wwalker3

13 ms·

31.
by wwalker3 16y ago
You're right, NKS does cover more than cellular automata, like network systems (as your reference shows). But all the examples Wolfram gives of network systems have the same anisotropy problem as a cellular automaton. He uses mostly hexagon
32.
by wwalker3 16y ago
It's harder than you might think to model real physics with a cellular automaton. Cellular automata are simulated on regular grids of cells, which gives them anisotropic (direction-dependent) behavior. For example, moving patterns in most a
33.
by wwalker3 16y ago
It sounds like the control system is the expensive part. It uses a Vicon motion capture system to track the quadrotor using 20 cameras arranged around the room, plus custom control software running on a laptop, and an XBee wireless link fro
34.
by wwalker3 16y ago
I've seen this too. OpenGL performance inside VMWare is much slower than native, and there are graphical artifacts in some cases (like lines across the diagonals of quads). Some small details (like the apparent lack of line anti-aliasing in
35.
by wwalker3 17y ago
They also mention running for Vice President of the US, so it's not exactly subtle. I just don't see the upside to bringing in such a polarizing political figure. Regardless of what you think of Sarah Palin, it hits a sour note to find her
36.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Totally true. HDMI takes many steps to try to reduce errors to a reasonable rate. In practice, this rate is usually low enough to ignore, even with cheap cables. I was just making the point that there is indeed a progressive degradation in
37.
by wwalker3 17y ago
That's still not correct. For HDMI in particular, there's no error correction at all on the video data (though there is on the audio and control data). So if one bit gets flipped in the video data as it goes through the cable, you're going
38.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Back in the late 90s, my partner and I were getting a startup game development company funded. I pitched quite a few VCs, and ran into this same problem. The typical objection was "The game business is like the music business -- it's based
39.
by wwalker3 17y ago
That's a good point -- to avoid confusing people, I should mention that my explanations above are sort of the mirror image of how most physicists would think about this situation. I was trying to be careful to say "appears to be" instead of
40.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I'm not a physicist, but here's why I think the energy appears to be less at the top of the tower than at the bottom. If you send energy up the tower as a light beam, gravitational redshift reduces the energy of each photon as it travels up
41.
by wwalker3 17y ago
That brings back memories. I used THINK Pascal back in the late '80s in an undergrad computer graphics class, and it did take a little while to get used to proportional fonts. But once I got the hang of indenting with tabs instead of spac
42.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Do you really have to have severe ADD to be a nerd? I'm super-nerdy by any measure, but have a very long attention span. Most nerds I know are similar -- that's how those ambitious nerd projects actually get finished. The guys with the long
43.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Indeed -- the whole point of projects like that is they make you a better programmer. The program itself is just a nice side effect.
44.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I think functional programming never took off because the world around us is made of stateful, interacting objects. Pure FP uses a completely different paradigm, so there's a huge impedance mismatch when you try to connect FP programs to th
45.
by wwalker3 17y ago
The article points out an interesting quirk in C#/.Net: the algorithm the C# compiler uses to convert numeric literals like "3.14159" to 64-bit IEEE binary may be different from the algorithm used by .Net framework APIs to do the same conve
46.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Nice tip about Door64 -- I live here in Austin but hadn't run across them.
47.
by wwalker3 17y ago
He may be using the wrong debugger. When I recreate and run his project in Visual Studio, I get this error: Unhandled exception at 0x00b31747 in Bogus.exe: 0xC00000FD: Stack overflow. The debugger points you to the offending line in a well-
48.
by wwalker3 17y ago
The investigators themselves are slightly more temperate than Science Daily. They used the name "classical magnetic monopoles" in a presentation a couple of years back ( http://www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/ClaudioCastelnovo/... ), and
49.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Probably the same as a normal text undo. You store the "actions" the user performs against the document on a stack. Each action is a replacement of one text string in the document with another (where strings can be zero-length and can start
50.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Phototoshop has apparently had this feature for some time. They call it "non-linear history". You can go back to earlier revisions, try new things starting from there, then if you don't like it, erase that history path and go back to your f
51.
by wwalker3 17y ago
If you read through the whole article and the comments, the author adds more nuance to this advice than the title suggests. It boils down to "shopping your terms verbally is fine, just don't flash your actual physical term sheet around town
52.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I've considered doing that, but I always worry that if I put too much of a barrier up front, I'll lose the superstars who know they can get a job somewhere else with less effort. Is this company a very famous or desirable place to work? Up-
53.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I've tried it three ways: having interviewees write code on paper, on a whiteboard, and on a computer. Of the three, the computer fares worst. Many developers work in highly customized dev environments with special keyboards or monitor layo
54.
by wwalker3 17y ago
So true. I learned this the hard way just like the author, by making some very bad hires. I had always thought it was insulting to ask interviewees to write a simple two-line strcopy() function. Of course they can -- they've got a CS degree
55.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I like many of these principles, it's just hard to apply more than a few of them to a given program. Vim and emacs have captive user interfaces. MP3 encoders like LAME write binary data files. That doesn't mean they're bad programs, but it
56.
by wwalker3 17y ago
These rules don't seem to apply to the modern age very well. The rules "Avoid captive user interfaces" and "Make every program a filter" mean that you can't write a text editor. The rule "Store data in flat text files" means you can't write
57.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I think that's the key to my confusion here -- I wasn't thinking of language constructs like functions or loops as patterns, I was only including things like "factory objects" or "visitors". Of course, if a function definition is a pattern,
58.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Could you give me a concrete example? Say, a pattern that can't be abstracted away in assembly language, but can be abstracted away in C++? Serious question, not a troll -- I've always felt like I'm missing some key point here.
59.
by wwalker3 17y ago
The "human compiler" bit never made sense to me. When I start to write something for the second time, I stop and make it a function (or a class, interface, library, or whatever's appropriate). "Don't repeat yourself" is good advice in any p
60.
by wwalker3 17y ago
Patches grow on our code because it's easier to patch than it is to figure out the paradigm-changing code simplification that will encompass all previous functionality plus the new thing we want to add. That's hard work! I'm elbow-deep in

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