Viewing profile — dswilkerson

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=…

Please provide a link.

If this essay can be distilled into a couple of lines, please do that.

Responses that say "If I started listing criticisms I would never finish" usually have none. Name 3.

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…

This is like saying we should not study physics because if we did then all art could be automatically generated.

> 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…

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

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 syste…

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 …

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 an…

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 i…

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…

"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…

No. If you want a deeper understanding of programming, write your own static analysis / theorem prover.

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…

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 Programmin…

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 cr…

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/362851.362858 "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance" by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant. Communicati…

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 infi…

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 un…

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 th…

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 exam…

"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 r…

> 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 lik…