svat

9 ms·

91.
by svat 9mo ago
FWIW the XKCD talk at Google is here (wow, 18 years ago! I remember watching this video when it was posted): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 (Knuth comes up to ask a question at 21:30) (Can't tell from the
92.
by svat 9mo ago
Thank you. IMO a couple of good motivating examples (as I said a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497843 ) are: • Bank accounts and cash. If you're tracking a single number, do you track a cas
93.
by svat 9mo ago
For what it's worth, the article posted here is not from 2024, but from this week: "Published : Jan. 4, 2026", and contains original reporting (quotes from the researcher). The mention of "Scientific American" in th
94.
by svat 9mo ago
It appears that the “111 lines” is a reference to the version as of 2014-02-11: https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish/blob/e2b7fc29ce2a112be... (386 lines), about which the author says ( https://www
95.
by svat 10mo ago
For what it's worth (and though I do have some complaints about stanfordonline), the URL https://online.stanford.edu/donald-e-knuth-lectures works fine for me.
96.
by svat 10mo ago
Every year Knuth gives a Christmas lecture in early December, and every year (at least the last few years) David Cassel writes a blog post about it; here is this year's: https://thenewstack.io/donald-knuths-2025-christm
97.
by svat 10mo ago
I see them prevalent in fiction just as well. Looking at the first few pages of a few random works of fiction, continuing from my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400974 - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fit
98.
by svat 10mo ago
Can you name some books as example? I picked a few random books from the period you mentioned, both fiction and non-fiction, and checked the first few pages of each; most of them had a good number of em dashes (or spaced en dashes, dependin
99.
by svat 10mo ago
Possibly more relevant is the "ACM Software System Award": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ACM_Software_Syst...
100.
by svat 10mo ago
The page is about tips for writing fast code. Much of it applied 20 years ago, and will apply 20 years from now. If by "the numbers" you mean specifically just the table ("rough costs for some basic low-level operations"
101.
by svat 10mo ago
The HN title here is currently “Performance Hints (2023)”, but this was only published externally recently (2025). (See e.g. https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2002089534188892256 announcing it.) And of course 2023 is
102.
by svat 10mo ago
Interesting, there seems to be a different Sacks (software engineer Robert Sacks) who devised his own Ulam-like spiral. Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicat
103.
by svat 10mo ago
If you buy something from Tiktok, you presumably visit the merchant's website, which almost surely will have chosen to have a tracking pixel that sends data to FB (Instagram). You can read a bit about how tracking pixels work here: ht
104.
by svat 10mo ago
> I don't see how AI would help with that What if the AI kept bringing up unspecified cases and all you (the human) had to do all day was respond to it on what the behavior should be in each case? In this model the AI would not spec
105.
by svat 10mo ago
There are some basic invariants like "this program should not crash on any input" or "this service should be able to handle requests that look like X up to N per second" — though I expect those will be the last to be ame
106.
by svat 10mo ago
I assumed the books were somewhat fictional (i.e. they were Gladwell-style) because if he meant to make a claim seriously he'd have published in a medical journal instead of a popular/literary book. But since writing the comment a
107.
by svat 10mo ago
This was a nice profile of (one side of) Sacks and his life, and as usual some mischievous or click-seeking online editor has given it a headline (and sub-heading) that are almost completely unrelated to what the article is about. In fact,
108.
by svat 10mo ago
Oh that sounds cool! What do you do now instead?
109.
by svat 10mo ago
This couldn't be further from the truth. He has given several talks where he's projecting his computer, you can see him comfortably switching between all the programs he uses (Emacs, Mathematica, etc); in fact he is very efficient
110.
by svat 10mo ago
Not exactly the question you asked, but you may want to read the chapter on “Large-Scale Changes” in the “Software Engineering at Google” book: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch22.html
111.
by svat 10mo ago
This was a good concise review! The book itself is surreal. One thing worth pointing out that is Knuth wrote it just as the characters described: he had only a vague memory of the initial axioms that Conway had told him, so the characters&#
112.
by svat 11mo ago
The comparison has two points one of which says that for "Complex scripts (Devanagari, Arabic)", ghostty-web has " Proper grapheme handling". But when I tried something extremely simple at the https://ghostty-
113.
by svat 11mo ago
Do you have a link?
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by svat 11mo ago
FWIW it was Bjarne Stroustrup (of C++) who said that, not Knuth.
115.
by svat 11mo ago
(2016) Also, “direct” link: https://blog.plover.com/tech/tmpdir.html (This doesn't really matter, as the posted link is to https://blog.plover.com/2016/07/01/#tmpdir i.e. the blog p
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by svat 11mo ago
Maybe my brain has rotted from paying a bit more attention to privacy language than the average person, but IMO in this case it's fairly clear to me that using your activity “to personalize your experience across Workspace” does not me
117.
by svat 11mo ago
Related to your comment, not the original post/book: - On Knuth’s idea (which seems good to me), see http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/knuth-big-o-ca... but also the last two comments by Davi
118.
by svat 11mo ago
Yeah that's one of the things the test was designed to catch: at that point, B is a reference , to the B that is being defined. Here's a C++ translation from https://oeis.org/A132343 that uses identity functions
119.
by svat 11mo ago
I agree with the comment you're replying to: the original problem (in the linked post) is about an 8x8 square in which 1x1 squares at either corner are removed, and asking whether it can be tiled by 2x1 tiles. The idea of "colorin
120.
by svat 11mo ago
This is a classic of course, but there is a lesser known extension to this problem (to be read only after this problem has been solved), which also has a beautiful "proof without words": > an 8x8 board in which squares at oppos

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