pjscott

41 ms·

361.
by pjscott 6y ago
SuperH and RISC-V and ARM are instruction sets, not microprocessors. The performance per Watt depends on the specific microprocessor architecture, the physical manufacturing technology, etc., much more than the instruction set.
362.
by pjscott 6y ago
Some will, some won't. I prefer to think in terms of the expected value. Each dollar I donate might be useful or it might be entirely wasted, but (if I've chosen a good enough charity) dollars like it are probably doing a lot of g
363.
by pjscott 6y ago
One of the most popular EA charities [1] gives money to very poor people, with no strings attached, for precisely that reason. The people you're criticizing embraced your criticism many years ago; did you notice? [1] https:/&#x2F
364.
by pjscott 6y ago
This is a common way of producing helium-3, but much more expensive than getting the more common helium-4 isotope as a byproduct of methane mining.
365.
by pjscott 6y ago
Close; the half-life of tritium is 12.3 years, at which point it turns into stable helium-3.
366.
by pjscott 6y ago
It does sound very worthwhile! But in order for it to be useful people need to be able to trust you, and in order to build and keep credibility, you need to be able to stick to reporting "honestly and without bias" even in the fac
367.
by pjscott 6y ago
Public goods are by definition non-rivalrous and non-excludable. How can they be gobbled? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) (I'm not being pedantic here. The concept of a public good, in this t
368.
by pjscott 6y ago
For statistics classes in particular, the overwhelmingly common failure mode is: 1. Students learn how to apply some formulas to specific types of problems. If you ask them to find the population standard deviation of heights from a sample
369.
by pjscott 6y ago
The RISC approach to microprocessor design has been around since the 1980s, but the specific instruction set called "RISC-V" has only been around since 2010.
370.
by pjscott 6y ago
Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the standard process for funding. One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as measured by time spent, is writing grant applications. Scientists spend a huge percentage o
371.
by pjscott 6y ago
> Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest uni
372.
by pjscott 6y ago
This is what institutional decay often looks like! They can still carry out a set of procedures allowing them to do the same thing they've been doing for a long time -- but they get less efficient, less flexible, more ossified. They ar
373.
by pjscott 6y ago
> Once you lose garbage collection does .net give you anything over C++? You don't need to lose garbage collection altogether. There's a middle ground here: if you can switch to manual buffer management for the most GC-heavy, s
374.
by pjscott 6y ago
I'd like to take this opportunity to encourage people to learn about sampling profilers. What they do is periodically record the program counter and call stack of a process, then aggregate these to get a picture of where the program wa
375.
by pjscott 6y ago
That could be their goal: they get all the advantages of having a forum, but with none of the moderation expense or guilt-by-association-with-trolls risk to their reputation that come with having an official forum.
376.
by pjscott 6y ago
If ePub were just a container format, there would be interoperability headaches galore. Part of the ePub standard specifies how to format a book's contents as a mixture of HTML, CSS, and a handful of basic image types that readers ar
377.
by pjscott 6y ago
On the one hand, I completely believe this; goats are beings spawned from the deepest pits of hell and thence sent to our world to chew on inappropriate objects. On the other hand, WTF: did they actually manage to chew through an electric f
378.
by pjscott 6y ago
Did you check? poke-mode.el is part of their source repo: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/poke.git/tree/etc/poke-mod...
379.
by pjscott 6y ago
Integer linear programming is NP-hard, which may have caused the confusion here.
380.
by pjscott 6y ago
FYI, greaterwrong.com is an alternate front-end for lesswrong.com. The content is identical, but with different UI.
381.
by pjscott 6y ago
For example, a comparison-based sort can't do better than O(n log n) time in general. More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_sort
382.
by pjscott 6y ago
If a subreddit forbids discussion of a topic, you probably wouldn't have been able to have a good conversation about it anyway. Don't go to the biggest subs! Avoid the places that have been taken over by the most aggressive enforc
383.
by pjscott 6y ago
The page you linked is not actually ambiguous, though perhaps a bit tricky to read. It says: 1. If you're compiling Objective C in ARC mode, you can't use NSAutoreleasePool directly, and must instead use @autoreleasepool. 2. In ma
384.
by pjscott 6y ago
Does the government, in fact, know how to do those things? How would we know if they did or didn't? I notice that they spend oddly large amounts of money on anything for which we know what the cost roughly should be -- e.g. CDC web s
385.
by pjscott 6y ago
I checked a few, and they mostly look like cases of non-performance-critical code that just happens to have some fiddly, slightly-wrong memory-handling logic -- which Rust would, indeed, make much harder to mess up with little or no runtime
386.
by pjscott 6y ago
And here is a point-by-point response from the authors of the paper it criticizes, which I found convincing: http://compbio.mit.edu/calcifediol/Response_to_Pachter_criti...
387.
by pjscott 6y ago
That would reduce the expected net present value of startups to investors, making it harder for them to get investment money in the first place and probably reducing the number of successful startups, acquired or otherwise. It's not ob
388.
by pjscott 6y ago
It's pretty startling, but yes, that non-crufty version is "Rust #8" that tops the n-body performance lists: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... It looks like the autovectoriz
389.
by pjscott 6y ago
It's not entirely surprising that a carefully-optimized C program using explicit SSE intrinsics, plus a fancy trick involving a low-precision square root instruction fixed up with two iterations of Newton's method, would be fast.
390.
by pjscott 6y ago
> Well you are saying that even in C you can use the restrict keyword to tell the compiler that 2 memory locations can overlap. Of course is in the hand of the programmer to tell the compiler to do so. It says that they can't over

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