fdej

11 ms·

91.
by fdej 9y ago
> Locality: traditional runtime computations focus on Big O, the number of operations computed. However, for modern computing, moving data around in memory can be very time-consuming I need to nitpick here... Big O notation is a way to d
92.
by fdej 9y ago
Why? Humans first migrated out of Africa at least 100,000 years ago, which would give plenty of time to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. The technology to build boats or rafts could easily have been forgotten over thousands of years if
93.
by fdej 9y ago
Same here. I will probably keep using Python 2 for as long as it works... simply because I don't have to type those parentheses.
94.
by fdej 9y ago
Well, we could in principle build a computer capable of this level of understanding, and then use a brain-computer interface to augment our own understanding with the computer's...
95.
by fdej 9y ago
Yes, and indeed, this is why life as we know it only works in a narrow temperature range: high enough for Brownian motion to drive reactions, low enough not to unravel the results too quickly.
96.
by fdej 9y ago
Look at this analysis of the Falcon 9 flight profile, in particular the graph at the bottom right: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6303ko/falcon_9_ful... The majority of the horizontal delta-V i
97.
by fdej 9y ago
The power output of high level radioactive waste is of the order some watt per kg, comparable to animal metabolism. This is so little that the energy that could be extracted would be worth far less than the running costs for maintenance and
98.
by fdej 9y ago
That improvement took about decade for computer chess, through a combination of algorithm and hardware improvements. A decade might be a reasonable ballpark estimate for Go as well (but even less than that is realistic). On the hardware sid
99.
by fdej 9y ago
No. Typical implementations use polynomial evaluation and range reduction. The advantage of CORDIC is that it only uses shifts and additions, and no multiplications. The disadvantage of CORDIC is that it converges very slowly. On modern har
100.
by fdej 9y ago
If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, o
101.
by fdej 9y ago
Talk about method acting. The creators truly immersed themselves in the role, taking on the standard industry practice of getting screwed over by record labels and production companies.
102.
by fdej 9y ago
From the epilogue of Barry Lyndon: "It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."
103.
by fdej 9y ago
That is correct, but the subterranean dodecahedron itself is merely the portal that the interdimensional lizard beings use to move between our world and the 4-dimensional hyperdodecahedron.
104.
by fdej 10y ago
Not just believed, pi(n) ~ n / log(n) is the prime number theorem.
105.
by fdej 10y ago
I don't know. There are empirical reasons to suspect that StarCraft uses code like this. void DragoonAI() { // Decide next move by reading main video buffer for random bits MoveDirection = Video->
106.
by fdej 10y ago
The NIST DLMF is great, but it has some deficiencies for someone who does serious work with mathematical functions. It was created with the print edition in mind, and the web edition as a companion, rather than the other way around. Due to
107.
by fdej 10y ago
gcc already optimises away loops like for (i = 0; i < n; i++) s += i; It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to detect and optimise away code that computes linearly recurrent sequences.
108.
by fdej 10y ago
Trivia: there was about as much chemical energy in the fuel of either Boeing 767 that struck the twin towers as the gravitational potential energy released by the towers collapsing.
109.
by fdej 10y ago
That's correct, but note that an electric motor is about twice as efficient as a combustion engine, reducing the factor to about 25x (at least ideally). Typical medium range aircraft burn about 3 kg fuel per km [1], so to fly 1000 km y
110.
by fdej 10y ago
The road markings will be clearly visible, of course, since there will be self-driving snowplows around 24/7.
111.
by fdej 10y ago
That's not the issue here at all. The IEEE 754 standard does in principle make floating-point operations completely deterministic, i.e. if you do a specific sequence of floating-point operations, then the result may indeed be slightly
112.
by fdej 10y ago
Well, babies don't learn to stand and walk (and many other skills) from scratch by trial and error. The hard part of constructing a walking machine has already been solved by millions of years of evolution. Indeed, a calf can walk with
113.
by fdej 10y ago
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141115/07113529155/paten...
114.
by fdej 10y ago
More precisely, stellar fusion is self-sustaining because of the immense gravitational pressure. You need around 1/10 the mass of the sun for this to be possible. In the current economic situation, it would be difficult to get funding
115.
by fdej 10y ago
Only if you insist on determinism :-)
116.
by fdej 10y ago
It is literally a quine, viewed as a program in a language where (for example) the code consists of a regular expression and the output is the sequence of all strings matching that regular expression.
117.
by fdej 10y ago
The figure I've seen cited for rhesus monkeys 93%, with cows around 80%. But why are you so concerned about genetic similarity? Isn't the more important question how sentient and capable of suffering they are? If we discovered ali
118.
by fdej 10y ago
"The experiments are more of a progression than a sudden breakthrough: they are based on a decade of work in rats, Courtine says, and the monkeys reacted in very similar ways."
119.
by fdej 10y ago
Well, the senior scientists who sit in evaluation committees and on editorial boards have some control over it. In many fields, only publications in "top" journals matter. If two persons then apply for the same job or grant and
120.
by fdej 10y ago
Anecdotally, PDF.js is slow compared to native viewers and often renders documents incorrectly. And the project is five years old now. It's not bad as a fallback, but considering how important PDF files are, looking for a better soluti

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