nwhitehead

7 ms·

1.
by nwhitehead 9d ago
"the smart thing to do is to give integers zeros as their tag bits, because then, adding or subtracting two shifted integers remains a plain add or sub machine instruction" this is brilliant, love it. stealing this idea immediatel
2.
LessHard: Less wrong about wanting [parody](shimmermathlabs.com)
2 points by nwhitehead 11d ago|0 comments
3.
Learn Neuralese: a small field guide to talking like the swarm(shimmermathlabs.com)
1 points by nwhitehead 13d ago|0 comments
4.
by nwhitehead 3mo ago
(Spouse's story) Today I used Claude to diagnose a blocking bug in a Steam game I really wanted to play. It took it 18 mins, but it unpacked the Godot package, figured out the bug, proposed a fix, and gave me an in game workaround. I
5.
by nwhitehead 11mo ago
This is fun, I'm curious to try it. An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and an Instant Pot. The total cost is not super h
6.
by nwhitehead 2y ago
You would think so... I asked this question in a college-level class with clickers. For the initial question I told them, "This is a trick question, your first answer might not be right". Still less than 10% of students got the ri
7.
by nwhitehead 3y ago
One idea is to put more pressure on writers of letters of recommendation. There is obviously already some rather weak "reputational incentive" to not give letters of recommendation to fraudsters. But it could be made a more formal
8.
by nwhitehead 3y ago
I like how you can handle lots of languages in a very systematic way, that is cool. One thing I like about pyodide is that it supports lots of packages like numpy. How would you support packages like this with a WASI approach?
9.
by nwhitehead 3y ago
I'm using the new generation of small models to do semantic search for music lyrics. The first step is giving the model the text and asking, "What is this text about?" Without fine-tuning and only minimal prompt engineering t
10.
by nwhitehead 6y ago
This is a good one. It is all too easy to spend years casually "interested" in a topic without developing a true foundation of the important ideas in the field. In my case I spent two decades casually reading about economics. But
11.
by nwhitehead 6y ago
This is awesome! This reminds me of MinBLEP audio synthesis of discontinuous functions ( https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/papers/icmc01-hardsync.pdf ). Instead of doing things at high sampling rate and explicitly filteri
12.
by nwhitehead 6y ago
Agree, automated testing is good as far as it goes but really shouldn't be the whole story with grading. Another fun tool is CrowdGrader ( https://www.crowdgrader.org/ ). It's a nice way to distribute reviewing&#x2F
13.
by nwhitehead 7y ago
My favorite is Welford's Algorithm [1] which lets you compute mean and standard deviation in one pass. Every programmer should be aware of it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_for_calculating_var...
14.
by nwhitehead 7y ago
OLGA was full of transcribed songs, great for learning guitar. Now it's gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive
15.
by nwhitehead 8y ago
I would recommend all the works by Robert Nozick, listed at #14 on the list for "Anarchy, State and Utopia". While that might be his most influential book, I found his other books more fun to read.
16.
by nwhitehead 9y ago
Steps to publishing your research: -Do a literature survey and read LOTS of papers. If you are not coming from the standard academic route you are probably vastly underestimating how much existing work has been published. To publish your re
17.
DungeonScript, a first-person version of PuzzleScript(farbs.org)
2 points by nwhitehead 9y ago|0 comments
18.
by nwhitehead 9y ago
> If you’re relying on c99 complex or std::complex and fast complex operations, and you don’t have -fcx-limited-range or -ffast-math turned on, you should probably consider this a bug in your project. I would rephrase this as, "If y
19.
by nwhitehead 10y ago
This is fun to read, I'm always amazed as the disconnect between public presentations and the engineering reality of what's really going on. For me, "Larrabee" died during it's first public demo in IDF 2009 [1]. At
20.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
What's wrong with sequence A096774 (numbers with 9*10^n+7 prime)? Why is sequence A000027 (numbers starting at 1 increasing by 1 each time) better? Because it comes earlier in the encyclopedia of sequences?
21.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
I'm solving "2^... = 256" and it gives NaN. It works when the right hand side is smaller than 200 but fails when the right side is larger than 242.
22.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
This example makes it really clear what's going on. Could someone translate it to do reverse automatic differentiation? That's the one I never quite understand.
23.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
This might be true on really weird platforms, but with IEEE-754 floating point this isn't true. Integers within a big range are exactly representable without any rounding error. Doing floor((float(13) + float(13))/2.0) should be e
24.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
Yes, I'm working on a good way to do this, this is high priority.
25.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
Yes, there is a way to install more packages. Inside the notebook you can do "import pineapple", then "%require NAME" which is just like doing "pip install NAME". There is also a provided pip shell script that
26.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
That is a great idea. I'm also thinking about ways to get multiple "pages" inside of one notebook file, let me know if you have good ideas for that.
27.
Show HN: Pineapple, a standalone IPython front end for Mac(nwhitehead.github.io)
6 points by nwhitehead 11y ago|5 comments
28.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
If you grab the latest code in master from https://github.com/numpy/numpy you'll get support for @ in numpy. It's great!
29.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
Java does have Math.scalb() which would work. It would be interesting to see how that compares to the Math.pow() and table lookup methods.
30.
by nwhitehead 11y ago
The old good ones are heavy, dark, and silky smooth. The new ones are lighter, noisier, have more friction, and erasing leaves more of a mess (in my opinion). Reading online people say that the old slate ones were harder to erase and had gl

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