qntm

26 ms·

1. 211.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   Ah, I see now though that if the bulb passes at 8 then you have reduced the problem to a 92-storey building so the "step size" upwards should be reduced. You don't even need to do that to get a good answer though. Ridiculous. For 100 storey
2. 212.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   The basic strategy is: Bulb 1: drop from the Xth floor, then the 2Xth floor, 3Xth floor, and so on until you pass 100. The bulb will survive a drop from the AXth floor, but break on the (A+1)Xth floor. For X = 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
3. 213.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   Other than the Moon landings?
4. 214.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   But those tombs weren't actually cursed. That was a case of relatively modern, scientifically enlightened people encountering a message from relatively primitive and superstitious people and - correctly - dismissing it. This is a case of po
5. 215.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   The curiosity problem is the whole problem. The only solution that I can see is to simply provide as much unambiguous information as possible, so that anybody encountering the buried waste knows exactly what it is that is buried and has a
6. 216.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   That right there is negative chi.
7. 217.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   Depends whether you're using it as a compound adjective or as a separate adverb and adjective. Correct: "Grammatically, this paragraph is incorrect. It is grammatically incorrect. I'm sick of these grammatically-incorrect paragraphs!" http
8. 218.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   Unicode is a character set , and the only character set really worth speaking of. The Unicode character set includes almost every character in every writing system on Earth. A string is a piece of text, i.e. an ordered sequence of charac
9. 219.▲
   by qntm 16y ago

   I did this too! After the second time I became bored with writing parsers by hand and now I'm trying to write a parser generator instead. It's extraordinarily good fun.
10. 220.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    All of this says nothing about e.g. the fact that Facebook is a corporation whose business model revolves around the acquisition of information about its users. I'm paranoid about information about myself. I left Facebook because I want exp
11. 221.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    All of my blog posts have buttons for Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook and StumbleUpon, none of which I use. There are a thousand other buttons I could add too. Hell, I have Adsense banners which I almost never see on account of Adblock. I
12. 222.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Hence reality television, which for the most part makes viewers feel good by showing other people having a miserable time?
13. 223.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-13-2006/the-...
14. 224.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I know what it is about. I'm suggesting a humans.txt which actually makes a decent analogy with robots.txt.
15. 225.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I'm not sure I fully understand the benefits of this final HATEOAS step in the implementation of a RESTful interface. The idea seems to be to add XML to the usual output from a resource endpoint, which will tell you what operations are avai
16. 226.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Perhaps humans.txt would suggest which kinds of humans should and should not visit this site. Under-18s, for example.
17. 227.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Use the drones to build the cranes!
18. 228.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    My inbox is every email conversation that isn't archived. It is a list of items awaiting action from me. (Just because an email has been read doesn't mean it doesn't require action from me.) If it no longer requires action from me, then I a
19. 229.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I don't think that downside is unavoidable. In the same way that you can't expect somebody to create some or all of a web page without at least a basic understanding of some form of markup, you can't expect a linguist to handle various diff
20. 230.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I don't see any solution to character encoding problems while web browsers actively lie about what they are sending. But that's not a problem with UTF-8, or even with any specific encoding.
21. 231.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Sounds good, but no Windows version.
22. 232.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I had misgivings about Dropbox too, which is why I only sync one file, namely a 1GB TrueCrypt archive with all my data inside it. I hear Dropbox added TrueCrypt support in some fashion in their latest release, but I haven't investigated tha
23. 233.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    I don't think religion is a choice. While a person does have control over which religion he or she adheres to in practice, I don't think a person has conscious control over what he or she believes, and I think that that's a factor which nee
24. 234.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Hence NaNoWriMo, of course.
25. 235.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    That's a great error message, but is it generally possible to take an arbitrary CFG and say whether or not the language it generates contains one or more strings with ambiguous interpretations? Even if it's possible, and such strings could
26. 236.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    > If in the end you're a student who finds yourself with the same grade as someone who cheated their way through the class, so long as you got what you paid for (an education), why should you care? Because they're competing for the sam
27. 237.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    That's not the BMW logo. That's just "BMW".
28. 238.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    The smart move would be to make people wait 3 days by default, and then charge a premium for "overnight construction".
29. 239.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    The next logical step would be to charge a little extra for the machine to operate in "Ultra-fast sorting mode", whereby all the built-in delays are removed.
30. 240.▲
    by qntm 16y ago

    Organisations who have been assigned /8s were almost uniformly assigned them very early in the internet's lifespan. That marks out those organisations as those with a vested interest in the internet-- that is, science and technology organis