stefco_

22 ms·

121.
by stefco_ 8y ago
I don't understand your issue with his statement on PRNGs... LFSRs are functionally pseudorandom number generators in this context, so you haven't invalidated his statement.
122.
by stefco_ 8y ago
Since it's DARPA it's pretty far from being fielded, so I should think they're only worried about proof of concept at this point. But if you could modularize and ruggedize the wheels and make them easily replaceable and compa
123.
by stefco_ 8y ago
Note that the whole assembly rotates when in wheel mode. Making it radially symmetric (i.e. a triangle) in track mode means that it can switch modes with at most a 120 degree rotation rather than having to rotate through up to 360 degrees t
124.
by stefco_ 8y ago
While that's true for most use cases, I think the author's point is that an archival compression format should be as forgiving as possible to the person recovering data because they are not necessarily the person who stored it. Th
125.
by stefco_ 9y ago
I was in Costa Rica last week with a slow wifi connection and had a similar experience with a 5MB offline PDF file in Google Drive. For some reason, drive decided to redownload it, but after only a minute it timed out and gave up. I just en
126.
by stefco_ 9y ago
But speed is a self-imposed constraint on most projects rather than a physical law, meaning it might be violated. Furthermore, there might be a smooth relationship between speed of execution and value returned (even outside of cost of produ
127.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Dirac and Bohr were both theorists, not experimentalists! But you're right that it varies within disciplines. I'm an experimental physics Ph.D. student working on LIGO, and I have also found that experimental physicists are often
128.
by stefco_ 9y ago
That is growing exponentially with number of dimensions . The earlier post assumed fixed but large number of dimensions and varying linear size, so that would just be a power law.
129.
by stefco_ 9y ago
I don't think it's very useful for local dev, but it is a lifesaver for SSH work on spotty connections (or any other case where you might want to leave a workspace intact despite losing connection). But if you're already usin
130.
by stefco_ 9y ago
This reminds me of an excellent talk on paramedic work at motorcycle road races in Northern Ireland given by the late Dr. John Hinds [1]. These guys crash into things at up to 200mph with unsurprisingly grisly results, which makes Dr. Hinds
131.
by stefco_ 9y ago
I've always suspected such a tool must exist in a typical *nix environment but never bothered to search for it. This is very helpful. Thanks for the simple example!
132.
by stefco_ 9y ago
This is a superb idea! Still not working on some of the papers I read, but hopefully it will soon. I would love to see a bookmarklet that lets me hop from an arxiv page straight to Arxiv Vanity. Also, the manicure emoji for the favicon was
133.
by stefco_ 9y ago
> I immediately switched to skeptic mode when I saw no actuation points or normalization for travel distance. All this is showing is that to move further it takes longer. I thought his explanation (that delay from the start of the motion
134.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Ha! Conflated "prurient" with "vulgar", though I'm guessing that mistake was (hopefully?) obvious from context. Thanks for the correction, made me chuckle :)
135.
by stefco_ 9y ago
> (And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to poverty is usually the moti
136.
by stefco_ 9y ago
This might be excessively prurient, but I would love to see some gameplay video or screenshots of what an unplayably vomit-filled park looks like.
137.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Just bought it and am trying it out. Where are the instructions, though? I have no idea how to move the window around or activate the pass-through feature, and it is unclear where the settings are. I had to kill the window by bringing up ac
138.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Yeah, but that's a good way to sell vim. Once you've shown someone vim and whet their appetite, it's probably best to show them about 2 or 3 features and let them fill in the blanks while being at least minimally productive
139.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Barry created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and was instrumental in getting the collaboration to cohere and coordinate.
140.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Yeah, exactly. And gaming in particular definitely has a lot of the same demographic skewing that SV is trying to move past, so things like this don't help with those efforts.
141.
by stefco_ 9y ago
> But as we grow in size, we also plan to grow in the diversity of our perspectives and backgrounds — which is even more reason not to add a bunch of extraneous or overly specific perks. Especially as our team diversifies, we can’t (and
142.
by stefco_ 9y ago
How does one obtain an old version of these utilities? Do you mean you just have an old mac running old OS X somewhere?
143.
by stefco_ 9y ago
I don't understand why we had to lose the old disk utility GUI. The new one is so underpowered and buggy that you need to use shell commands to get anything done. Things like this erode the benefits of MacOS as a lovely GUI environment
144.
by stefco_ 9y ago
Yes, but unlike clickbait advertising, microtransactions actually encourage a positive publisher-reader relationship. If you trust a news source to do good journalism and if you don't have to jump through hoops to pay for an article, m
145.
by stefco_ 9y ago
> What happens if you spend the month investigating and don't find anything? Same as what already happens; you don't write the story. > Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles tha
146.
by stefco_ 9y ago
This paper went out after the first detection in O1 (observing run 1) [1]. It discusses event rates inferred from the original event (GW150914) as well as previous predictions. CalTech also keeps a running list of detection papers, free for
147.
by stefco_ 9y ago
A little. I think it's been mostly fine. But my point is that he has spent a bunch of time building and optimizing a PC that he would not have had to invest into a pre-built, pre-configured machine. He does it because he finds it fun.
148.
by stefco_ 9y ago
(I'm a Ph.D. student working on LIGO) I think the author is missing the point a bit. LIGO is an observatory, and as it gets more sensitive, we certainly hope to see GW detections become normal! It is already interesting and surprising
149.
by stefco_ 9y ago
My friend in film production tells me that his shop does a ton of editing on iMacs despite the premium on hardware. He is an enthusiast and has built his own editing PC, but he tells me the iMacs are rock-solid and never give them any troub
150.
by stefco_ 9y ago
But you can't do that with the latest MacBooks, which have their SSDs soldered directly onto the logic boards. And you can't do that with memory for any Apple notebook from the last several years for the same reason. My 7 year o

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