Viewing profile — qntm

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 demonstr…

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 t…

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 synodi…

Better question, does Linus ever say extremely nice, encouraging, generous things and make the front page of HN for doing so?

Who are you to decide what on my computer is crap?

> just download all of the geotagged, timestamped and facially profiled photos of me in the place I went Or where someone else went...

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.

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 dif…

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 implement…

So, this person thinks there are 229 languages in India, but actually there's a minimum of 325, possibly twice that?

> 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 …

Those tools could use tooltips...

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. Predic…

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?

And that's not worth hating?

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 …

> 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

Done.

Why don't you just stop recommending Node.js?

> 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 h…

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.

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…

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 th…

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?

Perl is also good for creating testing frameworks for other software. Portable supercharged shell scripting.