gjm11

84 ms·

841.
by gjm11 5y ago
The proof that Tetris is a win for the computer was published in Eureka 51 (1992) by Richard Tucker. (Someone else has posted a link to another paper proving this, but it's from 1997; Richard got there first.) The proof that Tris is
842.
by gjm11 5y ago
They're explicitly recognizing that for three days a week, a bunch of people will not be where they individually work best. That doesn't necessarily mean their top priority isn't productivity, because the productivity of an
843.
by gjm11 5y ago
I'm pretty sure determining Kolmogorov complexity is not in class NP, and in fact isn't computable. (You can't just try all possible programs, because some of them never terminate and some others run for a very long time an
844.
by gjm11 6y ago
Very often, yes. But the sand needs some very expensive preparation first. (The first step is to turn it into silicon and make large very high quality crystals out of it, which you slice into wafers.)
845.
by gjm11 6y ago
You absolutely can claim that, and it gives a nice clean division into two classes, that's sometimes useful and usually lines up with other assessments of sex and gender. But it's not the only way to do it, and if you do that you
846.
by gjm11 6y ago
I think there's an ambiguity here. Let's give names to some more specific things. Proposition A: "Chromosomes, genitals, and sex hormones are real things. For the large majority of people, each of these falls into one of two
847.
by gjm11 6y ago
I've never heard anyone claim that biological sex is irrelevant or not a valid concept. (I'm sure some people do, just as some people believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But I don't see any sign that it's a widesprea
848.
by gjm11 6y ago
The video is excellent and I would encourage anyone reading this to watch it, but for the benefit of those who don't like clickbait the answer is: surround yourself with a quilt, jacket, pillow fort, or similar, because although it loo
849.
by gjm11 6y ago
That can't explain any similarity between what I quoted and English translations of the Qur'an -- because while what I quoted came from the intro to Dawood's translation of the Nights , what it is is a sample of Burton&#x27
850.
by gjm11 6y ago
One thing the KJV has in common with Burton's translation is a certain deliberate archaism -- its language was rather old-fashioned when it was published in 1610. There's (obviously) absolutely nothing with liking deliberately arc
851.
by gjm11 6y ago
Let's stipulate that Larry Wall is a religious fanatic (though I think that's only true if you use the word "fanatic" in a highly nonstandard way). So what? What actual impact has that had on the design of Perl? What fea
852.
by gjm11 6y ago
The trouble with Burton isn't inaccuracy so much as unreadability , or at least clumsiness , because he translated into an idiosyncratic variety of English never used by anyone else before or since. Here's an example from the
853.
by gjm11 6y ago
If you care at all about getting people to _use_ your language (which you might not, as with Haskell's "Avoid popularity at all costs" slogan) then I don't think this is good advice. Both Forth and Lisp have seen less ad
854.
by gjm11 6y ago
Imagine that you find Satoshi's private key and start trying to sell his million bitcoins. Approximately one minute after you start this process, someone will figure out that either (1) bitcoins no longer securely belong to anyone or (
855.
by gjm11 6y ago
That itself seems like a straw man. "Anti-statists" is your term -- neither "statist" nor "anti-statist" appears anywhere in the article. And it doesn't say anything at all about a "state-directed eco
856.
by gjm11 6y ago
> Any decent genetics/medical class will thoroughly disabuse you of this notion. That was my point: this is one reason why biologists are particularly unlikely to believe in God. (At least in places where the dominant form of belief
857.
by gjm11 6y ago
I don't think it should be surprising if biologists are the least likely group to believe in God. One common reason for believing in God is how ingeniously designed living things often are. The reason why this turns out not to be a v
858.
by gjm11 6y ago
I tend to think that "this person wrote an article but it was about what they wanted to talk about, not what I wanted them to talk about after seeing the title" isn't a strong criticism. The things you want them to talk a
859.
by gjm11 6y ago
Well, poor people definitely are more likely to be black, and black people are more likely to be poor. (In the US, which is the country OP is talking about, and in the UK, where I am, and in many other places, though maybe not everywhere.
860.
by gjm11 6y ago
I think it's slightly different. The "tax" is associated not so much with being poor oneself, as with having all one's friends and family also poor. Whether being black is a better predictor of that than being poor, I
861.
by gjm11 6y ago
The author's argument doesn't say anything about (or anything about anything like ) 'the "black tax" as a form of reparations'. The "black tax" of the title isn't a literal tax, but the extra co
862.
by gjm11 6y ago
It maybe depends on who's going to be interacting with the code in what ways. If you expect the code to be changed infrequently but read frequently, and if you think the justified version is easier to read or harder to miss errors in,
863.
by gjm11 6y ago
In geometry, it's conventional to use Greek letters for angles. If you have two angles, theta/phi or alpha/beta are reasonable names for them. Probably better than angle1/angle2 (in which the names are mostly "noise
864.
by gjm11 6y ago
Possibly worth noting: the title of that blog post ("Lambda: the ultimate Excel worksheet function") is a reference to a famous series of papers ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers ) by Guy Steele an
865.
by gjm11 6y ago
I vigorously agree that some jobs destroy value on net, but the report described in the BBC's article is pretty unconvincing. I have the impression that the people who wrote it knew what conclusion they wanted before they began. As an
866.
by gjm11 6y ago
There are different senses of "forwards and backwards". There's nothing particularly wrong with yours, there's nothing particularly wrong with the other one, but they aren't the same. "Reversible computing&quot
867.
by gjm11 6y ago
It's not "awfully pedantic"; the thing you were talking about has nothing to do with the sort of reversibility being discussed here, other than the name.
868.
by gjm11 6y ago
There is no x nor y in 4.442. I have two guesses at what you might mean. 1. Maybe you're referring to the last sentence "(The number of places in the left-hand pair of brackets is determined by the number of terms in the right-han
869.
by gjm11 6y ago
As I have said before in response to similar comments: HN has no problem with humour. Where it differs from, say, typical reddits is that in order to get upvoted rather than dowvoted, humorous comments have to actually be funny .
870.
by gjm11 6y ago
In the sidebar of the SagePub page about the article is a link to another article, commenting on this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797619827880 I've read only its first page (the rest one

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