drfuchs

51 ms·

601.
You're 25 times more likely to be the next US president than to win at Powerball
30 points by drfuchs 11y ago|12 comments
602.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Dude, your case statement will compile into a bunch of test and branch instructions, implementing a binary search if you're lucky, and a linear search if you're not. Better to use __builtin_clz() or similar, so your function will
603.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Given that its original purpose was to discourage the authorities from torturing or jailing you in order to compel you to give evidence against yourself, one could argue that the Fifth would need new justification in a future where thoughts
604.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Exactly; it shows just how wildly faster sqrt(n) grows than log(n).
605.
by drfuchs 11y ago
No, because sqrt(n)/log(n) is not bounded by a constant as n approaches infinity. Consider: in base 10, if log(n)=10, then sqrt(n) is 5 digits; if log(n)=100, then sqrt(n) is 50 digits; if log(n)=1000, then sqrt(n) is 500 digits; etc.
606.
by drfuchs 11y ago
"Mexican wave"?
607.
by drfuchs 11y ago
It wasn't me who down-voted you, but perhaps it was someone else who wasn't familiar with a single one of the capitalized words/phrases in the paragraph: "I carry a box with a couple of sets of Sharpies of various colour
608.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Oh, it's even worse than that. Lots of unhappy males leads to fear among the ruling class of where the discontent might lead, which encourages them to pick a fight to start a shooting war, which has the dual benefits of keeping the now
609.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Here's another human-friendly scheme to test divisibility by 7 that I don't think is popularly known: Write down the number, then cross off the least significant digit, double it, and subtract that from what's left of the num
610.
by drfuchs 11y ago
In the fall of 1978, I was taking Prof. Szymanski's EECS 217 class, in which the main project was to write a toy assembler. He mentioned this paper of his, but it was not part of the course. At the time, nobody was doing anything with
611.
by drfuchs 11y ago
An actual quote reported by an actual journalist who was actually there at the time and actually heard from the lips of "Marco Vidal, the head of Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit": McAfee is a “prime suspect” in Faull’s death. http
612.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Of course he was a suspect. He'd had an escalating battle with his neighbor, who coincidentally turned up shot to death. http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john-mcafee-wanted-for-murder
613.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Right, and his running mate will be Hans Reiser? Seriously, last I heard, the guy is pretty clearly a murderer. Or lunatic. Or both. http://memeburn.com/2013/01/john-mccafee-anti-virus-pioneer-... etc. etc.
614.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Knuth developed the first version of TeX in 1978, on the Sail mainframe, a 36-bit DEC PDP-10 with a unique hardware graphics system called Data Disc: a single-platter disk with 32 fixed read/write heads, where each of the 32 tracks con
615.
by drfuchs 11y ago
I saw it with my own eyes when I was in his office to discuss some typesetter-interfacing issues, but I suppose that's not enough of a reference. Perhaps the story is repeated in an old issue of TuGboat, the journal of the TeX Users Gr
616.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Knuth wrote the entirety of the first version of TeX on yellow legal note pads, and then typed it all in, and then started debugging. Ditto for MetaFont. Both are the equivalent of about 10kloc (after the Tangle preprocessor removes the v
617.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Close, but that only worked for punched paper tape (which had 7 positions for hole / not-hole per row, with a direct mapping to ASCII). Punch cards used Hollerith code, with 12 positions per column, with a peculiar mapping to EBCDIC,
618.
by drfuchs 11y ago
I bought a PC-compatible from Corona circa 1983 after my extensive research showed it had better technology (and thus more of a chance of corporate survival) than the also-newly-created Compaq.
619.
by drfuchs 11y ago
I wonder how many "single bit errors" are due to hardware faults vs. how many are due to software accidentally setting/unsetting a single bit binary flag through a wild pointer. It would also be interesting to know what perce
620.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Because big-endian matches how most humans have done it for most of history ("five hundred twenty one" is written "521" or "DXXI", not "125" or "IXXD"). Because the left-most bit in a byte i
621.
by drfuchs 11y ago
I managed to ask Chris Lattner this very question at WWDC (during a moment when he wasn't surrounded by adoring crowds). "So, you're signaling a new CPU architecture?" But, "No; think more along the lines of 'a
622.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Well, Yahoo search says his height was 5' 9" (1.75m), which is more than an inch taller than I am...
623.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Well, it may look beautiful from the outside, but if you've ever been inside, most of the rooms are way too cramped, and the ceilings are low. Not as bad as his Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, though; I don't have claustro
624.
by drfuchs 11y ago
"The authors have designed and tested a custom n-channel metal-oxide semiconductor (nMOS) chip (the Digitar chip), which computes 16 independent notes, each with a sampling rate of 20 KHz." Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong, "Dig
625.
by drfuchs 11y ago
When Alex demoed their first hardware, he'd hold an ice cube against the custom vlsi chip to get it to work at high enough frequency. Early overclocker!
626.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Your "because" is wrong. DPR's own words about killing Curtis: "ok, so can you change the order to execute rather than torture? ... he [Curtis] was on the inside for a while, and now that he’s been arrested, I’m afraid h
627.
by drfuchs 11y ago
So you agree that Alupis' item is completely false, which was my sole point. As an aside, you conveniently neglect to mention that Curtis Green feared Ross would have him killed simply because Curtis had been arrested and Ross knew tha
628.
by drfuchs 11y ago
Curtis Green is a real person, who really worked for Ross, who really was afraid Ross would have him killed, and who in fact Ross did try to have killed. See the very beginning of Joshuah Bearman's "The Rise and Fall of Silk Road
629.
Agent busted in Silk Road heist a Bitcoin fanboy(m.sfgate.com)
2 points by drfuchs 12y ago|0 comments
630.
by drfuchs 12y ago
The precursors to TeX (1978-82) and Metafont (1979-83) are good examples of complete, non-trivial Sail programs. Both were written by Donald Knuth; the sources for prototype-TeX are in http://www.saildart.org/[TEX,DEK] (se

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