supergarfield

10 ms·

61.
by supergarfield 9y ago
> do some people just have way to much time on their hands for thinking shit like this up. He's a philosophy professor. He's not supposed to be devising a more efficient way to cook noodles. > I'd rather live my life th
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by supergarfield 9y ago
SIMH is a good emulator for 70s-80s minicomputers. The Unix heritage society (TUHS) has a lot of software, including early Unices, at their Unix archive. Some of it is a little tricky to get to work, but v6 and v7 Unix both work like charms
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by supergarfield 9y ago
As I understand it, the vast majority of people in the UK must tell the tax service when their address changes: https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/change-of-circumstance
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by supergarfield 9y ago
This is not really true: the main limiting factor with H1-B visas is the yearly cap; as others have said, the rest of the requirements are normally easy to check off (especially if you already have an H1-B). Since you are not subject to the
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by supergarfield 9y ago
The Wikipedia article gives Weierstrass's original condition, but it was later improved to just ab ≥ 1 (as noted, not very visibly, at the end of the article). However, the Nautilus article also says that "Conventional wisdom held
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by supergarfield 9y ago
Geography may not be conductive to biking everywhere. While I mostly bike around the city I live in, it's a very hilly place and even a short trip requires an amount of effort that cannot be expected of most people. As for pedestrian t
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by supergarfield 9y ago
> 8.3 million dollars per life saved Interestingly, this is very close to what the EPA uses as the cost of a life -- a little above 9.1 million dollars when adjusted for inflation [1]. This seems in line with the math for environmental r
68.
by supergarfield 9y ago
I think the point is that hackers and cybersecurity researchers, or lawyers and other lawyers, cancel each other out. To take yet another example, countries pay lots of money to maintain nuclear arsenals that will never be used because thei
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by supergarfield 9y ago
0.1% of GDP is actually fairly large. In isolation it's fine, but government probably have dozens or hundreds of similar "small" programs we never think about. So sure, wars cost a lot more money, but running a hundred progra
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by supergarfield 9y ago
(I obviously meant Libya, not Syria)
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by supergarfield 9y ago
I don't think the main problem here is random terrorists cutting power to Europe by blowing up a power line tower. The real problem is that nation states that control the Sahara haven't proven to be stable (Syria, Egypt), or don&#
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by supergarfield 9y ago
Whether it's legal is certainly up to the state, but whether it's an ethical right just as certainly isn't. All rights aren't legal rights.
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by supergarfield 10y ago
That's very likely. Clang 8.0 collapses the loop with any optimizer setting other than -O0. But if you had to do it manually, loop unrolling and SIMD instructions (although not part of standard C) would be good bets and can probably ge
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by supergarfield 10y ago
I don't think the IC/brain comparison is particularly revealing. One of the key differences I see is that an IC will stop working (or at least very severely malfunction) if you disable a transistor. A brain on the other hand will
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by supergarfield 10y ago
These are all good points. In this case though, C doesn't have garbage collection or OO features, and (I believe) has unspecified behavior for arithmetic exceptions. I assume Fortran does the same (since it's comparably fast), so
76.
by supergarfield 10y ago
> Interestingly, C/C++ beats Fortran on all but two of the benchmarks, although they are fairly close on most. Unless I missed something, this directly contradicts the quotes benchmark source[1], where C beat Fortran on all tests ex
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by supergarfield 10y ago
If liking is the problem, you can usually follow pages without liking them. You can also make your following list private. However I think it's unclear what you will get from following a real extremist group, except if you like to see
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by supergarfield 10y ago
Specifically, projects Orion and Daedalus are based on nuclear pulse propulsion[0], which is essentially detonating thermodynamic bombs behind the spacecraft. It's one of the only realistic options we currently have to do interstellar
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by supergarfield 10y ago
It's not being forgotten. It was never widely known to begin with. Intellectual elites still know it, and if anything they've probably been growing relative to the entire population. I feel like at best one could argue that those
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by supergarfield 10y ago
Your definition of propaganda probably is a little to inclusive. In my experience, the Economist very rarely gets the facts wrong (including by omission of major elements). The "letters to the editor" at the beginning of every iss
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by supergarfield 10y ago
McKay uses something very close to this (as you said) theoretical value as the starting point of its calculations for how much can effectively be extracted.
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by supergarfield 10y ago
I don't think this is a reflection on the amount of usable sunlight on that hits the surface of the earth. It sounds more like a vague, general statement and isn't backed by calculations in the article. The late Professor McKay (w
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by supergarfield 10y ago
Interesting idea. One major difference though is that there is considerable economic incentive to keep making better chips, whereas the flatlining rocket technology was probably due in large part to lack of economic pressure to make it bett
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by supergarfield 10y ago
I felt like I was addressing this but it may not have been very clear. I understand, and agree with, the point about diversity. My argument is that the EU is still far from preventing political diversity since member states have a large amo
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by supergarfield 10y ago
I agree to some extent, but how many US states would take the option to leave the union if they could? They benefit from being part of the US so immensely that it is hard to imagine conditions where they would actually leave. If the EU inte
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by supergarfield 10y ago
This is a good point, but I am fairly sure there is a balance to reach here. The EU is currently politically extremely weak, with national veto powers widespread: see how Wallonia, only a part of a small country, was able to significantly d
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by supergarfield 10y ago
This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions. I feel like this is a sign