drfuchs

30 ms·

301.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Apple could also just buy AMD for about a third of their cash in the bank.
302.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Yes, that would be me. Usually folks bring up DVI, but thanks for the GF shout-out! For the record, as a real user of Metafont, all of your comments on this page are more informed than mine. (And, hi, Don!)
303.
by drfuchs 6y ago
You're absolutely correct; I should have said "more than 256". It's difficult to modify TeX to handle larger character sets, but Metafont could, using that weird hack that all characters of a given "mod 256" h
304.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Metafont's "charext" feature allows for more than 128 glyphs, though it's kind of a cheat, as it puts artificial constraints on character dimensions. But it would be much less trouble to modify Metafont to properly handl
305.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Fair enough, but they sure groused about it at the time.
306.
by drfuchs 6y ago
That's the source code; there's also the 360-page user manual, The Metafont Book, published by Addison-Wesley, in both soft and hard-cover. Unhappily out of print; softcover ISBN 0201134446 9780201134445; hardcover 0201134454 9780
307.
by drfuchs 6y ago
The article mentions the "staff’s storied annual trips to far-flung vacation spots" that were paid for by the magazine. I recall years ago hearing an interview in which one of them told the story that one year they vacationed in t
308.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Hmmm. There was a lot of local support for the city to get rid of that very-problematic McDonalds, as the police were being called there on an average of once per day over drug dealing, shootings, etc. And the lot is slated to be developed
309.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Why can't they mention "CORDIC" so that interested readers can find out the cool details about how to actually calculate "... trigonometric functions by repeatedly rotating an initial vector until the target angle was re
310.
by drfuchs 6y ago
“Well played, Thing; you’re really on the ball!” - Raul Julia, as Gomez.
311.
by drfuchs 6y ago
And while you’re at it, please correct “group” to “Group” so we know it’s not about a group of NSOs (are those like NGOs or something?) but rather a company called “NSO Group”.
312.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Au contraire; fax spam was a reasonably big problem: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-2-trillion-lawsuits...
313.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Very few things have ever been measured accurately to ten significant digits. How much did these numbers change run to run? How many measurements did you take? Were the caches warmed up similarly? Still, point taken.
314.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Fooey: Make that "... you get to subtract $9,000 from any other stock gains you have..."
315.
by drfuchs 6y ago
I think a bunch of the replies are missing out on the "why". Somewhat simplified: Employer: Welcome aboard. You get 1000 shares vesting over 4 years. They're currently worth $1 per share, which will be your price no matter wh
316.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Wow; not too many HNers are in a union, I'd guess. Next thing you'll be telling us is that you have a pension. Of course, if the company goes bankrupt, all bets are off. Or even if things get so dire that the company manages to c
317.
by drfuchs 6y ago
Even if your house gets foreclosed on, they don't confiscate it; you still own whatever equity you have in it, so you get a check when it's sold. Yes, you don't build equity quickly at the start, but still it's better th
318.
by drfuchs 6y ago
"Always take the package" is a mantra you'll hear from some folks who have been through earlier market carnage. The idea is that you're liable to be laid off in the next round of cuts, or the next; and subsequent packag
319.
by drfuchs 6y ago
In his live-stream three days ago, Andrew Kelley showed the beginnings of Zig directly generating debug-mode executables, very quickly. And that’s before incremental compilation and linking. This guy is amazing. https://www.twitc
320.
by drfuchs 6y ago
If all the incoming freshmen take a gap year, then the following year there would be a double-sized freshman class. That wouldn’t work so well. And 4 years later, would the university have to admit a double-sized class again in order to ke
321.
by drfuchs 6y ago
So, if I have an array of extint(3), does it pack them nicely into 10-per-32-bit-word? Or 21-per-64-bit-word? Will a struct with six extint(5) fields fit into 4 bytes? What about just a few global variables of extint(1)? Will they get packe
322.
by drfuchs 6y ago
My advice (and experience) is exactly the same as kabdib's (though his .emacs file is longer, and his baud rate lower, than mine). Literally the only advanced feature I use is Keyboard Macros (as dhosek mentions), but just that one fea
323.
by drfuchs 7y ago
IBM used all sorts of non-standard terminology of their own. You'd hear their folks seriously talking about PELs instead of Pixels ("Picture Elements"); and DASDs (pronounced "dah-z-dee") instead of disks ("Dir
324.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Except that in the 70's it would have been "Personnel Administration" (or more commonly "Personnel") rather than "HR".
325.
by drfuchs 7y ago
No, gas tax in California is just 2 cents higher per gallon than in Pennsylvania, while the price at the pump is 80 cents higher (as per https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/02/06/states-with-..
326.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Zig (the language) is very appealing as a "better C than C". Check out https://ziglang.org (dis-disclaimer: I'm unaffiliated.)
327.
by drfuchs 7y ago
The 4th paragraph on the 29th page names the students involved with the Euler effort in alphabetical order, giving the incorrect impression that I made a significant contribution. All credit goes to the others listed.
328.
by drfuchs 7y ago
So one third of the remaining flights won’t have a pilot?
329.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Concerning: “...as the table is linearly searched, the slot index must be wrapped at each slot. The cost of a modulo operation at each slot quickly adds up.” As you linearly search, you don’t need to re-modulo; you just have to set the ind
330.
by drfuchs 7y ago
HP’s oscilloscopes and other electronic lab equipment (at the time their exclusive focus) were beautifully designed and highest quality. Perfectionists would naturally be drawn to them. Ditto for their first calculators; they were drooled o

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