mtdewcmu

32 ms·

301.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I'm not sure I take the word of this "alleged survivor." It sounds suspiciously made-up. Ex.: He seems to have witnessed events that happened simultaneously in different locations, while at the same time being one of the vict
302.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I found some more background here[1]. It's not clear (to me, at least) whether Euler would have employed parentheses in that case if they hadn't been necessary to avoid ambiguity, i.e. if the argument had been x, he might have jus
303.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> low-level C implementation compiled with -O3, the max optimization setting. IME, -O2 always comes out faster than -O3. In this case, though, the difference is fairly insignificant.
304.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that there's a major difference between natural seeding of life on other planets via meteors, and humans bringing it over while trying to find natural life? There would definitely be a
305.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
That's kind of a cruel thing to do to people if there's no way to solve it other than brute force.
306.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I have no idea how that would work.
307.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture. I think so. A lot of the research at Xerox PARC and Bell Labs fail
308.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> For the above to work you'd have to use a custom JSON-parser when reading the lines. Not necessarily. You could just re-add the square brackets before passing the lines to the JSON parser. That would make more work for the mac
309.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I think one predictor of readability is the ratio of markup to data. XML gives you some flexibility there, but XML-based formats tend to have very verbose markup, which overwhelms the data. To cut back on markup in XSV, I used self-closing
310.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
It's hard to make a compelling argument for why a particular problem will never be solved. However, I think it's a reasonable supposition that such unsolvable problems exist. Resurrecting the dead, for instance. In order to faithf
311.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I agree that XSV is somewhat less human-readable than CSV. However, you can automatically convert XSV into more-readable CSV and back (assuming your flavor of CSV doesn't lose fidelity).
312.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I came up with an idea for a CSV replacement that's half-joke, half-serious. It's called XML Separated Values (XSV). It's meant to be a 1:1 drop-in replacement for CSV. It solves the ambiguity and encoding issues of CSV by re
313.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen Right. I take the position that there are problems that are unsolvable by technology; simulating the universe seems likely to be in that category. That position is
314.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
>> I've lost a couple friends to heroine overdoses, most were people that got hooked to pain pills, and when the "pill mills" were shut down they turned to heroine. The law of unintended consequences...
315.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I don't think that's an accurate statement. If a browser implemented this, it could be considered a crude form of JIT. But JIT techniques were more sophisticated than this by the time browsers started using them on Javascript.
316.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I suspect that a lot of it comes down to dynamic typing -- the fact that the type of a variable is determined on-the-fly at runtime. Also the fact that Google pulled out all the stops when they created v8. It works very hard at runtime to u
317.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Did it really take this long?
318.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
I had the same reaction -- what's the practical value here that makes it news? One possible clue is in this quote: "[Cannabidiol] production from plants is a bit complicated." This might turn out to be by far the best way to
319.
by mtdewcmu 11y ago
It's hard to imagine a situation where the hash function would be so slow as to justify adding 4 bytes to every string.
320.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
The conclusions in there are clear as mud... :)
321.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I thought those numbers were showing that lead and antimony are more common than lithium.
322.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
It may have to do with maintenance.
323.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Why is helium found underground with natural gas? My theory is that the helium underground comes from radioactive decay and gets trapped along with methane. -- I guess there's no need to speculate when you have Google: https:/&#x
324.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> If we eat something, there must be more of it in body. That's not scientific thinking. That's more like pre-scientific Ptolemaic reasoning. If you drink more water, do you fill up with water?
325.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
-- and if multiple strange cats enter your house, you start to think about closing the door. Interesting that you mention sodium. I've wondered whether the common advice to restrict sodium to reduce blood pressure actually has any effe
326.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
People usually invest in producing some thing. In order for that thing to have value, you need people who spend to buy it. It seems pretty simple to me. As for why it might be better to give money to someone to spend than to someone who inv
327.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
In trying to ascertain how much weight is practical to lift, I came across this list of the strongest cranes, which can lift millions of kilograms (thousands of metric tons): http://enr.construction.com/products/equipme
328.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
That table uses a mass-based unit, so wouldn't that tend to create the misleading impression that lighter elements are more scarce? Energy storage capacity depends on the number of atoms, not mass (as you can intuit by comparing lithiu
329.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
That's a devastating critique. The idea seemed a bit too good to be true, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Thanks for posting that. I did a little more research, and I'm not sure anymore that it's a complete de
330.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I thought Dropbox was a good idea until all the files I put there mysteriously disappeared. (I think what may have happened is that they started cleaning up the machine I used at a former company and it was still connected.)

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