martincmartin

5 ms·

1.
Like a cheat code for your car: We investigate ECU tuning(arstechnica.com)
2 points by martincmartin 3mo ago|0 comments
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Is Boston's tech and innovation scene withering?(bostonglobe.com)
2 points by martincmartin 8mo ago|0 comments
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LongBets 1: By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing test (2002)(longbets.org)
3 points by martincmartin 1y ago|0 comments
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by martincmartin 2y ago
How does this interact with the No Cloning Theorem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem If you can rebuild the cQbit from just the bath, then there's no information in cQbit, right?
5.
by martincmartin 2y ago
OP here. Yes, that's what I meant. Using the rocket equation, truncated Taylor series approximation, truncating even more to make things solvable, then iterating to improve the solution, were all things I wouldn't have expected.
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by martincmartin 2y ago
OP here. Cool! I was born in 1969, less than a month before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and was only a few months old when this game was written. I too learned BASIC, then spent hours pouring over the book "BASIC Computer Gam
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by martincmartin 2y ago
Yeah, I think we're agreeing. :) So it turns out, before discovering the bug, I actually wrote code to find the optimal sequence when your choices are restricted to integers. I thought, along the same lines as you, "maybe if you
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by martincmartin 2y ago
I thought it was a little odd that he mentioned "impressive for a high school senior in 1969" multiple times throughout -- honestly I would imagine that growing up in the Space Age would have had a massive influence on technicall
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by martincmartin 2y ago
The nature of the bug is that it has trouble finding when the lander has touched the surface. You need to have an altitude of less than zero for around 0.05 seconds for the game to notice that you've landed. If your thrust during tha
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by martincmartin 2y ago
OP here. True, I oversimplified. What I meant was, there are two parts to the dynamics, the rocket equation and gravity. They add linearly, so any extra velocity that comes from gravity needs to be eliminated by increasing the delta V fr
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by martincmartin 2y ago
True. + also has higher precedence than -, so that a - b + c means a - (b + c).
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by martincmartin 2y ago
Thanks. Fixed!
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by martincmartin 2y ago
OP here. One interesting thing about FOCAL is that * has higher precedence than /. So in Lunar Lander, M*G/Z*K is what mathematicians and other languages would write M*G/(Z*K). I did a double take when I first saw that. :
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by martincmartin 2y ago
OP here (of this blog post, not the original game). The naive way is what I expected too, and described as the Euler method in the post. In terms of physical accuracy, especially when you get near the surface, the mass does change signific
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I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game(martincmartin.com)
426 points by martincmartin 2y ago|114 comments
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by martincmartin 2y ago
$82,098 in 1955, adjusted for inflation, was worth $727,502.05[1]. So homes were actually much more expensive back then. [1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=82098&year1=19...
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by martincmartin 2y ago
The Economist had an article about this last week: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/17/... (Accompanying editorial: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024&#x2
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by martincmartin 2y ago
If you click on their username, it takes you to their profile. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonsarris which says: I make GoJS, a powerful canvas-based diagramming library: http://gojs.net/ Whi
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by martincmartin 2y ago
Isn't actually collecting judgements hard? I thought I read, in some article about how Alex Jones hasn't paid any of his judgement, that it's not uncommon to take decades before seeing any money. Often people settle for a g
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by martincmartin 3y ago
True. It turns out, it also applies for the two body problem, as long as one body is much more massive than the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period#Small_body_orbi...
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by martincmartin 3y ago
In a uniform gravitational field, it isn't. On the earth's surface, acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s^2, independent of the mass of the falling object. See Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. https:/
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by martincmartin 3y ago
What examples would you suggest?
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by martincmartin 3y ago
Used to be - 90% of replies were from normal people. Nowadays, it is just 90% bots in all replies. This reminds me of the saying that 90% of statistics are completely made up.
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by martincmartin 3y ago
An economist literally won a Nobel prize for answering that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons When you buy a used car, even one that's less than a year old, you have no way of knowing if there&#
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by martincmartin 3y ago
But observations need powerful domestic telescopes. If you're NASA, you own and have access to them.
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by martincmartin 3y ago
Might be about reproductive rights and abortion.
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by martincmartin 3y ago
I've had luck with Nolo legal documents, for things like a simple will when I was young and my estate was simple. https://www.nolo.com/
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by martincmartin 3y ago
My Ph.D. work was on a robot called Uranus. Let's just say it was the butt of many jokes. Like when my advisor was fixing it once, and I said "get your head out of Uranus!" https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~gwp/r
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Introducing The Cockroach Theory of Crypto(economist.com)
5 points by martincmartin 3y ago|1 comments
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by martincmartin 3y ago
Is this a reference to something? Other than Bobby Tables. Google can't find anything.

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