drostie

152 ms·

811.
by drostie 15y ago
Because as the numbers increase, their storage requirement also increases. Suppose you have the array [1, 2, 3, ..., n]. How does storage of that array scale? You need log(n) bits to store the largest element and you need about n elements
812.
by drostie 15y ago
At the very least, you could do it with logs like so: >>> from math import exp, log >>> ref = [i for i in range(1, 500000)] >>> test = [i if i != 7922 else 59148 for i in ref] >&#62
813.
by drostie 15y ago
TL;DR: The Hulk is maybe around 250 kg and jumps atop a 120 m building in the movie, which using E = m g h means that he jumped with a kinetic energy of ~300 kJ. He pushes through a distance of around one meter, so using W = F Δx we can est
814.
by drostie 15y ago
The reactions still seem to be pretty random -- about as random as reactions on reddit, to be perfectly honest. If I were really focusing on points, I suspect I would adopt a strategy like "don't ever reply to a comment, nobody ever up-vote
815.
by drostie 15y ago
I thought that this attitude was sufficiently funny that I decided to put it into a Philosoraptor image, which I think is reasonably appropriate: http://drostie.org/before_lolcats.jpg
816.
by drostie 15y ago
You asked "how does it work?" so let me answer that. How it works: Okay, so the black arrows represent adding one, and the white arrows represent multiplying by ten. The circle that you see represents the fact that after we hit 7 when addin
817.
by drostie 15y ago
It seems so strange that those that own a computer, though they are the neatest of folks, keep desktops which to me evoke a big litter of icons chaotically strewn. And picture folders seldom rise much above this low bar, a numerical sw
818.
by drostie 15y ago
I'm so glad that I watched the first of these, and I think I will also enjoy the second. Since it required a bit of searching due to the very short mention at the end, the "Vivaldi" KDE tablet can be found at http://makeplaylive.com/ , wh
819.
by drostie 15y ago
Not in Flash. If it were an HTML5 application I'd have been breaking it apart.
820.
by drostie 15y ago
Just to expand this for people who aren't familiar with this idea, which has a nice analogue with complex numbers, one can take the number a + b sqrt(5) and represent it as the matrix: [a, 5b] [b, a] This implements the multip
821.
by drostie 15y ago
(1) The whole point of that "O(1) algorithm" is that the n'th Fibonacci number has asymptotic size: F[n] ~= phi ** n / sqrt(5) But this means that it requires O(n) memory to store, which means that it is impossible to get an algor
822.
by drostie 15y ago
Achievement 3 is awarded for "find the right combination," but there are 137980 combinations (assuming order doesn't matter) and I'm not that patient. :x
823.
by drostie 15y ago
Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto. And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-poi
824.
by drostie 15y ago
If you want this in JSON format rather than XML, I have reformatted it as such here: http://drostie.org/votes-HR-3523.json
825.
by drostie 15y ago
Well, let's be cautious. The constraint of moving from the asteroid belt to near-Earth orbit is less "absurd amounts of energy" and more, "how fast do you want to get there?". More importantly, we're not necessarily going to choose the aste
826.
by drostie 15y ago
Is your entire log file a giant JSON array? That's not necessarily a bad choice, but it's problematic for the reasons you describe. Still, since JSON is concatenative, you could indeed store all of your objects with a comma at the end and
827.
by drostie 15y ago
> I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. Bu
828.
by drostie 15y ago
At simulating the quantum mechanics of simple 2D spin systems, from what I gather from the Nature article. The press release sounds like they've developed a quantum computer, but this is not borne out by that article. While there is lots of
829.
by drostie 15y ago
I have two related ideas for a useless language, this is very close to the first one. The first idea is that you normally use at least 2 symbols for a programming language, but you can in principle get away with just one. The "vanilla" form
830.
by drostie 15y ago
I like to add to any discussion of Prisoner's Dilemma a similar note, something like: This is why contracts matter. It's clear that both parties would love to sign a contract saying "I'll scratch your back and you scratch my back," if the c
831.
by drostie 15y ago
Thanks for this. Now I'm trying to think of ways that you could actuate thin metal rods, so that you could transform a greyscale picture into a sort of texture-photograph, so that you could "see" details by placing a hand atop it. If the ro
832.
by drostie 15y ago
Well, let's draw a distinction here. The above isn't griefing, it's simple capitalism. It exists for some reason other than aggravating people and/or wasting their time. You might also have griefers who would put out text-photographs like:
833.
by drostie 15y ago
My apologies; I suck at communicating. I think I agree. This camera is cute but this particular implementation has flaws -- that's what I said before and what I hoped would be my take-home message, and I guess I didn't highlight that enough
834.
by drostie 15y ago
Am I? Would the point somehow be served if you took a self-portrait and the response back was "haha ur so ugly"...? (I should add that I know that Amazon offers a review process, but I am not sure how it integrates with the above camera, an
835.
by drostie 15y ago
Perversely, I grew to like the fact that Linux doesn't really have many games for it. I think we could say that I lost many hours of my life to MMOs and RPGs, though perhaps "lost" should be in scare quotes. It's kind of the same reason t
836.
by drostie 15y ago
It is a cute idea but unfortunately (or fortunately?) this particular implementation of the camera comes with (a) opinions, (b) typos, and (c) probably trolls, if they know that their text will automatically be accepted and printed out. I g
837.
by drostie 15y ago
Hey, let's use XOR-encrypt -- it works so well in the movies! But seriously, it's nice to see this sort of post about breaking into the inbreakers' code. I'm a little surprised that people are treating logging into the FTP server (if not de
838.
by drostie 15y ago
Well, you could pursue legal action under the DMCA for those sorts of actions in principle, but other than that, there is no need for a question mark on your first statement. It is, if you like, the exact problem that copyright enforcement
839.
by drostie 15y ago
It's really unfortunate that the "podcast" amounts to the authors reading a press release. Good physicists -- and I think these guys probably are good physicists -- can often give an intuitive picture of what such a density limit is, why it
840.
by drostie 15y ago
(1) As for forgetting, well, good companies often market their price reductions. I mean, famously, Apple released two iPhones in 2007, a 4GB one at $500 and an 8GB one at $600, and rapidly killed the first and reduced the second to $400, af

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