Viewing profile — raddan

> This is about gunning for the elite/upper echelons of society. Is that what it’s about? Keep in that the University of Michigan is a public university, explicitly founded to “pro…

But then you lose extra important information from words like "masshole."

Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"

This is exactly the trick one of my colleagues uses to teach Theory of Computation, a notoriously boring subject (for your average CS student). Instead of motivating reductions by …

It’s funny—I also wrongly assumed that the controls required me to tilt my phone and died instantly. It does say right there on the main screen “drag your thumb anywhere on the scr…

My interpretation of “we don’t know” is that the space of possible instruction methods is huge, and we don’t know what works best. It is easy to think of it as a kind of optimizati…

Moreover, there are areas of expertise that are very hard to reach without special help. I have a PhD in computer science. Earning that degree was a major time commitment, and it g…

Wow, a DAT Walkman [1]! I forgot that this existed, but I am remembering now that I heard about them in college and desperately wanted one. I was (and still am) an avid listener of…

People’s tastes in beer and wine vary so dramatically (and there are so many styles) that it’s not clear to me that you can actually have a “best of.” The beer and wine I enjoy the…

You should check to see if it still works. My favorite thumb drive went through the washing machine several times and still works.

I 100% agree with you, but as a person who came up in the tail end of the generation we’re discussing (we bought a bargain bin TI-99/4a at K-Mart) and also a faculty member who has…

I am also curious about this. The best sleep I ever had was when I was teaching an early morning class. Part of my morning routine is a short run, so this meant I was regularly wak…

Artificial light has a huge effect on drowsiness for me. This is quite noticable when I am out in the woods, camping in a tent. After sundown, I have about an hour left before I ge…

My PhD advisor likes to drink a coffee just prior to falling asleep. That way the caffiene slowly kicks in and wakes him up. I can't do this--I already have trouble sleeping and I …

There are things that are causal and have little to no effect and things that are causal and have a large effect. I think determining whether and how much something matters, especi…

Interesting approach. Thanks for sharing. I should send my students your way for internships!

The rabbit hole goes deep fast with this one! https://rcoh.me/posts/linear-time-median-finding/ I vaguely recall learning a randomized (approximate) streaming median algorithm in g…

As a non-Australian I just have to know what “chippies” and “sparkies” are!

The first time I attended a selective school was graduate school. Like you, I was extremely nervous. “They’re all going to be smarter than me. I’m going to feel like an idiot.” And…

It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shin…

I am a little surprised that they rewrote the compiler in Go instead of just compiling the existing compiler to WASM. The linked announcement does not talk about a WASM alternative…

I'm glad that TypeScript uses JSDoc and not the hideous XML format [1] that Microsoft's other languages use. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they …

That’s a strange delineation. Engineering is essentially about designing a thing, asking whether that thing really does satisfy the desired criteria, and then iterating when it doe…

You definitely needed the manual. But an 8-year old version of me mastered the game so it couldn't have been that hard. FWIW, the manual is a masterpiece. I really miss all the anc…