gregfjohnson

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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
This is why I love hacker news. I was sitting in the waiting area at Long Beach Airport about to board a Southwest flight when I read this article. Did the hack, it worked spectacularly. I didn't have jq installed, but whipped up a
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
The B-2 stealth bomber also has an astro-inertial navigation system which relies on tracking stars.
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
May I point out how painful this comment feels to those of us who take our religious faith seriously?
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
I have progressed enough in my mediation practice to understand the question, but not far enough to have much to say in the way of answers. "Apophatic" theology in Catholic circles seems to be related: One approaches insight int
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
On a light note: There is a difference between micro-wave meditation and slow-cook meditation! Personally, I'm a slow-cook kind of guy. This article seems to be describing various ways to short-cut or accelerate the process, and I&#
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
Here's a suggestion, plagiarized from a friend who is an experienced meditator! For one month, meditate for one minute. Set a timer on your smart phone, and do one minute. If you miss a day, restart the month. After a month of cons
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
Question for this knowledgeable group of people: Which fusion start-ups look promising? How does inertial confinement look? Any thoughts on the newly funded start-up Blue Laser Fusion? Any thoughts on one of the older players, TAE? How
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
Jon Bentley's classic column "Bumper sticker Computer Science" includes the following bumper stickers: [Brook's Law of Prototypes] Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow. Fred Brooks, University of North Carolina If
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
A person's mind or quality of consciousness is a work in progress. It evolves and develops over a lifetime. We can in fact self-referentially make choices that affect the trajectory of our mind's development. A meditation pract
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
Signature properties of human language and consciousness are recursion and self-awareness. As ChatGPT and its ilk continue to vacuum up basically all of the human-generated content on the net, more and more of that content will be discussi
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by gregfjohnson 3y ago
This essay is great. Regarding simplicity, a couple of amusing observations: "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one." - Mark Twain (a variation of the French original by Blaise Pascal)
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Sperm whales are incredible amazing animals. They have a large skeletal structure at the back of their head, shaped like a huge concave radar dish. This helps focus and direct the sounds they make for purposes of echolocation. I believe
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
I have a cherished (really) old piece of code, the APL\11 interpreter, originally written by Ken Thompson. It has gone through several incarnations. My version is at git@github.com:gregfjohnson/aplette. I did a rewrite to make it wo
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
There are a number of different approaches that are currently being worked on. I'm curious to know how they rank in terms of likelihood of getting power onto the grid. First Light Fusion of Britain is pursuing a novel approach, as is
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
John and I were in graduate school together (computer science, U Wisconsin - Madison). He was indeed a remarkable person. He was blind and deaf. He carried around a little mechanical Braille typewriter. To talk with John, you would type,
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
How does this compare to the classic Bellman-Ford algorithm and subsequent improvements by Yen and Bannister&Eppstein?
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
1. The Fast Fourier Transform 2. Quantum computing 3. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem 4. Denotational semantics In all four cases, I make no claims to real expertise. However, in each of these cases there was a powerful moment of epipha
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Stepping back for a moment from the content, I think it is worth noting what an exceptionally well-written essay this is. Being able to write well is a super power for engineers. It is a reflection of the lucidity and clarity of one'
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Not exactly your question, but valgrind is an amazing tool. It does execution-time analysis of your code and provides an in-depth report on memory usage. It will find and report memory leaks, use of uninitialized variables, bad memory ref
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
These days my job is writing treatment planning software for radiation treatment. Your post makes it more real from the patient’s perspective. The hope and goal is to move the probability needle of range of outcomes in a good direction.
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
What I wonder about is all of the technologies that go into ICBM's with nuclear weapons. My layman's guess is that there is active support and collaboration of the NK nuclear program from outside. North Korea is a headache for t
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
If this is the first time you’ve heard of Jon Bentley’s “Bumper sticker computer science”, you are in for a rare treat! It is a combination of the hilarious and the deeply insightful. An absolute joy, and a must-read for computer scientis
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Given that you can solve the top layer, there is a really nice hack that lets you work out the rest of the puzzle. Say your top layer is completely solved, except that one of the top side pieces is flipped 180 degrees. You know a sequence
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
There are non-physical attributes ascribed to humans besides intelligence that may be interesting to consider. Can there be such a thing as artificial wisdom? Artificial love? Artificial enlightenment? Artificial kindness? My initial r
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Ken Thompson's self-perpetuating hack on the c compiler and login.c to create a back door that is invisible in the compiler source code and the source code of login.c. Described in his Turing Award acceptance speech, "Reflections
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Is the essential similarity of the key trick in Godel's incompleteness theorem and the Y combinator well known? I finally "got" the incompleteness theorem when that relationship dawned on me. As a cute entry point, consider
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
Been programming for 50 years, and still love it. Can't believe I'm paid to do it! Learn something new every day. I started for real as a freshman at 17; took a CS course taught by a guest professor. The course was taught usin
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
I was a grad student in statistics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I was struggling; things just weren't clicking. I had an intuition that statistics and computer science would be a meaningful combination, so I started look
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by gregfjohnson 4y ago
For those in Southern California, the legendary W6TRW swap meet is up and running again. As always, last Saturday of the month, 7am until 11:30am. It’s in Redondo Beach. Brilliant nerdy stuff from every decade from the 40’s to the presen
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by gregfjohnson 5y ago
I really enjoyed this - several LOL's. I loved the sequence of falsehoods about compilers: - The compiler won’t have bugs. - The compiler won’t have show-stopping bugs. - The compiler’s bugs will be fixed quickly. - The compiler’s bug

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