I have TONS of logging statements I can toggle. I make program execution as deterministic and reproducible as possible (for exam
155.
by dfan 11y ago
You might do better with problems that ask you to determine the status (alive/dead/seki/killable/ko/etc) of a group of stones.
156.
by dfan 11y ago
Yes, I always teach novices with area scoring, because all of the "if I played it out, I'd kill you, but I don't have to actually play it out" stuff is incredibly confusing to someone learning the rules for the first tim
157.
Unbounded Human Learning: Optimal Scheduling for Spaced Repetition(arxiv.org)
1 points by dfan 11y ago|0 comments
158.
by dfan 11y ago
David Silver said at the beginning of the broadcast of game 5 that AlphaGo's policy network had given Lee Sedol's move 78 only a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring.
159.
by dfan 11y ago
> For all we know from what we've seen, AlphaGo could win even if Sedol were allowed a one-stone handicap. What do you mean by a one-stone handicap? Just no komi? > In the case of AlphaGo, an extremely optimized strategy seems t
160.
by dfan 11y ago
The game of Arimaa was created in 2002 specifically to be a complete-information game that computers couldn't beat humans at. As of 2015, the best player in the world is a computer.
161.
by dfan 11y ago
Very nice! It may be annoying, but I think at some point you really will need to keep track of castling rights and en-passant (position repetition is much harder but I don't think it is so necessary). Some evaluations depend very heavi
162.
by dfan 11y ago
I picked up the "always use the less-than sign when you're comparing" rule of thumb from something written by Bjarne Stroustrup, though I can't find an online reference to cite. I don't always do it for single compa
163.
by dfan 11y ago
Previous discussion of this article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275623
164.
by dfan 11y ago
You can successfully make a computer program play at a 2000 FIDE level (say), in that its win/loss/draw results will be consistent with that of a 2000 FIDE human. IPR is a good way of doing this in a quantitative way. The interest
165.
by dfan 11y ago
Just to clarify your comment so people aren't confused by the apparently low winning percentages, those are all 4-stone handicap games. (It's still an apples-to-apples comparison.)
166.
by dfan 11y ago
MIT's 8.05x, Mastering Quantum Mechanics ( https://www.edx.org/course/mastering-quantum-mechanics-mitx-... ) It's the only MOOC I've taken that was anywhere close to the kind of experience I had as an actu
167.
by dfan 11y ago
From looking through the Planetfall document collection, it looked like G/R came up with that name too (the working title was Survivor).
168.
by dfan 11y ago
It wasn't really possible for the creators to update it, unfortunately (for one thing, the company they originally built it for ditched it): https://twitter.com/emshort/status/653222041265537028
169.
by dfan 11y ago
For people who are disappointed by the shallowness of it, I recommend supplementing it with the notes to his Stanford class: http://cs229.stanford.edu/materials.html . The combination worked well for me.
170.
by dfan 11y ago
I am looking for a less crappy source and have not found one yet. Given that his proof was supposedly presented on November 11 and I haven't heard any mathematicians say anything about it, I'm not getting too excited yet.
171.
by dfan 11y ago
I didn't use OCaml for that long, but I still remember being astonished at how trivial it was to refactor in it.
172.
by dfan 11y ago
Do you look at everyone around you who is 55 and think of them as slowly becoming brain dead? Do you look at people in their 70s and think none of them is enjoying life? 32 is way too early to be terrified of aging.
173.
by dfan 11y ago
Judging by all the comments here from people who evidently didn't watch the video, they could really use a bit more explanatory text on the home page.
174.
by dfan 11y ago
The main historical reason for using sans-serif fonts on displays was the displays' lousy resolution. With modern display technology that reason has mostly disappeared.
175.
by dfan 11y ago
Inexperienced Emacs Lisp programmers coming to this site for the first time should be aware that Xah Lee's code is generally not very idiomatic. He discusses it himself here: http://ergoemacs.org/misc/emacs_lisp_co
176.
by dfan 11y ago
Honestly the preview doesn't read to me like any of them, Pynchon included. When I tried to think of a name that I wouldn't be surprised to see on the cover, the first one that came to mind was Austin Grosmman. I am not saying tha
177.
by dfan 11y ago
I said, "Huh, he really changed up his style for this one." It did have the same lyrical qualities as his other work, though. More importantly, it had his name rather than someone else's on the cover, which slightly increased
178.
by dfan 11y ago
I've read all of Pynchon's books and a lot of books whose authors were clearly inspired by Pynchon, and I don't see any reason to assume this doesn't fall into the latter category, especially after reading a few pages on
179.
by dfan 11y ago
The author presents basically no evidence for this hypothesis.
180.
by dfan 11y ago
New Year's Eve, early in the first decade of this century. I'm riding the Red Line home with a bunch of other revelers. One young inebriated gentleman is trying to induce the rest of us to join him in a sports-related chant. &quot

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