todd8

47 ms·

361.
by todd8 6y ago
Yes you are right, records have been around for a long time. COBOL was a popular, very early language supporting hierarchical data of different types. This dates back to approximately 1960. FORTRAN didn’t have records other than I/O “r
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by todd8 6y ago
Discussion five days ago of this Reuters article on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325442
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by todd8 6y ago
Yes, it was! Thanks so much, I just couldn't remember the name of that game. How did you recall it from over half a century ago? Looking up used editions of WFF'N Proof on Amazon I recognize the instruction book published in 1965.
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by todd8 6y ago
I was first exposed to RPN around 1963. It was a game my aunt gave me as a present. I wish I could remember the name of the game. Players rolled dice that had logical operators and perhaps quantifiers on the faces of the dice. The goal was
365.
by todd8 6y ago
I grew up going to bad schools, not as bad as the schools are now but nevertheless quite bad. I was assaulted numerous times and robbed (at knife point once, once by a gang of seven) inside the school. My school work was often stolen or des
366.
by todd8 6y ago
Here is the data. According to the US Census[1], out of the largest 100 US Public School systems Baltimore ranked near the very top in spending per child (5th out of 100). Baltimore spent $15,793 per child. Only New York and Boston spent co
367.
WHO Investigators to Scrap Plans for Interim Report on Probe of Covid-19 Origins(wsj.com)
2 points by todd8 6y ago|0 comments
368.
by todd8 6y ago
There is an article in the WSJ about this call for an investigation that gives some perspective, see WHO Investigators to Scrap Plans for Interim Report on Probe of Covid-19 Origins [1] This WSJ article says: > Moreover, many leading
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Call for a International Forensic Investigation into the Origins of Covid-19 [pdf](s.wsj.net)
2 points by todd8 6y ago|1 comments
370.
by todd8 6y ago
My concern is should we, the US and China, be doing gain of function research at all. This research investigates the possible routes/mutations that viruses can use to infect a different species. However, the results of this research ar
371.
by todd8 6y ago
The article never mentions the gain of function research being done internationally where viruses are enhanced with abilities not found in the wild. This Newsweek article, from almost a year, ago discusses the possibility that this kind o
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by todd8 6y ago
Common Lisp has functions first , second , last , etc. It has rest too. (first '(a b c d)) returns 'a (rest '(a b c d)) returns '(b c d) (third '(a b c d)) returns 'c (nth 0 '(a
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by todd8 6y ago
With respect to personality, I believe that there are likely a number of independent factors, perhaps hundreds, that affect in some way where one’s position lies on each of the axes of personality. These factors could be particular childhoo
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by todd8 6y ago
Sanskrit is a possible exception. I know very little about it, but it is an ancient language that one of my professors explained is still read today allowing direct access to ancient literature. Of course, any language thousands of years ol
375.
by todd8 6y ago
The Central Limit Theorem is one big reason to expect that traits have a normal distribution. Wikipedia has a good explanation. [1] and [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem [2] https:/&#x2F
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by todd8 6y ago
After working with real-world compilers in industry I was surprised to hear CS professors that taught the compiler class say that no one should be writing parsers by hand because compiler writers should just build a table driven parser usin
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by todd8 6y ago
Absolutely. I became interested in compilers while in graduate school in the 70's and I spent many many hours studying Aho and Ulman's two volumes work on compilers that preceded their Dragon book [1]. The first volume was all abo
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by todd8 6y ago
I’m looking forward to Apple’s upcoming TV versions of Dune by Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. These are such big stories that they can’t be squeezed into a movie without losing their allure.
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by todd8 6y ago
> Many places elsewhere have all but completed the transition to renewables and are well on their way to 100% renewable grids ... I'm really interested in this progress, can you enumerate just a handful of these places.
380.
by todd8 6y ago
How strange, I just picked up a book from my bookshelf, my old copy of Starting Forth by Leo Brodie. I was trying to remember if Forth was created by Charles Moore or Calvin Moores. Charles Moore invented Forth. I really enjoyed reading
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by todd8 6y ago
I'm sure that Texas could have prepared for this cold weather better. However, to be fair, its a rare for the weather to be this cold in Texas. Even in climates where there cold weather is common, cold weather disasters still happen. T
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by todd8 6y ago
Technically, I believe the problem is the CO concentration and exposure time, not displacement of oxygen. CO binds to hemoglobin more effectively than oxygen, preventing enough oxygen from getting to the body's tissues. CO poisoning is
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by todd8 6y ago
Wood ashes also collect in the small chamber in the basement under the chimney. As a child in Michigan, one of my hamsters escaped his confinement. Poor little Pinky couldn't be found in the house, but a couple of days after disappeari
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by todd8 6y ago
Here, in Central Texas, my home has three fireplaces. Each designed to accommodate wood, but all have gas feeds that make it possible to run them without the smoke of wood fires. We don't run them for heat nor decorative effect. The ar
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by todd8 6y ago
BNF is just a notation for describing a formal language. Although there are many slight variations of BNF in use, BNF is generally used to describe very precisely the exact syntactically legal sentences (that is, sequences symbols) that bel
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by todd8 6y ago
This provides evidence that Intel and Apple have split for good. I'm happy with my new M1 Apple systems, but I wondered if the Mac Pro was possibly going to stay Intel based because of number of PCI lanes, ECC memory, etc. This campai
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by todd8 6y ago
My father was an officer in the Marine Corp during WW2 and he told me (many years ago) about being taught this in his training.
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by todd8 6y ago
Oh, thanks. That's interesting, there's a long history of decimal time. Afer fixing the time we can fix the calendar. See the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanke–Henry_Permane
389.
by todd8 6y ago
I'm not looking for a job, but I'm often invited to chat with a company's dev team, and I get a chance to see what they are doing and how they are doing it. The last company I visited was a handful of Physics Ph.D.s. They wer
390.
by todd8 6y ago
I can't call someone in India without looking up their timezone and figuring out if they are at work or still sound asleep. Time zones made sense when the only people we could talk to lived close by. Why not just use one universal time

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