mjd

15 ms·

1. 241.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   Thanks for your kind words and for reading my blog!
2. 242.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   Fixed, thanks.
3. 243.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   And the scribbling would have been done by someone wearing heavy gloves, probably while the rod was in a glovebox.
4. 244.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   The page says it is electromechanical: > [The hammers etc.] sit on the center spine and are activated by solenoids, a proven technology even used on some Spirio Steinways. I don't know much about pianos but it struck me that they we
5. 245.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   BTW, regarding this: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/chhtx/comment/c0smh0c... * That article was #4 in a series. I did add a correction to article 3 the same day that 4 was published, and v
6. 246.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   Hey, I do that too for the same reason. You have my sympathy, it is super embarrassing when it happens.
7. 247.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   The article says that in the very next sentence.
8. 248.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   I didn't miss it. I was an rc user for many years.
9. 249.▲
   by mjd 3y ago

   You are absolutely right! Thanks for the correction. It seems that I didn't know what a 35% packing looked like.
10. 250.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    This led me to the Wikipedia article on "aedeagus", which is the organ that serves the spider mite for a penis. There is a photo of the (highly magnified) intact aedeagus of some water beetle. I want to send it to soneone as the w
11. 251.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Fun, and interesting. But the illustration is highly misleading. The article explains that the researchers are pleased when they can achieve a 35-40% packing density.
12. 252.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    https://blog.plover.com/ The Universe of Discourse, since 2006. I don't know how many posts, maybe 800 or 900? About ⅓ math and ⅔ everything under the sun. Hits the front page here several times a year. A few of my
13. 253.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Thanks! But it was actually Greg Bacon (responding to my original article) who thought of calling the phenomenon "XY problem".
14. 254.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    I had that at the back of my mind as something similar, but I didn't intend it as a reference. The two games are very different. A better chess analog of yubitsume would be: you can make one (normally) illegal move in the game, if you
15. 255.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Copyright violation! You'll be hearing from my lawyers by end of week.
16. 256.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Consider the metric where the distance between <a1, a2, …> and <b1, b2, …> is max(|a1-b1|, |a2-b2|, …) In the this metric, no point of a unit n-cube is more than one unit from any other point.
17. 257.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    “High dimension cubes are qualitatively more like hedgehogs than building blocks.” https://plus.maths.org/content/round-peg-square-hole-or-squa...
18. 258.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    tl;dr
19. 259.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Followup post with your comments is at https://blog.plover.com/games/game-mechanics-2.html . Thanks again.
20. 260.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Thanks! If you would like to be credited as anything other than "Hacker News user fwlr”, please email me at mjd@pobox.com.
21. 261.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Thanks very much. This is a wonderful description! May I have your permission to add this, verbatim, to the original article or a followup to it?
22. 262.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Was there a game something like that in “Consider Phlebas”? I thought about mentioning it in the article but decided it wasn't worth the time it would take.
23. 263.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Thanks for letting me know.
24. 264.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    I didn't “basically” say any of that. I didn't say any of it at all; you made it all up and then attributed it to me. All I actually did was to state a fact: someone on StackExchange actually asked this question. All those thoug
25. 265.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    About thirty years ago I had an account on a computer system that had a Boggle game, and I got tired of losing to it. So I wrote a program (in C!) which, when run, would search the grid and print out a list of all the words it found. Sinc
26. 266.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    Scored by Levenenshtein distance, that is still fourth-highest.
27. 267.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    This came up the last time this was discussed here. It didn't work well. https://gist.github.com/anonymous/431b163b2a2d532bfd0a3bdcc7... See https://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring-3.html
28. 268.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    I'm listening. Please explain.
29. 269.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    I did Wikipedia article titles and found: Atlantic casino resort spa / Carter assassination plot
30. 270.▲
    by mjd 3y ago

    This headline is very misleading. It actually means that Samsung Electronics' profits are down 95% Samsung is an enormous conglomerate of which Samsung Electronics is only one of many sub-companies.