xscott

50 ms·

541.
by xscott 6y ago
> Also, my single biggest all time source of off by one errors is translating between mathematical notation and code in a 0-based language. If you were working with polynomial coefficients, Fast Fourier Transforms and convolutions, or mo
542.
by xscott 6y ago
If his apparatus was a "beta barium borate" crystal, isn't this exactly how entangled pairs of photons are created?
543.
by xscott 6y ago
> Go fixes C's well-understood flaws (declaration resembling use This seems to be a common belief, but since Go kept pointer syntax as prefix, you're still stuck needing parens in some unfortunate cases: https://blog
544.
by xscott 6y ago
>The author did himself a disservice by attracting chess players to criticize his example Heh, I think the author's example is fine if the reader gives it a charitable interpretation. The disservice is from all the overly pedantic
545.
by xscott 6y ago
This particular overflow is pretty famous as a bug, but it's always annoyed me. If you have a 32 bit address space and use a 32 bit integer, the only way this would reasonably overflow is if you have a single array of sorted bytes con
546.
by xscott 6y ago
Worldwide with quarantines from customs is virtually impossible. Customs can't stop human or cocaine trafficking from making it into the country, much less undocumented immigration. All you need is a half dozen sick people who are t
547.
by xscott 6y ago
Well, that'd be fast enough for some venues. I'm still skeptical it'd work in practice.
548.
by xscott 6y ago
No, that's exactly my point. Even if it went according to your best possible plan, all you do is reset it back to Jan 2019. Or did you mean we're all going to do daily testing and contact tracing forever?
549.
by xscott 6y ago
This is interesting, and I hadn't heard this about herd immunity before. However, I kind of imagine that at some point in history a lot of our ancestors died from things we don't even think of as more than nuisances now.
550.
by xscott 6y ago
I didn't see the turn around time in the article. Just something about "less sensitive test with results today". I think it's optimistic to assume this could be used as an entry check for a restaurant.
551.
by xscott 6y ago
Australia's borders are oceans. It's a different thing altogether.
552.
by xscott 6y ago
And then what? We're going to impose 2 week quarantines on every flight into the US? Have a dedicated branch of the CDC perform contact tracing on everyone who crosses the borders? I think you greatly overestimate how politics plays
553.
by xscott 6y ago
I would love for this whole thing to end as much as anyone, but I don't see how this gets anything back to normal. In January of this year, there were a negligible amount of people in the US with Covid. Let's say now in November
554.
by xscott 6y ago
I'm not the person you asked, but in general with polynomials, if you need to go much past the second or third order order to fit your data, you should probably be fitting with a different set of functions. Take a look at Runge's
555.
by xscott 6y ago
Blizzard games, including WoW and Overwatch, run very well under Linux using Wine if you use Lutris to get the configuration right.
556.
by xscott 6y ago
I like the visuals in his videos, but I agree that he presents things as though he's discovered, and is now showing you, a trivial new path to deep insights. Then, when he discusses a topic I already know something about, it seems lik
557.
by xscott 6y ago
I would love for good contributors to be rewarded, but I'm not sure how you do that without people gaming the system and creating worse editor politics than there are now. However, I am sure what happens if you don't pay the elect
558.
by xscott 6y ago
> Did you read the part where it says that the people writing the content don't receive any of the donations? I did, but I think there's value in just sustaining the platform. I'm worried about perverse incentives and gam
559.
by xscott 6y ago
I've donated thousands of dollars to Wikimedia over the years. Before I retired, I took frequent advantage of my company's policy for matching donations, doubling the amount I gave. After retirement, I set my "Amazon Smile&
560.
by xscott 6y ago
Patient or not, it isn't true. Even in a small semi-rural town, I saw a dominant/submissive family at the grocery store where one of them wore pretty revealing clothing with a t-shirt that said she was "collared and loved&qu
561.
by xscott 6y ago
> While VLIW like Itanium was limited to 3 ops/instruction, which is already behind today's OOO CPUs Itanium could group 3 instructions per 128 bit "bundle", but multiple bundles could be run in parallel, and the comp
562.
by xscott 6y ago
Other than fillable forms, which is sometimes very important, I don't see how PDF is much of an improvement over PostScript (which came first).
563.
by xscott 6y ago
> The only feature of lambdas that a proper nested function would miss is the "copy capture". Yeah, reference by default would fit with what people probably expect from other languages, but without a garbage collector (or simil
564.
by xscott 6y ago
I sympathize with you here. I kind of like the lambda syntax for simple cases in C++, but the complex cases look painful to me, and based on everything else in C++, I predict there are many special cases to remember. However, if you just w
565.
by xscott 6y ago
Not just politics... Although maybe we could argue that all of the other taboo topics have become politics, and that's part of the problem.
566.
by xscott 6y ago
Oh please, you're just throwing up chaff because I contradicted your point. Pick some other whacko theory (crystal power, personal auras, whatever). You don't need to be an expert in bullshit to question whether something is bul
567.
by xscott 6y ago
> But they don't understand even the basics of the existing theory, and don't want to understand it. How much homeopathy do you need to learn before you can dare to question it's validity?
568.
by xscott 6y ago
Python is a very popular language where the list type is implemented as an array, and named a list. Calling these things vectors (C++, Rust) is unfortunate because you eventually want real vectors for working with matrices, and the behavio
569.
by xscott 6y ago
I used to work with some folks who believed the Intel compiler was amazing. I think the logic to the myth was, "Who would better know how to optimize for Intel chips?". However, in my experience icc crashed more than any other co
570.
by xscott 6y ago
Thinking about it some more, I suspect the disconnect between us is that you think the primary way of getting sick is breathing the airborne virus. Whereas I think the primary way of getting sick is touching your eyes (or picking your nose

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