dws

10 ms·

61.
by dws 7y ago
It's possible to both get it and still be fooled.
62.
by dws 8y ago
Watch a document get vandalized in realtime. Fun.
63.
by dws 8y ago
Heard Gosper give a talk a decade ago. He was introduced as "The World's Greatest Living 19th Century Mathematician."
64.
by dws 8y ago
Will your feet know the difference if it isn't really the floor they're flat on?
65.
by dws 8y ago
> One of my random question is that what does Google gain by spending resources on developing course like this? s/Google/someone at Google/ 20% time leaves discretionary time for people who're motivated to get somethi
66.
by dws 8y ago
Extracted from working code overnight, which in those days on that equipment was still quite an accomplishment.
67.
by dws 9y ago
I live and commute in Waymo country, and see evidence of quick reactions, though I can't say for sure whether it's an alert human taking over. Mostly, the Waymo vehicles still drive conservatively.
68.
by dws 9y ago
Several friends and I went in on a bulk buy of H19 kits. Every one of us discovered that we'd missed soldering the connections for the space bar.
69.
by dws 9y ago
Wall warts. Most of mine are deployed in places where recharging a Lipo would be a nuisance.
70.
by dws 9y ago
I have the opposite problem. It's finding 1300+ domains that I don't own. The perils of name matching against a common name.
71.
by dws 9y ago
There is, however, a rarer PDP-1
72.
by dws 9y ago
The PDP-10, sadly, isn't on display at the moment (or wasn't as of the night of the talk).
73.
by dws 9y ago
You might find the history of Doug Lennat's Eurisko informative. "Lenat fed the massive Traveller rulebook into the system and asked it to find the best way of winning. Each night, after several hours of trial and error, Eurisko w
74.
by dws 9y ago
Eventually, in the stopped-clock sense, if he lives long enough he might be right.
75.
by dws 9y ago
There's some debate about that. Knuth at one point (in Literate Programming) attributes it to Hoare, and Hoare later attributes it to Knuth.
76.
by dws 9y ago
"And you love robotics! Which makes so much sense- we are Olin after all!- over half of you participated in competitive robotics in high school."
77.
by dws 9y ago
The FIRST Robotics Team I helped out with has sent three students to Olin so far, with more interested. So not only are these students who self-select, but Olin is getting students who've already had an aggressive, entrepreneurial Engi
78.
by dws 9y ago
A seatmate on a recent long flight had an Asus Chromebook with Linux side-loaded via Crouton, and was doing exploratory data analysis in Jupyter notebooks (mostly using R). Response seemed reasonably snappy. The trade-off for him was long-
79.
by dws 9y ago
The CPU is no longer the CPU that the CPU designers (often) think it is. A few years back someone who worked on CPUs at Intel related how his group pulling their hair out trying to characterize how a small section of code in a loop could ha
80.
by dws 9y ago
Huh? I've been hanging around Metafilter for many years. There have been changes since it ran on a box under Matt's desk, but "used to be amazing" to "going downhill"? Not seeing it. It's still one of the
81.
by dws 9y ago
What's your source for "large fraction"?
82.
by dws 9y ago
SparkFun posted a full tutorial on their machine few months ago. https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/building-a-safe-crackin...
83.
by dws 9y ago
The non-transitivity of Rock-Scissors-Paper is easy to understand, partly because it's so simple, but mostly because you're likely never played outside the usual rules, even if adding Lizard-Spock. Non-transitive dice screw with t
84.
by dws 10y ago
I found it fairly easy to turn those off. YMapparentlyV'd.
85.
by dws 10y ago
The explanation is almost correct, but misses a tiny, but interesting detail. Subclasses of Boolean do implement #ifTrue: and #ifFalse:, wich each take a block (a no-argument function) as an argument. But they also implement #ifTrue:ifFalse
86.
by dws 10y ago
Calculating the cost of a line of shuttle code, adjusting for present dollars, then comparing that with your own code base can be insightful.
87.
by dws 10y ago
Fun blast from the past. The original version of this shipped with Mark of the Unicorn's Mince/Scribble package for CP/M. (Mince = Mince Is Not Complete Emacs)
88.
by dws 10y ago
Cheap shot. Gibson may not be current, but he's one of the few out there trying to explain issues to a wider audience who are outside of our bubble, and he does a fairly good job at it (though I wish he'd give Leo LaPorte a good s
89.
by dws 11y ago
The 32032 instruction set was wonderful to generate code for. There were a few early bugs (if a floating point instruction crossed a page boundary, and a page fault was triggered, hilarity would ensue), but those were ironed out well before
90.
by dws 11y ago
If memory serves, the load average calculation was the only use of floating point in the BSD 4.2 kernel. Reworking the algorithm to get 4.2 running on the National 32016 before the floating point co-processor was available was my first time

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