fdej

24 ms·

181.
by fdej 11y ago
The Doom engine uses a lot of global mutable state. In context, there's nothing wrong with this. Why pass around state explicitly when there's just one instance of the state? Multithreading wasn't on the horizon for game engi
182.
by fdej 11y ago
The result of Ono and Bruinier is significant, but I don't know if it really belongs on this list. Euler's pentagonal number theorem already gives a simple algebraic description of the partition numbers. The so-called "finite
183.
by fdej 11y ago
In my case, I only had to use a predetermined stylesheet for the title page. I've heard of one university (there must be others) where there's a thick compendium that specifies exactly which font to use where on each page, what sp
184.
by fdej 11y ago
One big advantage of zero-based indexing is that it's consistent with division with remainder. This is especially nice when working with multidimensional arrays.
185.
by fdej 11y ago
> So it exponentiates 31 by one less than the length of the string and multiples that with the first character's ascii, then exponentiates 31 by two less than the length of the string and multiples that with the second character&#x2
186.
by fdej 11y ago
Chess 1.1 changelog * nerfed movement for white pieces to balance out first-move advantage * added "undo" and "knight blast radius damage" DLC
187.
by fdej 11y ago
"This sample from a relatively decent model illustrates a few common mistakes. For example, the model opens a \begin{proof} environment but then ends it with a \end{lemma} ... By the time the model is done with the proof it has forgott
188.
by fdej 11y ago
My thesis (in math / CS) was essentially several papers stapled together, except that I made the papers into chapters, expanded/rewrote bits and pieces, and added narrative to glue the chapters together. This took about six months
189.
by fdej 11y ago
Python calling a no-op Python function def foo(): pass
190.
by fdej 11y ago
ctypes overhead is horrendous though, at least in CPython (I don't know about PyPy). Fine if you're doing array operations on huge arrays, but not so if you have lots of small objects. I wanted to use ctypes to wrap a C library fo
191.
by fdej 11y ago
185 ns is worse than function call overhead in Python (about 100 ns on this machine)
192.
by fdej 12y ago
It's almost certainly optimal, but proving that is likely an open problem.
193.
by fdej 12y ago
It's O(M(n)) where M(n) is the complexity of the algorithm used for multiplying n-bit integers. To see why, note that each step of the matrix powering or fast doubling algorithm 1) costs a constant C number of multiplications, and 2) r
194.
by fdej 12y ago
If you generate a random double-precision floating-point number in [1,2) and subtract 1, you will never generate 2^-100. A correct algorithm will be able to generate 2^-100 (with very small probability!)
195.
by fdej 12y ago
What you propose is similar to generating an integer in {0, 1, ..., 2^k - 1} and dividing by 2^k. This is not the same as drawing a uniformly random real number and rounding to the nearest floating-point number. The original link addresse
196.
by fdej 12y ago
Both tau and pi are inconvenient because you often need fractional multiples like 1/6 or 3/4. We should instead take the fundamental unit of angle measurement to be pi divided by a highly composite number, say 2 * 2 * 3 * 3 * 5
197.
by fdej 12y ago
Why shouldn't UIs last a long time?
198.
by fdej 12y ago
Of course. In the end, we don't even have a perfect understanding of the physics on which digital technology is built. Nonetheless, we can evidently do much better than we do today, and delegate more of the hard work to our robotic sla
199.
by fdej 12y ago
http://compcert.inria.fr/ is the first that comes to mind.
200.
by fdej 12y ago
That's certainly an issue, and there's no easy way around the fact that even formally specifying the behavior of a program that has to interact with the outside world is problematic. Nonetheless, some of the academic research that
201.
by fdej 12y ago
You should be able to understand everything in that sentence if you have taken a typical undergraduate curriculum in physics including quantum mechanics and electromagnetism. Though it depends on what you mean by "understand". It
202.
by fdej 12y ago
Eventually, we need to move towards formally verified software. Some bugs slip past any number of human eyeballs. It won't be feasible to do formal verification of all software anytime soon, but it should be done for operating system k
203.
by fdej 12y ago
"This video contains content from BBC Worldwide, who has blocked it in your country on copyright gounds." How worldwide.
204.
by fdej 12y ago
Indeed. I need to make a graphic once every couple of years, and every time, I just boot up Inkscape and it does what I expect.
205.
by fdej 12y ago
Related: I recently published a preprint describing some techniques to speed up evaluation of transcendental functions in the range of a few hundred bits to a few thousand bits: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7176
206.
by fdej 12y ago
The closed form is just the diagonalized version of the matrix power, though.
207.
by fdej 12y ago
Minor pedantry: the best proved bound for M(N) is O(N log N 8^(log* N)). You can easily pretend that log* N is constant, though...
208.
by fdej 12y ago
I disagree that the name unobtanium is an example of lazy writing. I always took it for an in-universe joke (doubling as a meta-joke), and/or a deliberately gimmicky marketing name invented by the corporation. There are plenty of playf
209.
by fdej 12y ago
S(log(x)dx)[0..1] => - oo It's not very convincing when one of your examples is mathematically wrong (the integral should be -1).
210.
by fdej 12y ago
http://www.catb.org/~esr/src/FAQ.html#self-hosting

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