qntm

5 ms·

1.
by qntm 9y ago
Yes, a strategy does exist which can force at least one line in a well of width 10 (and different strategies for 4, 6 and 8). I did a tedious brute-force calculation which demonstrated this a few years back. The code is not particularly pre
2.
by qntm 11y ago
I find one of the most fascinating questions about constructing an escape room is how exactly you calibrate the difficulty for different groups of people. Some people will finish the room in 30 minutes like you, but others will be totally s
3.
by qntm 11y ago
Actually you'd need December to have one extra day every year and a second extra day every 4 years. And the months still wouldn't sync up with the synodic month, because the synodic month doesn't evenly divide the solar y
4.
by qntm 11y ago
Better question, does Linus ever say extremely nice, encouraging, generous things and make the front page of HN for doing so?
5.
by qntm 11y ago
Who are you to decide what on my computer is crap?
6.
by qntm 11y ago
> just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went Or where someone else went...
7.
by qntm 11y ago
Whether or not they realise it, I think people are building brand new systems right now, using cutting-edge technology, which will survive until 2045.
8.
by qntm 11y ago
If you're puzzled about the implementation, I invite you to inspect the JavaScript code! And if you disagree with my implementation, I'd be interested to know what you would do differently.
9.
by qntm 11y ago
This is a question of implementation, and answering it was part of the reason why I implemented this problem in the form of a computer program in the first place. In this implementation, the True and False gods simply pose the question to R
10.
by qntm 12y ago
So, this person thinks there are 229 languages in India, but actually there's a minimum of 325, possibly twice that?
11.
by qntm 12y ago
> He proudly announces that there are ‘no fewer than 147 Indian dialects’ – a pathetically inaccurate count. (Today, India has 57 non-endangered and 172 endangered languages, each with multiple dialects – not even counting the many more
12.
by qntm 12y ago
Those tools could use tooltips...
13.
by qntm 12y ago
It would be good to have a rigid specification for this kind of thing, same as for the colour and blink frequency of signal lights, road sign designs and number plate fonts. Predictability and standardisation is super valuable on the road.
14.
by qntm 12y ago
Are you aware that "this reminds me of Black Mirror" is a really, really bad thing? Like, did you miss the whole point of the show?
15.
by qntm 12y ago
And that's not worth hating?
16.
by qntm 12y ago
In the context of the story, information is a substance that you can almost shovel around like snow. Brain-uploading isn't an inevitability in the real world but in Fine Structure it's a ( relatively ) simple application of inform
17.
by qntm 12y ago
> A scroller at is essential is a mathematical set with a curser and that all scrolling does (whether by mouse or keyboard) Well, by mouse anyway
18.
by qntm 13y ago
Done.
19.
by qntm 13y ago
Why don't you just stop recommending Node.js?
20.
by qntm 13y ago
> An infinite loop does not end, even in an infinitely powerful computer Sure it does! Run one processor instruction, then run the next one in half the time, then the next one in half as much time again...
21.
by qntm 13y ago
If I was in charge of an advertising standards authority I would make it outright illegal to use the words "unlimited" or "infinite" in a commercial context.
22.
by qntm 13y ago
The "There's more than one way to do it" sucks for trying to teach Perl too. You can't just teach one way; you need to teach every way, so that students can understand what they're seeing in the wild. This makes it take three times as long
23.
by qntm 14y ago
Suppose the random file is 3,000,000 bytes long and happens to contain 135 bytes "X". Split the file on the letter "X" into 136 smaller files, each with no X in it. Then, return the files along with a "decompressor" script which says someth
24.
by qntm 14y ago
Maybe I haven't read K&R carefully enough but how can you have a function declaration like sleep(chan, pri) without any data types?
25.
by qntm 14y ago
Perl is also good for creating testing frameworks for other software. Portable supercharged shell scripting.
26.
by qntm 14y ago
> Ask everyone in the world if they "don't want to be tracked, understanding that is the economic foundation for almost all of the content they enjoy and thus they will either need to directly pay or go without" and somewhere approachin
27.
by qntm 14y ago
This is the W3C's problem. "An ordinary user agent MUST NOT send a Tracking Preference signal without a user’s explicit consent"? How, exactly, are they intending to detect the user's explicit consent via the medium of HTTP headers? Why int
28.
by qntm 14y ago
Hey, you show me a performance problem, I show you a solution. Preferably one involving finite state machines.
29.
by qntm 14y ago
> How about we just make a "blacklist" of these known bots, look up every user agent, and compare against the blacklist? So now every single request to your site has to do a substring match against every single term in this list. Depend
30.
by qntm 14y ago
I had the same idea. The problem is that shifting the bits to the right results in decimal points falling off the end, which is actually a big deal because they add up to something substantial (i.e. more than 1) by the end of the sum. If N

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