wbhart

101 ms·

421.
by wbhart 14y ago
Even if this is not a hoax, the premise that Zuck invented facebooks is wrong, as anyone who has watched the movie well knows.
422.
by wbhart 15y ago
I don't understand the title of this post. After reading the article, I don't see a workable explanation presented which accounts for the features of the phenomenon which is described. I recently read quite a few reports of NDEs for my own
423.
by wbhart 15y ago
I had the pleasure of looking through forum post after forum post on Numeric Code 93 shortly after the problem started. This actually didn't appear to help. There was no information, only people reporting the same issue over and over.
424.
by wbhart 15y ago
It's only a partial outage (Google says 2% of users - much lower than I suspected). Mine's been down for about half an hour (I'm in the UK). Someone did an Ask HN where it was mentioned that #gmail was trending on twitter which suggests tha
425.
by wbhart 15y ago
There are reports of a partial outage which is ongoing: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...
426.
by wbhart 15y ago
A far better argument for me to have made is that it would be impossible to have a 64kb demo which models a surface on which is printed the source code of all 64kb demos written since the start of the scene decades ago. Of course, if equati
427.
by wbhart 15y ago
This is precisely the same thing as a quine. A Lisp program able to "introspect" its own source contains somewhere in the binary a quoted representation of the source code in some format (stored as a list instead of a string if we aren't wo
428.
by wbhart 15y ago
Yeah I'm wrong. What I had in mind I guess, is take an existing very impressive 64kb demo, then do this. That might be much harder, but not necessarily impossible in theory.
429.
by wbhart 15y ago
For the longest time, my favourite was Prophecy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8
430.
by wbhart 15y ago
I imagined that demo skills would eventually die and the more recent stuff would just end up being bloated or lame. But it really has improved. Infeasibly improved. Debris is amazing. But it isn't the only more recent amazing demo. Someone
431.
by wbhart 15y ago
I remember trying to figure out how a certain lensing effect was done in the werkzeug a few years back. I really invested quite a bit of effort in this, and I never did work it out (yes, I did use all of the umm, obvious techniques for this
432.
by wbhart 15y ago
Lua is not suitable from my point of view due to the lack of proper integer types (and many other features).
433.
by wbhart 15y ago
My own project (FLINT) is about 120k lines, and we're still going with C. I did spend a lot of time looking for a theoretical higher level language which could take us further when C ran out of puff, but we eventually decided to stick with
434.
by wbhart 15y ago
I am no physicist, but I still feel as though this is an immensely misleading subject. The idea of an infinite universe conjures up images an infinite number of worlds out there, infinitely many of which must be similar to our own. And some
435.
by wbhart 15y ago
I guess that is Norton of Conway and Norton Monstrous Moonshine fame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine I'm glad someone wrote a book about him. Cambridge's loss will be someone else's gain.
436.
by wbhart 15y ago
Ah, there are finalisers. The function finalizer lets you define a function to be called when there are no more references to an object. I guess maybe the idea is to use this from within the constructor.
437.
by wbhart 15y ago
Is the documentation still accurate on that there is no way to pass structs from Julia to C? One other slight difficulty seems to be the lack of finilisers, e.g. to clean up a GMP bignum when there are no remaining references to it.
438.
by wbhart 15y ago
The problem with changing it in the library is that you'd also have to change it everywhere arrays are used in Julia itself. The only way I could think to manage it would be a pragma which switches 0-based on for a given file. But this is d
439.
by wbhart 15y ago
Things may have changed, but last time I looked at Cling you were limited in what you could do in the REPL. The main way I think it is used in practice is to slurp in a pile of C++ from files, and then inspect values in the REPL. As I say,
440.
by wbhart 15y ago
It's been done. I think it was Gambit Scheme that had its own bignum library. And for a while, very large integer arithmetic was reportedly faster than GMP, which if you know anything about GMP is quite an achievement. However, the GMP guys
441.
by wbhart 15y ago
Unfortunately the performance would be poor. This is not a reflection on Julia. Even compiled C is between 4 and 12 times slower than assembly for some bignum operations. Also, LLVM handles carries and certain loop optimisations poorly, so
442.
by wbhart 15y ago
Many divide-and-conquer algorithms seem to be easier to express with 0 based indexing, whereas quite a few array operations seem to be better with 1 based indexing. I can certainly understand and appreciate the different points of view, I j
443.
by wbhart 15y ago
Great news about the operators. I didn't see an example of overloading there, but I probably rushed through it a bit quickly. I have been working on and off on a BSD licensed bignum library. Maybe in a few years....
444.
by wbhart 15y ago
And what should the library writers use? The great advantage of this is that much of it can be done in one language. From the article: "The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran librari
445.
by wbhart 15y ago
It would certainly be nice if there was an option to use 0 based indices in blocks of code. It's understandable in that they are pitching at the technical community, and many mathematical papers and books are written with 1 based indices. B
446.
by wbhart 15y ago
Much praise!! These guys have incredibly good taste. Almost every single thing I can think of that I want in a programming language, they have it. All in the one language! The fact that it has parametric types, parametric polymorphism, macr
447.
by wbhart 15y ago
The confusing thing about this lot is the redundancy. They got at least 15 people to make statements, but it looks like multiple SA's interviewed the same people and they all said pretty much the same thing (with the exception of the one du
448.
by wbhart 15y ago
Prestige is not something you decide you want in the morning and have by evening. A lot of the most prestigious universities are very old, and so it is with the most prestigious journals. The whole academic culture needs to be changed. Peop
449.
by wbhart 15y ago
There are web apps that do this already. The process itself is straightforward (at least for mathematics). An editor-in-chief and a group of associate editors (who are always top academics in related fields) accept publications, sometimes t
450.
by wbhart 15y ago
Do you have a reference? You are not talking about the article to do with the US drone are you? Edit: oh I see you mean this: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/CrosbyWallach_UsenixSec...

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