philiplu

7 ms·

31.
by philiplu 2y ago
I mostly stayed hands-off and let him explore where he would. He really only got into programming more seriously the past couple years, so age 13 on, after we got him a gaming PC. He was playing various Roblox games, and decided he could
32.
by philiplu 2y ago
My kid (15 yo) keeps producing games in Python on his iPhone using Pythonista. Latest one is a Tetris clone with load/save game, music, animations on removing a line. I offer to help if he runs into problems but he prefers to hack aw
33.
by philiplu 2y ago
Much of my earliest computer experience was on an 1130 clone, the General Automation 18/30. Never did the AM radio thing, but you could see what phase the Fortran compiler was up to just by the general look of the blinkenlights.
34.
by philiplu 2y ago
> I found it quite ironical how the whole topic has been hijacked into this side discussion Indeed. I submitted this post, because I found the article's discussion of the math involved fascinating, along with biographical details o
35.
Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan(quantamagazine.org)
826 points by philiplu 2y ago|414 comments
36.
by philiplu 2y ago
I do, but there's nothing too obscure in it. Efficient prime number sieve, prime factorization using trial division, generating list of divisors from the prime factorization, modular inverse via Euclidean algorithm, Chinese Remainder
37.
by philiplu 2y ago
One other thing - can't believe I forgot to mention this: once you solve a problem, read the solvers' thread in the forum! I learned so much by doing that, which fed into success on later problems. The link will be at the bottom
38.
by philiplu 2y ago
Something this illustrates, though - once you solve a problem, read the forum thread (the link will be at the bottom of the problem page when solved). I learned so much poring over the solutions of earlier solvers. Without that knowledge,
39.
by philiplu 2y ago
That's exactly what Project Euler problems often do, especially once you get past the first hundred or two. Problems are scaled so a brute-force often means hours to days of compute time, or worse. You get to recognize the effect - if
40.
by philiplu 2y ago
As a class of problems, I'd say the combinatorial game theory ones are my favorites. There are a lot of impartial game theory problems - look for problems mentioning Nim or stone games. They build on each other nicely, from the mid 3
41.
by philiplu 2y ago
I've got a bachelor's in math, but that's 40+ years ago. I had intended to go on for a PhD in math, but fell into computers instead - programming was easier and way more lucrative, even in the early 80s. Once I was retired
42.
by philiplu 2y ago
It’s my game plan for keeping my brain active in retirement. Been heavily involved for the past 7 years. Been at the 100% solved level since summer 2023, though I’m back to one away the past couple weeks - PE910 is _hard_
43.
by philiplu 2y ago
I was explaining ham radio to my kids last night (something neither teenager had ever heard of), and ran across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth–Moon–Earth_communication .
44.
Vacuum of space to decay sooner than expected, but still not soon(quantamagazine.org)
1 points by philiplu 2y ago|0 comments
45.
by philiplu 2y ago
Diagnosed celiac here, though a fairly mild case - blood test detected it 16 years ago, age 48, but I don't know if I've been hit with gluten, though celiac explains why I'm several inches shorter than my brothers and have bo
46.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects(en.wikipedia.org)
2 points by philiplu 2y ago|0 comments
47.
by philiplu 2y ago
Not true by the time I retired in 2007, but I've got a vague memory of talking to someone on the C++ front-end team some time after that and EDG for IntelliSense being mentioned. So no idea if that's really true or not, and if so
48.
by philiplu 2y ago
I was a developer on the Microsoft C++ compiler team from 1991 to 2006. We definitely didn't purchase someone else's compiler in that time. We looked at the EDG front end at various times but never moved over to it while I was t
49.
by philiplu 3y ago
Brings to mind James Lileks' "Gallery of Regrettable Food", https://lileks.com/institute/gallery/ . I was born in 1960, so missed most of these delights - I suspect they mostly tailed off by the mid
50.
by philiplu 3y ago
I’ve got a 15 yo who decided to start programming in Python using Pythonista on his iPhone. He refuses to take any input from me; just wants to learn on his own. Pythonista comes with some nice game-programming modules. So far he’s shown me
51.
by philiplu 3y ago
I was at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, almost always as an IC, and don't ever recall stack-ranking teammates. That was always something done by the managers, not the ICs. Even my short stint as a manager (with one report, lol), I wasn&
52.
by philiplu 3y ago
Heh, I hit that next year. This last birthday, it occurred to me that the Hamming weight (popcount) of my age in years was the largest it would ever get, barring me living to a really unlikely age.
53.
by philiplu 3y ago
The 6809 (and 6800) helped me pay for my computer habit back in the late 70s/early 80s. I wrote a program for those CPUs, "Dynamite Disassembler", which I originally wrote to reverse engineer a bunch of code in the Flex and
54.
by philiplu 3y ago
Lost all vision in my right eye to retinal detachment over the summer, but to me, the brains look closer than the background in both cases, though maybe more pronounced in the red brain on the left.
55.
Back to New Jersey, Where the Universe Began(nytimes.com)
2 points by philiplu 3y ago|1 comments
56.
by philiplu 3y ago
Celiac or allergy? I've got celiac, diagnosed at age 47, but it explains a lot of growth issues back to my teenage years. Never heard of phages in relation to gluten issues; that's very interesting. Seems unlikely to help with
57.
by philiplu 3y ago
Yep, the old Radio Shack 100-in-1 kits. Great fun (early to mid 70s for me).
58.
by philiplu 3y ago
As an avid SF reader back then, I pretty much devoured everything by the big 3 of Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein. And lots of others, of course - the Callahan's Bar shorts by Spider Robinson were a fun update of the Tales from the White
59.
by philiplu 3y ago
Heh, sorry to disagree, but that's a big nope. I learned the word in my teens, back in the 70s, from the Arthur C. Clarke story "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch" in his "Tales from the White Hart" collection
60.
by philiplu 3y ago
I was a dev on the Visual C++ team at this time (1990s). Part of making largish compiler changes would involve throwing a test compiler at all of WinNT and seeing what broke in the build process. It was challenging to do so, to say the le

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