Viewing profile — npsomaratna

Somehow made me think of Warhammer 40k (maybe pre men of iron?)

I owned a C64. Remember how buttery smooth the interfaces of those '80s computers were?

Didn't they remake Quest for Glory II and a couple of the Kings Quest games in this? Fun times.

On a tangent: I remember reading John Carmak saying that as game engines became more complex, he had to relinquish the idea of writing all the (engine) code himself, and start to r…

Why is there a significant time lag? Is it because monitoring is done via cultures?

That makes a lot of sense. After 30+ years of programming, I still have to do a search (or use an LLM) to do anything useful with sed, xargs, etc. Perl never really clicked with me…

I remember playing Ultima VII back in '94 (or was it '95?). When the game started up, I could only feel wonder. It was so far ahead of the competition at the time. The only other i…

Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade. I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that…

I have no understanding of the physics involved, but could the broadcast location be reverse engineered? (With triangulation and clever math?)

On the topic of professions: Joseph Lister was a surgeon. Modern surgery (which I define as surgery aided by anesthesia) is a relatively recent discipline dating to the early 19th …

Programmer from DOS times here. I've ingrained pressing CTRL + S every few seconds as a reflex. That has saved my bacon more than a few times.

Out of curiosity, are there any algorithms faster than BLAST? (For DNA search).

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that folks who learned typing in the 80s and earlier use two dashes '--' instead of the em-dash (although modern word processors seem to replace this…

Are you the CEO of Cerebras? (Guessing from the handle)

Wasn't this for one of the questions on the second day? Where you had to submit a series of outputs, but these were trivial to generate once you cracked the problem. I remember get…

That's my impression as well. I think it's because access to knowledge has become a lot easier, so contestants know more; plus, the competitions themselves have become more organiz…

Nice! I guess you must know Bruce Merry. Once, when practicing, I kept on hitting my head on a problem. On the spur of the moment, I decided to fire off an email to Bruce (given hi…

No, sorry. I vaguely remember compile time limits, but they were high enough (30 seconds, I think?) that I didn't bother worrying about them (at least, that's my memory).

Sri Lankan here. I used to compete in the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), back in the '90s. I aced the competition in Sri Lanka, but I failed to win a medal the first …

Em-dash fan here as well. I've been watering down my use of the em-dash, because I don't want folk to think that my (always self-written) business emails, etc are a chatGPT job.

Not the developer, but here is his repo: https://github.com/sohzm/cheating-daddy

Fields medal winner. Arguably the greatest living mathematician.