nwhitehead

8 ms·

31.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
In my mind the real tragedy is blackboards. Almost nowhere has good blackboards anymore except for math departments in older universities that stubbornly refuse to replace their old boards. Since the 1970s everything has been replaced with
32.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
The derivative of a type is its "zipper", a datatype for representing a "hole" that moves around the data structure. http://strictlypositive.org/diff.pdf
33.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
It's funny how everyone seems to have a different view of how equity should work. I'm reading Felix Dennis "How to Get Rich" (highly recommended, much better than the title makes it sound). He made his fortune in magazin
34.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
Feature plea: it would be awesome to have legible YouTube screencast videos of all the algorithms from sites like this for lecture purposes. I teach various CS classes and love using these kinds of sites. It really is a powerful way to demo
35.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
Doesn't appear to work on ipad.
36.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
If you are limited to one short question, a better choice is to ask them: "Teach me something technical you've learned recently." You can evaluate their answer on technical depth and correctness, communication skills, and tim
37.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
Once you've got pseudorandom bits working, the next step is generating variates from different distributions. Luc Devroye has a nice book on this freely available online, "Non-Uniform Random Variate Generation". http:/&
38.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
The idea is that you can use guard digits instead of full products and get correct rounding (as if to infinite precision). For IEEE-754 math you need 3 guard digits, typically named Guard, Round, and Sticky. The trick at the hardware level
39.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
"Programming in Lua", by Roberto Ierusalimschy. This is a gem of a programming book. Some of my favorite chapters: coroutines, metamethods, weak tables, threads and states. Similar in tone and clarity to K&R "The C Progra
40.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
I'm a lecturer and I think clickers are great, for large classes especially. Clicker questions and small group discussion about the answers gets students thinking rather than just sitting there with eyes glazing over. It works well. By
41.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
Cool! I've used type classes in Haskell but had no idea how you could even start to implement them. It's like learning about vtable pointers for a C++ programmer.
42.
by nwhitehead 12y ago
If you're interested in the mathematics behind this kind of stuff you should check out Eliot Jacobson's blog [1]. He does mathematical analysis of edge sorting, hole carding, card counting, loss rebates, etc. [1]: http:/&#x2
43.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Fun! When I saw spherical harmonics I was confused about why spherical harmonics would come into play in a voxel universe (isn't everything flat?). Digging into it a bit I found out more about spherical harmonic lighting: http:/&
44.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
1 mile = 1760 yards
45.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This would be pretty easy to do in games since you have all the z-buffer info already. I'm thinking of a HUD that has multiple horizontal "monitors" that show you the action. Then when things get close, they pop out of the mo
46.
The Voltmeter Story: An argument in favor of the likelihood principle(en.wikipedia.org)
6 points by nwhitehead 13y ago|0 comments
47.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I prefer Palatino when typesetting mathematics using latex. It looks nicer than Computer Modern and is super easy to use. Nowadays I use xelatex and actual fonts instead of staying stuck in the tex font ghetto. http://www.tug.dk&
48.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Academic publishers generally do give explicit "consideration" to make the contract valid. I don't remember what Elsevier does exactly, but the "consideration" is typically discounts on copies of the journal or conf
49.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
You could also accept groups with good interviews in the experiment batch, but not include them in the experiment.
50.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I would absolutely love to see a double-blind randomized experiment with controls for YC applications. In one batch, randomly and secretly assign CONTROL or EXPERIMENT to each application (in whatever proportion you are comfortable with). O
51.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Visual cryptography is fun! I used the idea to make wedding invitations when I got married. We printed out black and white patterns on transparencies along with some other graphics, then when you overlapped the "his" and "her
52.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
That article agrees with Touche, unless I'm missing something. EULA: "[you are free] to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each M
53.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
There aren't a lot of advantages to putting quadruple precision into the hardware. Typically with numeric code you don't run out of exponent space you run into precision limits. To increase precision you can use software technique
54.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Interesting link! I think the explanation is that homeschool parents are not providing "tutorial instruction" to their children most of the time (that's the 2 sigma effect). I don't know of good statistics of actual pare
55.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
It's fun to measure these sorts of numbers for all kinds of devices. You don't need equipment that is too fancy, a Casio Exilim EX-ZR10 (cheap!) is good enough to get numbers within 4ms by framecounting the high speed videos. I pe
56.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I've always heard "vertically integrated" as a separate category from "IC design house". Supply chains are long and the endpoints vary depending on the context.
57.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
That is seriously cool. I'm jealous, I want to put on an event like that! Looks like the code is available at: https://github.com/kgrandis/teentechcamp
58.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Colleges and universities are great places to do projects with people and build social networks. Doesn't require paying tuition!
59.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I agree with everything in the article, U.S. News' rankings are terrible and have hugely bad effects. There are better lists. For example, Affordable Colleges Online has a list of the best return-on-investment CS degrees [1]. It has it
60.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
MyHDL is great, more people should use it. I find it especially powerful for building test frameworks. I love using the power of Python for all the verification logic.

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