wwalker3

15 ms·

91.
by wwalker3 17y ago
I can understand this guy's frustration, but he could have better spent his effort commenting the rest of the file properly. Out of 500 lines, about 30 lines are spent on the rant, and there are almost no comments of any significance anywhe
92.
by wwalker3 18y ago
It's immoral to tempt someone into harming themselves, especially when it also benefits you. Payday loans tempt the weak with options that help in the (very) short run, but harm in the long run. The very existence of payday loans encourages
93.
by wwalker3 18y ago
I guess it's a simulator in that the bond angles and lengths dynamically rearrange as you add new atoms or yank on existing ones. I'm not sure the results are accurate (compared with density functional theory, Hartree-Fock, etc.), but it lo
94.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Great hackers create great works from within, not from their tools or their environment. Their core competencies are things like relentless self-improvement, not the use of a particular editor or a particular OS. The author's list of core c
95.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Thanks for the clarification, Igor -- my knowledge of this is second-hand, from a friend's description of an interesting project he's working on. I had never heard of compressive sampling or convex optimization before that, and it was eye-o
96.
by wwalker3 18y ago
It sounded like a broad-spectrum communications monitor. If you want to know who's broadcasting anywhere in the range from 1MHz to 10GHz (example only -- I don't know the real range for this device), that's a bandwidth of 9.999 GHz. You cou
97.
by wwalker3 18y ago
I know a guy who's using convex optimization as part of a project to sample an ultra-wide range of frequencies looking for a hidden narrowband signal (I leave it up to you to guess who would need that kind of device). Apparently they use "c
98.
by wwalker3 18y ago
They've derived exact mathematical expressions for the shapes and locations of those flow separations, and it sounded like the whole derivation was based on the assumption of incompressibility, so I'm not sure how extensible their approach
99.
by wwalker3 18y ago
The gist is that they've created a better theory of flow separation (roughly speaking, where a flowing fluid "tears loose" from a boundary surface of some sort to make a sheet of fluid that folds up and projects out into the main flow). The
100.
by wwalker3 18y ago
This article is better than I thought it would be. It's written by Neil Davidson, co-CEO of Red Gate software. I used their C# profiling tool a few years back, so my ears perked up a bit when I saw the author's affiliation. The takeaway see
101.
by wwalker3 18y ago
I agree that there should be sufficient drill, but it sounds like the Chinese have taken it too far, and are eating up time that might be more profitably spent learning more advanced theories. I could spend a year practicing simple dynamics
102.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Doing well in the Physics Olympiad is not the same as doing well in physics. In the Physics Olympiad, you solve simple problems based on well-understood formulae. In physics, you create new knowledge. It may be telling that China has won on
103.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Not necessarily. The square root hardware could be heavily pipelined to get each stage short enough for one cycle. This increases latency, but lets you keep a one-per-cycle throughput without slowing down the clock.
104.
by wwalker3 18y ago
It seems like there are only two kinds of economists, "stopped clocks" and "wind socks". The stopped clocks are ecstatic that their doomful (or glorious) predictions are finally right -- never mind the fact that they've been wrong nine year
105.
by wwalker3 18y ago
- Technicians implement others' designs using skills - Engineers create new designs using knowledge - Scientists create new knowledge "Pure" programmers are technicians. Computer scientists are engineers or scientists. Plumbing, like progra
106.
by wwalker3 18y ago
I'd say "Build One To Improve" instead of "Build One To Throw Away". Software is infinitely malleable, so there's no need to start from scratch. You can morph your code from its present state to any desired state smoothly, keeping it workin
107.
by wwalker3 18y ago
The only elegant way I can think of to solve the toasting non-uniformity problem requires a breakthrough in materials science. If you could make the toaster's heating coils out of a substance that increases its resistance with increased lig
108.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Another strategy I considered was using an infrared photodiode instead of a visible light photodiode. That way, the diode effectively reads the toast temperature rather than color, which would address the issues you mention. But I was a bit
109.
by wwalker3 18y ago
There are lots of engineering PhD's in industry, but you have to pick the right industry. For example, there are many other electrical engineering PhD's at my current workplace (a microprocessor design company), but PhD's were very thin on
110.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Good point. You'd have to make the darkness control an offset from the initial darkness, rather than an absolute darkness level. Not hard, but you'd need an extra bit of analog circuitry to store the initial value of the toast's reflectance
111.
by wwalker3 18y ago
The supposed EE's design is too complex by half. Indexing into an array of precomputed timer values? No. That's digital "CS thinking" :) All you need is a photodetector. The heating coils illuminate the toast, and the photodetector shuts th
112.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Interesting essay, but it sounds like to the author, programming is merely glueing together things that someone else has written, or writing a few pages of code to translate some text from one format to another. For small-scale projects lik
113.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Brooks is confusing collectivism with dictatorship, and they're not related. You can have a collectivist democracy, like Japan, or an individualist dictatorship, like Saddam's Iraq or Nazi Germany. China's recent economic improvements have
114.
by wwalker3 18y ago
Great reference. It's got tons of hard numbers about subjects that I generally only see unsupported assertions about.
115.
by wwalker3 18y ago
I think his comment about IMP might apply to a few of the terser modern languages (emphasis mine): "The second thing about IMP was that it was an extremely terse language. For example, where in PASCAL you would say "IF X > 0 THEN...", i
116.
by wwalker3 18y ago
It's always nice to learn something I'd never even heard of before that's so simple. The article is about how you can use a neat trick (space-filling curves) to turn a multidimensional search into a set of one-dimensional searches, which co