todd8

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661.
by todd8 7y ago
I wasn’t trying to insult Lisp. Compilers for Lisp have been around in some form for many years—I can remember hearing Patrick Winston talking about them when I first learned Lisp in his class in 1973. There are both interpreters and compil
662.
by todd8 7y ago
Performance differences are likely not that critical between reading small amounts of data using string I/O vs reading small amounts of data using a library routine that reads and evaluates the data. Runtime evaluation of a string as a
663.
by todd8 7y ago
Double exponential growth is crazy fast, but some problem grow much faster and follow the hyperoperation sequence growth rate. Knuth wrote a fun paper in Science in 1976 [1]. (Easy & interesting but sadly my link is to a paywall.) Tha
664.
by todd8 7y ago
Two interacting factors are claimed to be responsible for Neven’s Law. The first is the exponential advantage q-bits have over regular bits according to the article. (But isn’t this the case only for some algorithms? i.e. Shore’s) The next
665.
by todd8 7y ago
Imagine, if you can, a world where no one owned an electronic calculator and few people had ever seen a computer outside of photographs or TV. I found out that my high school's school district owned a computer at its administration bui
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by todd8 7y ago
The performance of the etcd system is complex[1], there’s raft consensus, replication, security, snapshots, networking, and basically a lot going on. Perhaps, your benchmarks really do reflect problems that go has with gc, but perhaps some
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by todd8 7y ago
WTF. I’m sorry I’m flabbergasted.
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by todd8 7y ago
A few years ago, I decided I would learn how to memorize a deck of cards in a single pass through a shuffled deck. I was surprised to find that it wasn't too difficult. Googling will reveal a few instructional web pages or you tube vid
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by todd8 7y ago
I don't believe that this is completely accurate. According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave , a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricit
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by todd8 7y ago
I like the book but the contents seem to go well beyond the prerequisites of category theory—-it’s almost 900 pages. I got the impression that the author was not simply attempting to connect high school math to category theory but was provi
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by todd8 7y ago
I am surprised at the cost of LEGO parts, but they are undeniably good and durable toys.
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by todd8 7y ago
Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.
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by todd8 7y ago
> some parts are worth more than you’d think reasonable... all parts are worth more than I’d think reasonable.
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by todd8 7y ago
I'm a computer scientist, not a mathematician (but I've taken around 25 college math courses spread over many years). Nevertheless, I do have a couple of suggestions and observations that I will address to the author that I hope i
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Drone Autonomously Avoiding Obstacles at 30 MPH(youtube.com)
1 points by todd8 7y ago|0 comments
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by todd8 7y ago
Yes, this approach does find every solution and it is using backtracking. See my other reply to a sibling comment.
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by todd8 7y ago
Yes it would take a long time to do it that way since there would be roughly 25 billion solutions to evaluate. My Python program doesn’t do this and runs very fast . Elapsed time for this program is approximately 0.03 seconds on my 2013 de
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by todd8 7y ago
For comparison, here is my own solution in Python 3 to the Zebra Puzzle. To me this solution seems sorter and easier to understand: from itertools import permutations as perms houses = range(1,6) # house
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by todd8 7y ago
You’re right. I corrected it. Thanks.
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by todd8 7y ago
This reminds me of Paul Harrell’s “High Tech” fleece bullet stop. It’s just some folded up fleece blankets. He uses it in his ammo reviews. See, for example, https://youtu.be/hVfStJS5XQw around the 4:40 mark.
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by todd8 7y ago
I’m not sure Apple is listening. I’ve had four Mac Pros over the years, and I’ve been waiting for years to replace my current (6-core, 32GB/512GB) 2013 Mac Pro. I won’t be buying the new Mac Pro. I’ve ordered an upgraded new Mac Mini f
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by todd8 7y ago
Your 3 * 7 and 3 * 5 got interpreted as a highlighting of the text surrounded by the asterisks. You can edit your comment to fix it. Here are the complete HN markup rules: Blank lines separate paragraphs. Text surrounded by asterisks is it
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by todd8 7y ago
I wondered that myself, but I've never investigated!
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by todd8 7y ago
I was referring to readline-style completion (as in GNU Readline) as is also found in the bash shell. You're right that the stock REPL doesn't have IDE style completion.
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by todd8 7y ago
Yes, a lot of the tech support falls into your enumeration, but I was Chief Scientist at a company for over six years, an OS Architect at IBM for five years and subsequently have done years of part time consulting at a number of startups. I
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by todd8 7y ago
Tech support for family, friends, coworkers.
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by todd8 7y ago
I use spotlight a lot, but never for calculations. I’ll have to try that out. The ability to use variables, math functions, lists, loops, and completion in Python will likely keep me using it as my basic calculator. Although I need to figur
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by todd8 7y ago
In the past when I needed a calculator on someone’s Mac, I just started Python in a terminal and typed in expressions to be evaluated. It was nice to be able to find it on any Mac and it’s much nicer to type into Python’s REPL than clicking
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by todd8 7y ago
You’re right, but this is a bit irritating. Whenever I’m in need of a calculator on someone’s Mac I just start python in a terminal and type in expressions to be evaluated. It was nice to be able to find it on any Mac and so much nicer than
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by todd8 7y ago
I agree, but I don’t think education will end up solving the problem. Somewhere out there, there is a sociopathic engineer that will make antisocial choices anyway. Software is so easy to copy that it proliferates too easily. If a mechanica

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