todd8

10 ms·

31.
by todd8 3y ago
Core War is a game played in a memory arena of a virtual machine supporting a simple simulated assembly language. I first saw it described in a 1984 issue of Scientific American[1]. I had already been programming for 15 years by then and re
32.
by todd8 3y ago
Here are a few observations. From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134. The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716
33.
by todd8 3y ago
I don't understand the curved keyboard wells as present on the Glove80 and Kinesis Advantage keyboards. For most keys on a flat keyboard I type not by bending the finger joints and then punching the keys with the tips of my fingers by
34.
by todd8 3y ago
I was working on Distributed Services for AIX in 1986 and 1987, a distributed filesystem to compete with NFS. As this was being developed by a dev team, my colleague and I pondered how to test the system that we had architected. There were
35.
by todd8 3y ago
While I am certified for Nitrox diving, I'm not sure I would actually use it very much. After over 100 open water dives and many dive classes (I was one class away from being a certified instructor back in the 1970s) I realized that I
36.
by todd8 3y ago
My first, brief, dive to 135 feet (41m) was in 1976 off the coast of Cozumel. I was in a group led by a dive master and we quickly descended, swam through a large ring shaped coral structure at around 135ft, and started our ascent. More acc
37.
by todd8 3y ago
Emacs is daunting, I've used it since grad school in the 80's, and I'm still familiar with only a couple of hundred packages/extensions available out of thousands that are available. Likewise, I use maybe a couple of hun
38.
by todd8 3y ago
Another problem with using unicode in code is the handling of Unicode equivalence, compatibility, and normalization[1]. The same glyph can be produced in multiple ways. How is the reader, vim or emacs, and the compiler supposed to handle th
39.
by todd8 3y ago
Perhaps this is true for some texts, but take a look at math journals where mathematicians are writing for other mathematicians within their own field. They reuse symbols, sometime an integral symbol is for Riemann integration and sometimes
40.
by todd8 3y ago
Using the equals sign (=) for assignment is unfortunate. Mathematically, a=a+5 is confusing. Algol 60 (and its grandchild Pascal) are a bit better and represent this as a:=a+5, but this is an odd notation too. A left pointing arrow would be
41.
by todd8 3y ago
Cards were often numbered for finished programs, but during development any change or refactoring would invalidate the numbers and the diagonal lines drawn on the side of a deck of cards. Some of the larger comp centers had data processing
42.
by todd8 3y ago
Punching the cards was a pain. The machines could jam and a single mistake would ruin the card and you have to pull it out and start over on a fresh card. So it wasn’t practical to number the cards while initially punching them. There was a
43.
by todd8 3y ago
As far back as 2007 it was called clang . I'm not sure if it was called clang internally before that. See the seventh slide in the linked presentation. https://web.archive.org/web/20190403123249/http:/&#
44.
by todd8 3y ago
When I learned APL, the expression evaluation order at first seemed odd (strictly right to left with no operator presence, 5*5+4 evals to 45 not 29). After working with it a couple of hours I came to appreciate its simplicity, kind of like
45.
by todd8 3y ago
A recent report written for the UK government[1] estimates that the per megawatt of energy could get down to 62.50 USD, assuming that the system would run for 100 years--according to Sabine Hossenfelder[2] this would make it cheaper than Nu
46.
Should We Beam Energy Down from a Satellite?(youtube.com)
1 points by todd8 3y ago|0 comments
47.
Frazer-Nash shows feasibility of space solar power – Frazer-Nash Consultancy(fnc.co.uk)
1 points by todd8 3y ago|1 comments
48.
by todd8 3y ago
In grad school I took a class from Robert Boyer and J Strother Moore (famous for Boyer-Moore string searching and the 2005 ACM Software System Award for the Boyer-Moore Theorem Prover). It was a long time ago, but I remember an anecdote tha
49.
by todd8 3y ago
Tesla seems to be making progress on full self driving, but real self driving (cars without steering wheels) still seems quite distant. How will such a car respond to road workers redirecting traffic? How many times have you had to talk to
50.
by todd8 3y ago
A friend's wrote a book on prehistoric flutes. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on the subject, [1]. Unfortunately, I believe that it is out of print. [1] Lana Neal, The Earliest Instrument: Ritual Power and Fertility Magic of the Flute in U
51.
by todd8 3y ago
Yes
52.
by todd8 3y ago
I'm a computer scientist/software engineer that has used primarily Unix or Linux systems since the 80's. I write shell scripts occasionally, but I just find them error prone enough that I'd rather use python than sh for
53.
by todd8 3y ago
Thanks...I'm think I'm too sensitive about it since this comes up every f'ing time.
54.
by todd8 3y ago
Really? I didn't invent it for browsers, I invented it for distributed file systems before the "World Wide Web" had even been invented. You might as well have a talk with William Shockley or Vint Cerf.
55.
by todd8 3y ago
I'm sure that many can make the same claim. In the 1980's, I was an operating systems architect working at IBM. I thought up many interesting (to me) innovations while working on the first couple of releases of the AIX on the IBM
56.
by todd8 3y ago
My spouse will sometimes mention in conversation with others that I invented the cookie. This always puts me on the spot, and I have to enter into a long explanation of the what and the why of cookies least they believe that I some sort of
57.
by todd8 3y ago
I enjoy looking over the 2D chart of programming language popularity, but the chart raises some questions: -- How are there more Roff projects on GitHub than there are projects in Julia or Haskell or Perl ? I haven't thought abo
58.
by todd8 3y ago
This is off topic, but thinking about portable desktop apps, why didn’t JavaFx become more popular? What is JetBrains using for its sophisticated GUIs? Is it just Swing? It would be great if Rust could be used to write portable high quality
59.
by todd8 3y ago
Today I posted this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35840591 to HN. It is a YouTube video with some straightforward statistics that, in my opinion, imply a very rough road ahead for Solar and Wind. The basic problem co
60.
The energy transition delusion: inescapable mineral realities(youtube.com)
4 points by todd8 3y ago|1 comments

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