jeffcoat

5 ms·

1.
by jeffcoat 5mo ago
We can only guess about what's going wrong for you specifically . But I like guessing: (extremely mild spoilers:) - A core skill for Nethack is understanding how much danger you're in at any particular moment. Your comment about s
2.
by jeffcoat 2y ago
Even switching from magnetic to true is unhelpful close enough to the South pole. All directions are north. We have to switch to "grid" north to make sense of directions there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un
3.
by jeffcoat 4y ago
This is amazing. Thank you.
4.
by jeffcoat 6y ago
Probably not. Knowing the speed-of-light round trip time to a network location gives you a bound on how much you can improve the performance of remote operations. For example, I'm in Austin, querying a database hosted in Amazon's
5.
by jeffcoat 6y ago
MCMLXVII + LXV = MCCCCCCCCCLXVII + LXV (canonicalize) = MCCCCCCCCCLXVIILXV (concatenate) = MCCCCCCCCCLLXXVVII (sort) = MCCCCCCCCCLLXXXII (combine, VV => X) = MCCCCCCCCCCXXXII (... keep combining, LL =&g
6.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
I choose to believe it's a prophecy, foretelling the coming of a Universal search engine that will someday make that joke stop working.
7.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
You're right, thank you.
8.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
You're recalling a different incident: engine-out problems are a routine part of flight training at every level. You're thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 where so much of th
9.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
Certified Programming with Dependent Types http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/
10.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
You'll also need to know that e^x = sum{0 -> infinity} x^n / n!.
11.
by jeffcoat 10y ago
Not so stupid: Start with the phrase "Hoteling's rule" for a century of academic analysis of that question. If you own an oil field, you have to balance a number of factors: * How is the price of oil changing, relative to ove
12.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
I enjoyed it: not a sports fan, knew little of baseball except that the one game pro game I've seen in person was super-boring [to me]. _Moneyball_ isn't about baseball so much as it's about how easy it is for humans to be tr
13.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
It's because "latitude lines" aren't really lines in this context (except the one at the equator). If you took two points from one of those latitude "lines", you'd always be able to find a shorter path bet
14.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
It's obvious that moving oil in space helps, right? You move the resource from a place it's relatively plentiful to a different place where oil is relatively scarce. Say, from the Persian Gulf to Australia. The same thing is happe
15.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
All of this is fine for real-valued inputs and outcomes. It's the number of events (coin flips, measurements, etc) that we're restricting to be countable.
16.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
I think I know what you're getting at, but the problem here is that prosecutors have some discretion. The chain of thought that goes I only prosecute worthy cases => I picked those cases because these people are guilty,
17.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
ABC ran pretty much this same story in 2010: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/loaded-gun-slips-past-tsa-scre... According to one report, undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one d
18.
by jeffcoat 11y ago
The slides are interesting enough that I went looking to see if the actual talk that goes with them was online anywhere; found it at http://chariotsolutions.com/screencast/philly-ete-2015-7-mon...
19.
by jeffcoat 12y ago
It's tough being smart and influential: your [Dijkstra's] successes and mistakes end up going through the same megaphone.
20.
How I Teach When I Really Want My Students to Learn(econlog.econlib.org)
2 points by jeffcoat 12y ago|0 comments
21.
by jeffcoat 12y ago
I was in a 1 or 2-person office while I was at IBM. Their policy (at that branch) was a private office for senior developers and up, two to an office otherwise. I'm at Motive right now; the large majority of developers here have their
22.
by jeffcoat 13y ago
You're probably thinking of Isaac Asimov's story "My Son, the Physicist". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Son,_the_Physicist
23.
by jeffcoat 13y ago
Did you see the first line? "That mathematics is thought to be consistent justifies the use of Proof by Contradiction." So the original author agrees with you. You're right too, though: most of the value of that post is in
24.
by jeffcoat 14y ago
Wikipedia presents both origin stories, but the accounting version (black ink) does appear to be a 1980s back-formation trying to put a nicer spin on the name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(shopping)#Origin_...
25.
by jeffcoat 14y ago
Great demo. The last question, where I had to name and spell the part, caught me by surprise -- the difficultly level had, up until then, been increasing very slowly, and that felt like a huge jump. Wishlist feature: Speech recognition, in
26.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
That borders on impressive: Four of the five statements leading into the "proofs" are wrong (and the fifth needs a lot of charity), and all three of the proofs are meaningless in exactly the same way.
27.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
I picked up Venkatesh's book _Gang Leader for a Day_ on the strength of the work cited here ... and ended up throwing it out. He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and n
28.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
It's a fine combination; as the settings hint, they were designed to be used together.
29.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
The XML spec refers to them as "empty-element" tags. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags
30.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
We say an algorithm is in P if the running time grows as a polynomial function (e.g., n^2, but not 2^n) of the input size (n, in my example; the number of variables in the polynomial in this paper). We say that an algorithm is in NP if chec

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