prestonbriggs

9 ms·

1.
by prestonbriggs 3y ago
If you look at some of the other Christmas lectures, you'll see he's often (always?) wearing the same outfit. So, tradition!
2.
by prestonbriggs 3y ago
Doing a good job of constant prop means doing a thorough job of implementing the best algorithm in the best paper. And to do that, you need to build a form of SSA. And to do that you need to compute dominators. And to do that, you need to b
3.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Yes, memorizing everything (all the music) helped hugely in practicing. I used to believe it was because I didn't have to read the music, and could focus on fingers, etc. But maybe the memorization effort (and it wasn't hard, as y
4.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Has anyone used this approach to memorize music? E.g., for playing an instrument. I used to be able to remember plenty when I was young and practicing a lot. And certainly professionals can remember significant amounts (and not just the mus
5.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Indeed. But consider the 2nd sentence, the conclusion, and the twitter post. On the other hand, I certain agree with your idea about teach/using handwritten recursive-descent parsers. Here's an old book that presents it pretty cl
6.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Compilers have parsers, not languages. Many languages have more than one compiler (e.g., C), and the various compilers may use different techniques for parsing.
7.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
I argued for years in favor of keeping the minimum runtime of a number of samples; never found much support.
8.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Golly would crush them all.
9.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Happens in other fields too. When I worked at Tera, I (and plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls. Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and smart. Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our IQ wou
10.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Eh? IBM 704
11.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
One of my favorite moments in literature: "... and nothing more was said - may God forgive me - of duodecimal functions."
12.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.
13.
by prestonbriggs 5y ago
Then again, crows collect shiny things too.
14.
by prestonbriggs 6y ago
Thinking about it a bit more, I realize I've over simplified. Things were more diverse. At the time, there were significant academic compiler projects in the US written in PL/1, SETL, and Lisp. ML (as in Standard ML of New Jersey)
15.
by prestonbriggs 6y ago
When I started grad school, in 1986, I'd written a lot of Pascal and used Turbo Pascal on my PC. But the school used Sun workstations with unix, so I had to learn C pretty quickly. Nobody seemed to use Pascal. There was a Modula II com
16.
by prestonbriggs 6y ago
Cool, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic!
17.
by prestonbriggs 7y ago
Of course lots of musical instruments require chorded inputs. Pianos, guitars, trumpets, most woodwinds, even trombones.
18.
by prestonbriggs 7y ago
I remember the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766301 Is this what growing up in those tenements leads to?
19.
by prestonbriggs 7y ago
Peter Matthiessen's book "Killing Mr. Watson" centers on a similar story in south Florida.
20.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
I'm 63. When I was a kid (pick an age), there weren't anywhere near as many programmers as there are now. So while I believe lots of older programmers have gotten out of the field, one way or another, I think the remaining ones ar
21.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
It's interesting to read about the 10,000-year clock while thinking about Canticle.
22.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
The kids look fine, but the older folks look pretty bad, I think. So many of the captions are of the form: So-and-so waiting. For what? Nothing much, I'd guess.
23.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
At the bottom of the page are links to other pages of Hedges' work. There are a number (e.g., in London) showing single men living alone. Often pensioners (OAPs). Perhaps your guess that the particular tenements in Glasgow were reserve
24.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
Reminds me of the Bronx, from a train window, in about 2005.
25.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
I was pretty surprised at the 17 knots in a fjord.
26.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
Here's a link to the CADR paper: http://www.unlambda.com/lispm/memo528.html I like these; they describe a microcoded machine in more detail than I can usually find.
27.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
Not much about Lisp here. It describes the design of a microcode-based machine that could be used for all sorts of things. You could use it to implement a PDP-11, an x86, or whatever (though it's biased towards 32-bit machines). Google
28.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
Wikipedia disagrees. Skara Brae was occupied about 3190 BC. Earliest Egyptian pyramids were started about 2630. The Great Pyramid was built about 2560 BC.
29.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
There's a lot of oil money in Tulsa, has been for decades. I'm not sure they'll notice.
30.
by prestonbriggs 8y ago
I have a sister who recently bought a house in Tulsa. Their house is so large it's got rooms she's forgotten about... Pretty new, pool, nice neighborhood. Cost less than $300K. I don't know about the school district (Jenks).

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