Viewing profile — jeffcoat

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…

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. htt…

This is amazing. Thank you.

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 …

MCMLXVII + LXV = MCCCCCCCCCLXVII + LXV (canonicalize) = MCCCCCCCCCLXVIILXV (concatenate) = MCCCCCCCCCLLXXVVII (sort) = MCCCCCCCCCLLXXXII (combine, VV => X) = MCCCCCCCCCCXXXII (... …

I choose to believe it's a prophecy, foretelling the coming of a Universal search engine that will someday make that joke stop working.

You're right, thank you.

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_Fl…

Certified Programming with Dependent Types http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/

You'll also need to know that e^x = sum{0 -> infinity} x^n / n!.

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 …

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 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 t…

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 …

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.

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…

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 Ne…

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-e…

It's tough being smart and influential: your [Dijkstra's] successes and mistakes end up going through the same megaphone.

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…

You're probably thinking of Isaac Asimov's story "My Son, the Physicist". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Son,_the_Physicist

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, th…

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.…

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…