twtw

19 ms·

151.
by twtw 8y ago
This slippery slope argument is valueless. It's perfectly possible to have socialized healthcare without communism.
152.
by twtw 8y ago
You seem to be responding to the title, not the essay. Dyson describes the theory as "simple and intelligible" once you accept the concept of fields, which was very much foreign in Maxwell's time.
153.
by twtw 8y ago
Thus my second paragraph. You have to opt in to use other formats. Casting to bigint doesn't work because the problem occurs when converting the decimal constant in the source to floating point. You would have to convince the parser to
154.
by twtw 8y ago
Can't comment on the situation with other GPU languages, but CUDA on GPUs since fermi are 754 compliant, with the exception that certain status flags are unavailable.
155.
by twtw 8y ago
Ah, thanks for the correction. I don't currently have a license, so out of curiosity is 0.3 == 3/10 in wolfram?
156.
by twtw 8y ago
Binary-coded decimal formats have more or less already lived and died (both fixed and floating point). They still have areas of applicability, but this idea is very much not a new one - x86 used to have native BCD support, but it was taken
157.
by twtw 8y ago
That failure had nothing to do with floating point specifically. The same failure could have occurred when converting any data type with larger range (including rationals or arbitrary precision numbers) to 16 bit integer. I would say the fa
158.
by twtw 8y ago
Julia has built in rationals (as do a few other languages). I'm not aware of any language (other than Wolfram) that defaults to storing something like 0.1 as 1/10 - i.e. uses the decimal constant notation for rationals, rather tha
159.
by twtw 8y ago
It doesn't even illustrate that particularly well. As is, the page just seems to be pointing at floating point and yelling "wrong", with no information on what's actually happening. By all means embrace the surprise and
160.
by twtw 8y ago
I don't understand all the crap that IEEE 754 gets. I appreciate that it may be surprising that 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 at first, or that many people are not educated about floating point, but I don't understand the people who "unde
161.
by twtw 8y ago
The nearest doubles to each of these two decimal constants end up being roughly 2 apart. Whereas for fp32 both decimal constants are stored as the same float.
162.
by twtw 8y ago
The late 1980s (after the Mead&Conway revolution) seems like such a magical time for VLSI to me, as someone who wasn't around at that time. Does this spirit of getting a few engineers together and taping out a chip in a few months
163.
by twtw 8y ago
Right, and the paper itself is very upfront about that. I don't have any objection to the research, which is likely very valuable, but I do find it strange that the article claims they solved two problems without mentioning that only o
164.
by twtw 8y ago
... and couldn't get the correct answers for LiH. Interesting that the article didn't mention this. From the paper: > For lithium hydride, LiH, we were not able to reproduce closely the ground state energy with the currently av
165.
by twtw 8y ago
Nice try. I've seen how this goes over with those types. The parents escalate to the adminstrators, who either involve the student counsellors or talk to the teacher directly. One of these two tell the teacher how they need to better s
166.
by twtw 8y ago
This sounds a lot like my mom's situation. In the last decade, parents and admins have made her job terrible. The parents make similar demands regarding grades - if their kid does poorly on an exam, it doesn't even enter into thei
167.
by twtw 8y ago
It's probably a few kilobytes of symbols, a few kilobytes of crt0, some ELF overhead, and a few hundred bytes of user code.
168.
by twtw 8y ago
Meh. Aras is comparing apples to apples, so I don't see how it matters.
169.
by twtw 8y ago
I'm not sure what the takeaway here is. If desktop users don't need (or can't use) more cores, then don't get them - and call an end to the periodic performance improvements, because CPUs won't get faster without mo
170.
by twtw 8y ago
> wouldn’t creating OR and AND gates directly reduce the number of transistors No. Gates require varying numbers of transistors to implement in CMOS. This idea is almost exactly backwards - logic is reduced to nand because nand requires
171.
by twtw 8y ago
Absorbance characteristics of sub 100 MHz are substantially different from those of multiple GHz.
172.
by twtw 8y ago
How can HN just choose to be noncompliant? Aren't there penalties? I don't understand the jurisdiction of GDPR very well, but I thought it applied to all EU users.
173.
by twtw 8y ago
Obviously, I have a bias coming into this discussion (and so do you). Mine comes from experience in a world of hardware and physical products that gives me a greater affinity for the business model of hardware companies than "open sour
174.
by twtw 8y ago
Cue the argument that these "don't count" because they use CUDA.
175.
by twtw 8y ago
There are far more than two data points on all of the charts in the article. What chart are you looking at?
176.
by twtw 8y ago
I wish the economics of the present were somewhat different, and that money didn't exist in the 21st century. And yet, in the world we live in, I have a hard time faulting a corporation for not giving away their core products for free.
177.
by twtw 8y ago
Were the CPU cores of Cell (PPEs) hard to program? I had the impression that the difficulty of the Cell was in the need to manage the 8 SPEs, not in writing software for the Power4 core. The 8 core Carmel CPU in Xavier is not like the SPEs
178.
by twtw 8y ago
Homogeneous coordinates allow for affine transformations to be represented and performed with a matrix multiply. This includes perspective projection and translation. One of the use cases for homogeneous coordinates is certainly to be able
179.
by twtw 8y ago
I don't follow. What do we gain by moving the homogeneous coordinate from last position to first? I don't understand this: > then it's just a sparse vector! Set the variables you want to! Or this: > [1] is the origin po
180.
by twtw 8y ago
> There is no employee shortage, ever. Just a shortage of businesses owners who are willing to pay market rate for labor. Is the situation the same for housing? Is there never a housing shortage, just a shortage of people who are willing

More ›