philiplu

9 ms·

61.
by philiplu 3y ago
Yep, that's what I meant.
62.
by philiplu 3y ago
Nope - those are all bagged single ingredients I usually order online. Authentic Foods has most of them. The ivory teff is from Maskal. The arrowroot and tapioca might be called flour, starch, or powder - all the same thing. Potato star
63.
by philiplu 3y ago
I mix up 2 kilograms at a time: 500 grams sweet rice flour, 400 grams brown rice flour & potato starch, 200 grams ivory teff & arrowroot starch, 100 grams white rice flour, potato flour, & tapioca starch. The original recipe ha
64.
by philiplu 3y ago
Hah, for once, a benefit of having celiac, no wheat for me apparently means no weevils for me. I mix up a lot of gluten-free flour mix to substitute for all-purpose flour. It's a mix of way too many flours and starches (white rice, b
65.
by philiplu 3y ago
I know we shipped p-code for general usage, not just internal like Excel. But it might have been internal-only in the mid to late 80s. I found a link [1] talking about some p-code internals, from April 1992, by the guy who hired me at Mic
66.
by philiplu 3y ago
That sounds reasonable. I'd forgotten about the p-code version. I think that was dead by the time I started. I was also fortunate enough to avoid working on the 16-bit compiler backend, and just worked on the 32-bit, referred to int
67.
by philiplu 3y ago
Own C compiler? IIRC, that's not quite true. I worked on the C/C++ compiler team at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, and I don't remember us producing a drop of the compiler just for Excel. I do think there was a special compi
68.
by philiplu 4y ago
Thanks! It's gratifying that the reminiscences of a graybeard like me can still resonate with readers here.
69.
by philiplu 4y ago
I'm a self-taught programmer, starting in the mid-70s, and learned how to write compilers in a way that probably wouldn't work nowadays, but was great fun back then. The first thing I'd usually do when starting on a new archi
70.
by philiplu 4y ago
I searched on "Moore's law is not a law" and found [1], "Moore’s Law Is Not Really A Law But It Is Still Obeyed", from someone who was a semiconductor engineer at Intel 40 years ago. As he says, Moore's law wa
71.
by philiplu 4y ago
Like bluesnowmonkey says, the concept you're looking for is called popcount, for population count. It's also called the Hamming weight. Wikipedia has 5 different example implementations under that latter name. Many C/C++ c
72.
by philiplu 4y ago
I suppose the online list of hacks at the 1st reference in the OP [1] makes more sense, but I've got a fondness for the book "Hacker's Delight", which I've owned and browsed for many years now [2]. And checking on
73.
by philiplu 4y ago
Been following this blog since it was first posted to HN a few months back. It's from an IT contractor working in Antarctica for the first time. Today's post has some fascinating photos of unheated storage sheds at the South Pol
74.
Frost(brr.fyi)
3 points by philiplu 4y ago|1 comments
75.
by philiplu 4y ago
That was a fun read. Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales From the White Hart" meets Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With", with Lowe showing up in the comments afterwards. Thanks for the link.
76.
by philiplu 4y ago
Thanks for that. So what does ED refer to? Emergency Department? Synonym for ER?
77.
by philiplu 4y ago
I was dev lead for the Microsoft C runtimes (msvcrt.dll and the like) back around the turn of the century. We shipped most of the source for the runtimes with Visual C++, and included a copyright message in each file. Those had the copyri
78.
by philiplu 4y ago
Huh, I never knew Quaker Steak & Lube had spread that far. I lived in Sharon, PA for most of the 80s, and worked a couple blocks from the original restaurant. Decent wings, if a bit too focused on heat level ("atomic wings")
79.
by philiplu 4y ago
I write in cursive in one place only - physical checks. Had a subcontractor rip me off on a house remodel years ago, adding $1000 to a check I'd written with printing, not cursive. The bank reimbursed me, so no loss, but from then on
80.
by philiplu 4y ago
Nice - this means the May 1988 issue of CACM is freely available. That's notable because the cover article is Cliff Stoll's "Stalking the Wily Hacker" [1], with the material that later became his book "The Cuckoo&#
81.
by philiplu 5y ago
It's #202, at https://projecteuler.net/problem=202 .
82.
by philiplu 5y ago
It probably didn't improve my programming - I started it as a fun way to learn Python, but I'm retired after 30 years in the business writing compilers and other programming tools/library code. Learning and programming data
83.
by philiplu 5y ago
For me, lots of candidates, but I'll go with #589, Poohsticks Marathon, because of my history solving it. I worked on it for a month after I'd solved about 200 problems, and got nowhere. Dropped it for 2 years, then decided afte
84.
by philiplu 5y ago
Whew, probably 5 to 10 thousand, at a wild guess? I ran through the first 106 problems (plus #243) in 23 days in April/May 2016, then dropped it for a year. Since then, I've plugged away pretty steadily, about 150 problems a yea
85.
by philiplu 5y ago
Heh, thanks for the nerd-sniping. I’m down to 25 unsolved problems (currently working on #522, for way more than 30 hours), but #453 is one I haven’t done anything with yet. So of course I took a look, had some thoughts, and will probably
86.
by philiplu 5y ago
Most PE problems are more math than data-structure based. There are plenty of number theory problems, but lots of other areas as well, especially combinatorics and probability. I’ve learned about many more niche areas, like impartial game
87.
by philiplu 5y ago
For a hard science fictional version of this, check out Poul Anderson’s “Tau Zero”, from 1970, according to Wikipedia. I read it a few years after that, and it’s stuck with me since. A ship with a Bussard ramjet runs into troubles and has
88.
by philiplu 5y ago
Not just you. Something changed two or three months ago. Never really saw spam for years before that; now 3 or 4 mails a day.
89.
by philiplu 5y ago
Came here to see if anyone mentioned "The In-Laws". Just a perfect, farcical gem. I still crack myself up yelling "serpentine, serpentine" when running with my kids, who have no idea what's funny. Probably about
90.
by philiplu 5y ago
Suppose you’ve got a 16 foot strand of lights and an 8 foot column. If you unwrap the column in your mind, you can see you’ve got a right triangle with a hypotenuse of 16 and vertical leg of 8. What’s the angle that the hypotenuse makes w

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