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It seems like any method for solving this problem could be interpreted in a Bayesian way: At any time, you consider all the different possible distributions each arm could have, an…

Crud. I assumed the left and right side were symmetric and would cancel, but they're not -- the air's moving at different relative velocity on each side.

I'm thinking the baseball spinning counterclockwise when viewed from above will curve to the pitcher's right (the same direction shown by Trefil). Basically friction will cause the…

> real numbers. In an open interval like (0, 1), there is no single real number which is less than one but is greater than all other real numbers less than one. The rational number…

The sign-exponent-mantissa nature of IEEE format means (basically by design) that you have a much finer resolution near 0 (smaller absolute value) than you do away from 0 (larger a…

It's about time. I was just using ffmpeg today, wanted libx264 lossless encoding, noticed the deprecation message and lack of libx264 support in the Ubuntu package, recompiled from…

Wow. This is epic. I totally had this exact idea a few years ago -- that every mathematically possible universe physically exists, with some probability distribution. I was thinkin…

This comment is mostly speaking to the author of the parent post, who seems to be a founder of prmatch.com [1]. I think OP represents an underserved market -- people who have a gre…

The key is a "hook," a goal, a source motivation. Seeing how a particular technology enables new capabilities and applications is a powerful encouragement to learning it, even for …

This is really neat. Somehow I always assumed realloc() copied stuff instead of using the page table. But say you have 4K page table size. You malloc() in turn a 2K object, a 256K …

TLDR: You can't write the first compiler for a language in the language. However, you can write the second compiler in the language and use the first compiler to compile it. If you…

It actually does, if a is an integer.

MIT licensed source code: https://github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js In case it's not clear, this allows you to generate a file from client-side JS, and allow the user to save the gen…

Readers may be familiar with the TI-83 programmable graphing calculator's assembly language functionality (especially those who took high school math classes in the mid-to-late 199…

> most people would probably not benefit much from having that additional content added into the high school course It would be great if we could switch from content to teaching ac…

Basic algebra and geometry: Order of operations; simplifying expressions; solving quadratic equations by factoring; finding area and perimeter of shapes; the classic "garden proble…

> I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities I disagree. In middle school I had a textbook on assembly language; the first chapters …

If you've ever programmed in JavaScript -- and most people have, it's the language of the Web -- you will know that it is very easy to accidentally omit the "var" keyword and unint…

The "global" keyword in Python binds a name to the scope of the top level of the enclosing module. The "nonlocal" keyword is a Python 3.x feature which binds a name to the next enc…

Here's a perspective from the founder of a successful bootstrapped software startup that began by developing native OS/2 applications: http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/art…

For those who aren't familiar, Gitlab is essentially an open-source clone of Github. For those who already use it, this is a good time to upgrade, because multiple security vulnera…

Here is the checklist for my programming language, foil -- demo available (requires Java plugin) at http://picomancer.com/blog/foil-compiler-tech-preview/ You appear to be advocati…