dswilkerson

6 ms·

1.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
This seems to be the 9th time that my paper on harmony has been on Hacker News. I wonder if it has been on HN more than any other paper on arxiv: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
2.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
Please provide a link.
3.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
If this essay can be distilled into a couple of lines, please do that.
4.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
Responses that say "If I started listing criticisms I would never finish" usually have none. Name 3.
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by dswilkerson 2mo ago
Does Daniel Levitin, author of "This is your brain on music", count as someone with "a decent understanding of music and acoustics" ? He thinks that Helmholtz explained harmony (he told me personally). However, as the
6.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
This is like saying we should not study physics because if we did then all art could be automatically generated.
7.
by dswilkerson 2mo ago
> if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves Not necessarily: if you read the essay, one assumption is that the brain is halving and doubling frequencies to fit them all into one frequency magnitude, an obvious op
8.
by dswilkerson 10mo ago
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
9.
by dswilkerson 11mo ago
I will just add a comment on an aspect of using emacs that no one else mentioned: (1) I find that I must bind caps-lock to control, and (2) as far as I can tell, no operating system does this in a way that really works besides OSX. So no
10.
by dswilkerson 1y ago
Entropy is expected information. That is, given a random variable, if you compute the expected value (the sum of the values weighted by their probability) of the information of an event (the log base 2 of the multiplicative inverse of the
11.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
Fasting puts your cells into a "clean out the junk" mode that is quite powerful for deleting stuff, including cancer. That is, rather that being passive, fasting is quite active and uniquely potent. I had a lump in my throat nea
12.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
Math major here: this is wrong. The expression 1/0 is NOT A NUMBER, even if you allow positive infinity or negative infinity. In particular, it is most certainly not 0. Note that infinity would be a fine answer IF MATHEMATICS COULD B
13.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
Delta debugging is not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_debugging My implementation of delta debugging, "delta" is 19+ years old: https://github.com/dsw/delta I released it as Op
14.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
"Show me your flowcharts [code], and conceal your tables [schema], and I shall continue to be mystified; show me your tables [schema] and I won't usually need your flowcharts [code]: they'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks,
15.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
No. If you want a deeper understanding of programming, write your own static analysis / theorem prover.
16.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
I used to be a teaching assistant for CS 61A (intro to programming) at Berkeley teaching from this book with Brian as the instructor. One of Brian's primary points is the following: > Scheme ... has a very simple, uniform notation f
17.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
Empirical evidence that the 10x programmer is not a myth. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362851.362858 "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance" by
18.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
One thing I and other programmers do that increases productivity is to write a programming language specific to the task. In particular, it allows the programmer to factor out a cross-cutting concern as a language feature.
19.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362851.362858 "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance" by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant. Communications of the ACM.
20.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
A set being infinite does not mean that it contains everything. For example, the set of even integers is infinite but does not contain the number 3. So even if the universe is infinite, that does not mean that it contains another copy of
21.
by dswilkerson 2y ago
Think in object orientation: Put related nouns and verbs together: it is much easier to organize your thoughts using constructors and methods. However do not use virtual methods unless you really must, and if you do, make the class a well-
22.
by dswilkerson 3y ago
We have the longest unguarded border in the world and, if the two countries diverge enough culturally, that will become a real problem. Can you imagine if we had the problems on the northern border that we have on the southern border with
23.
by dswilkerson 3y ago
You could just write Patterson directly. I would first write him a short email with maybe one example and then ask if he would be interested in seeing the rest. Check out your examples with someone else before writing him. If you are not
24.
by dswilkerson 3y ago
"v later found out with more debugging that it happened because the module in question cast that struct back from memory, and then added its own stuff to it." That's your problem right there: "cast". In C, you can
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by dswilkerson 3y ago
> learn as much Mathematics as possible because this is how things work, I disagree: I spent 10 years in math and theory, ending up in grad school at Berkeley. I took something like 6 semesters of Calculus and I just about never use any
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by dswilkerson 3y ago
Will they let you teach at a community college / junior college ? Sounds ideal for you.
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by dswilkerson 3y ago
I know some very talented people (Ph.D.s from Berkeley in CS) in Silicon Valley or San Francisco who are "parked on the beach" to use a term from Marc Andreessen. Basically, in the Valley, as soon as people can stop coding financ
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by dswilkerson 3y ago
I appreciate your effort in supporting people. Christmas can be really lonely for a lot of people. People who have family really do not understand that. Christmas is full of lights and presents and songs and happy people until one day it
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by dswilkerson 3y ago
So having come up with Proquints years ago, I thought that they were a rather neat solution to a common problem. Lots of people seem interested in them, and yet I have yet to see a solution that uses them. For example, I do not know of a
30.
by dswilkerson 3y ago
Noise Bridge: https://www.noisebridge.net/

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