Viewing profile — ryani

Listening to Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" podcast I was distinctly struck with the idea that the main thing leftists like to do, even more than fighting rightists, is fighting other…

Sadly, you can't easily do the full pimpl idiom in C++. The pimpl idiom is a C idiom where a header declares an opaque structure and prototypes of functions that take pointers to t…

> I can tell you right now that you would have to pay me far above market rate to get me to move If everyone feels that way, then it's not an above-market rate, it's by definition …

What statutory penalty? https://www.copyright.gov/512/ Read the requirements for a takedown notice. The only thing a DMCA notice needs to claim under penalty of perjury is that you…

I want to be able to click-and-drag. For example, in this row 1 2 |x x | if I left click the second cell and drag right it should mark all the blank cells black. Similarly in the i…

This is also available (with an included Flash emulator, so playable on modern machines) in Zach's free retrospective "Zach-like" [1] [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098840…

How is "Baumol effect" different from supply and demand for any limited resource? Let's say that some new use for copper is discovered, that drastically increases the demand for co…

Hi Chaim! I really enjoyed working with you on Spore. What have you been up to in the intervening years besides writing this book?

I think something like Unity or Gamemaker or even Scratch fills that niche now. They are a bit more game-focused than Hypercard (which was really more of an early iteration on the …

This is such a crazy take. "Because the waste is so huge, it's impossible to do anything". It's not like any individual reform is going to suddenly end all that waste and put every…

Here's the standard algorithm for this problem function weightedRandom(weight, outcomes){ var total = sum( weight ); var roll = Math.random()*total; // value in the range [0,total)…

I think there's a difference between "blockchain + PoW" and "blockchain". Blockchain taken literally is just verification of history via hashing. It's a form of provenance that is …

> The adage that teachers still teach, "don't cite Wikipedia" -- [...] what are people supposed to use? Wikipedia cites sources. Go to those sources, find the ones that best line u…

If you raise your prices, you drive away legitimate customers but don't drive away fraudsters, since the fraudsters aren't actually paying with real money. So raising your price in…

Full disclosure: I used to work at EA and while I was there I contributed a tiny amount of code to EASTL. EASTL provided a bunch of value that the standard STL would not. The bigge…

After listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "History of Rome" podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they…

You're a software developer, so if you really believe that, get to hacking. It's clearly an industry with huge potential if it is economically viable to spend money buying an Argen…

The "under penalty of perjury" is completely toothless and I don't believe has ever resulted in a judgement against a rightsholder. Here is the exact text from the DMCA from https:…

That page claims it can compress a single transaction down to 12-16 bits. Unless the vast majority of btc transactions are between the same few wallet addresses, this seems impossi…

From reading his comment the goal of the ad spend isn't to get a lot of visitors, but to get enough visitors that you can measure impact. So you don't need a big push, just enough …

So the goal of futures is to deal with inversion of control. The code you want to write is something like: fn f( filename ) { val someUrl = computeTheUrl(); val data = await http.g…

Although there is projective space where it does make sense to say x = infinity (and also that f(0) is defined). In projective space all of the conic sections (lines, hyperbolas, e…

But you can ship a packet of flower seeds (cost: 10 cents and a stamp) instead of your expensive product, and your tracking obligation is dealt with.

The distinction I make is that roguelites are designed around metagame progression rather than / in addition to the in-game progression used by roguelikes. For example, Rogue Legac…