drfuchs

31 ms·

361.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Of course, that’s the definition of Monty’s Paradox, and exactly how ”Let’s Make A Deal” worked: Monty knows where the one good prize is, and always shows you only bad doors. Anything else is indeed a different story, and a different prob
362.
by drfuchs 7y ago
I found the easiest way to convince non-mathematical types is by suggesting we do the million-door version: “Ok, pick a door between 1 and 1,000,000. We’ll call that door N. Now, I’ll open 999,998 bad doors. So, now only door N and door 2
363.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Sure. It seems best to redisplay quickly, then update the screen again when everything is quiescent (the user hasn’t typed anything for a few tenths of a second, and the whole document has been fully recompiled with no changes detected). Us
364.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Yes, indeed. An absolute plain vanilla TeX, exactly as Knuth wrote it, and my tool chain compiles it, composes all 495 pages of The TeXbook in 0.300 seconds on a 2012 MacBook Pro laptop (the first "Retina" model). Single threaded
365.
For Airbnb employees, dream turns into disillusionment(sfgate.com)
55 points by drfuchs 7y ago|71 comments
366.
by drfuchs 7y ago
The issue isn't storage requirements; the issue is that, in the environments where this algorithm is useful, random access to the storage device is orders of magnitude slower than sequential access. Think magnetic tape in 1986, or tod
367.
by drfuchs 7y ago
The algorithm has to deal with picking, say, 2^63 of them. No room in RAM or even on disk to keep track of the chosen cards.
368.
by drfuchs 7y ago
A bunch of comments here are missing the main point: Unless you have an Exabyte of memory, you can't use any kind of data structure to remember which cards you've already picked among 2^64 of them. The goal here is an algorithm th
369.
by drfuchs 7y ago
I about fell out of my chair when I saw gcc and clang both turn (u>>s)|(u<<(32-s)) into a single "rorl" (rotate right logical) instruction.
370.
by drfuchs 7y ago
After page 20 of your paper are pages of junk that I don't expect you mean to have there (at least in the PDF version).
371.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Careful! Shutting off the ignition will lock the steering wheel on older cars.
372.
by drfuchs 7y ago
You don’t know the half of it...
373.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Right, and he did not include her as a co-author of his paper. That's dirty pool in the academic world. As for who typically gets credit, yes, I think you'd get a different result if you ask astronomers and astro-physicists who ar
374.
by drfuchs 7y ago
As a Ph.D. candidate at Radcliffe, Cecilia Payne discovered that, contrary to accepted theory of the time, stars (and the universe) are mostly hydrogen, and not the same mix of stuff here on earth. Established astronomer Henry Norris Russel
375.
by drfuchs 7y ago
There's a lot of misunderstanding here about what "Independent Company" means. In the business world, it's understood as "not having shares that are traded on the stock market". So, SUSE is "independent&qu
376.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Hmmm; you’re closer to correct than I. Actual details are covered in http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R3.16 where it explains that the “R” instruction would store away the address part of what was typica
377.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Learned LGP-30 assembly language for my high-school's programming class back in 1973, but we didn't actually have one, or even access to one. The teacher had learned on a (real) LGP-30, and thought that we students ought to learn
378.
by drfuchs 7y ago
I chanced to be next to him in line for the buffet at the big NeXT unveiling event at SF’s Davies Hall and chatted briefly with him. Nobody seemed to be aware of who / what he was at the time. I wonder how many zillionaire investors a
379.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Weren’t all DECwriters, and just about any terminal from the 1970’s on, pretty much exclusively RS-232?
380.
by drfuchs 7y ago
You’re incorrect. The result of a comparison is guaranteed to be zero or one in C. Similarly for the exclamation-point “not” operator, and || and &&. This isn’t a recent standardization; it’s been an explicitly specified feature of
381.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Lisp 1.5 was using tagged pointers by 1962, and I don’t think it was innovative in this regard at the time.
382.
by drfuchs 7y ago
APL is the true origin of the phrase “write-only code.”
383.
by drfuchs 7y ago
To your first bullet point: For the first year and a half of its existence, the only shipping model of the IBM-PC came with one or two floppy drives, and no hard disk was available at all. And MS-DOS was the operating system of choice. ht
384.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Yeah, the naming conventions between 8008, 8080, 8086, 8088, and 80186 is enough to make you nuts. Anyway, let's check the sources! Surfing over to https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ and clicking on ALPHA.LST on
385.
by drfuchs 7y ago
The Alphatype CRS ("Cathode Ray Setter") was nominally 5333dpi, but it's a bit of a fudge. As the person who wrote the DVI interface for it, and personally ran the entire Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2, 2nd Edition throu
386.
by drfuchs 7y ago
1982 DataDisc displays that Knuth developed everything on? Sorry you’re unhappy, but given that dvi is literally a dump of TeX’s internal results on layout positioning, it contains all the information that any other system could possibly us
387.
by drfuchs 7y ago
I’m not current, so I don’t know if anyone has bothered to do a dvi viewer optimized for today’s display technology. Given the billions of dollars invested in the pdf ecosystem, though, it’s a reasonable place to live.
388.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Presumably Evince could do a better job of it then.
389.
by drfuchs 7y ago
There’s no context given, so it’s hard to tell why you’re ascribing the problem to dvi, rather than it being used sub-optimally. What’s the full tool chain being used? What’s the output device? Given that dvi doesn’t involve pixels, and let
390.
by drfuchs 7y ago
Ouch! Sorry! Anything specific? (DVI is my design.)

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