qntm

27 ms·

241.
by qntm 16y ago
This quote leapt out at me: "[PowerPoint] wants to organize the talk, to manage the presentation. There's always going to be a slide up, whether you need it there or not. Want to skip over some material? OK, but only by letting the audience
242.
by qntm 16y ago
If the regex was (0|1(01* 0)* 0)*, then that would accept "10", which is not divisible by 3.
243.
by qntm 16y ago
I should probably clarify that it only becomes trivial to turn that FSM into a regex when you've drawn it out! I encourage HNers to do this and see what I mean. In my experience, just inspecting the transition function visually isn't much u
244.
by qntm 16y ago
A simpler solution is to use modular arithmetic (this works for any base). If we consume a binary number from left to right, let N be the binary value already expressed. If we then consume a 0, then the new value is now 2N. If we consume a
245.
by qntm 16y ago
I actually found mblase's explanation to be just as inaccurate as the one in the original story. "Infinity is not a number and you can never get there" is never a good defence in well-formed arguments about limits. It just sidesteps the que
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by qntm 16y ago
One could make a case for deliberately weeding such people out of whatever system the CAPTCHA is intended to protect.
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by qntm 16y ago
What's your source?
248.
by qntm 16y ago
The first Dirk Gently is actually basically an old-school Doctor Who serial.
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by qntm 16y ago
Why would a university incite you to drop out of it? What does the university gain from that? Why would you go to university with the intention of dropping out as soon as your startup gains traction? Why not just start your startup right ou
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by qntm 16y ago
This, incidentally, is the major problem I have with Google's latest Image Search interface. Most of the screen is tiled with hover-sensitive areas, and it's not safe to leave the mouse pointer where it is while you browse the images becaus
251.
by qntm 16y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this. Friendship is not an idempotent operation. Facebook connects up hundreds of millions of people and makes it extremely simple for them to share information. It's a social internet. To make an
252.
by qntm 16y ago
Do US plugs actually spark? I thought that was something you just saw in movies.
253.
by qntm 16y ago
I apply a minimalist ethic to all kinds of things, including the amount of effort I put into designing my site ;)
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by qntm 16y ago
Yes. The distance between madness and genius is measured in success. Okay, that's a quote from a Bond movie, but still.
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by qntm 16y ago
No, but submitting it to HN does
256.
by qntm 16y ago
I like to think of the younger twin as a backup copy, in case the older twin becomes lost or damaged.
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by qntm 16y ago
In a nutshell, I aim for a life with the fewest variables. I'll admit that "minimalist" doesn't fully cover this. Possibly "simplicity" doesn't either.
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by qntm 16y ago
It depends on the type of thing you're trying to minimise. A low-cost lifestyle is not synonymous with a minimalist one, they are related goals but different on a practical level. Some kinds of minimalism can be very expensive. Replacing yo
259.
by qntm 16y ago
Most "regular" expression engines in modern programming languages can handle back-references (e.g. "(.)\1"), which are actually so complex that you need a full-blown Turing machine to handle them.
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by qntm 16y ago
Well, there you go then. I did make an effort to find what I'd done online, but since there is no explicit "minimization" step in the way I've phrased my algorithm I probably didn't stand a chance. Apparently that DFA minimization thing is
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by qntm 16y ago
I apologise for the site loading slowly, my entirely unrelated page http://qntm.org/uk "The Great British Venn Diagram" is currently being hammered by Redditors.
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by qntm 16y ago
If fate has doomed you to be a Minecraft fanatic, you might as well be the best damned Minecraft fanatic you can be.
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by qntm 16y ago
This can be easily averted. Destroy the Earth.
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by qntm 16y ago
"Milk"?
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by qntm 16y ago
If Wikipedia is to be believed, even if a Challenger-like disaster could be made survivable, it would require quite radical and undesirable changes to the orbiter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disast... http://en