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Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

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Re: Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

#51

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

tg3 wrote: post #47
hueving wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>created by Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of Backbone, Underscore, and CoffeeScript) Just out of curiosity, why did you include that? Do people make judgements about tools based on the person who wrote it?

I'd say yes. If you took the time to independently evaluate every tool that was ever produced, you wouldn't have time for anything else. So instead, people rely on crude, biased, but effective heuristics, the author's past achievements being one of them. It's the same thing with novel authors - I'm much more likely to purchase a book by Stephen King than an unknown author's debut album if that's all I know about the…

In my experience, unknown authors do tend to make terrible debut albums :)

Re: Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

#52

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

deckar01 wrote: post #36

I am trying to apply the Chinese remainder theorem to solve the time required for all of the events to occur simultaneously. I am ignoring the GIF timing bug. 1. Normalize times to integers. 2. Assume congruence at x = t mod (t+1). 3. Solve congruence system. 4. Denormalize result. Python solution: http://ideone.com/Wh2SR6 Solution perspective: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=35417600268377072234556...

I sometimes wish a HN comment could be 'favourited'.

Re: Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

#53

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

jeffgreco wrote: post #35
roma1n wrote: post #34

Didn't get the "A european resident has their first kiss" though. Wouldn't it make more sense to divide the frequency by two and state "Two european residents have their first kiss"?

It very well may only be one of the participants' first kiss.

roma1n said "Two european residents have their first kiss", not "Two european residents each have their first kiss". It would definitely be their first kiss. Do I win pedant fight? :)

Re: Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

#54

Post by tripzilch »

bbx wrote: post #8
josephwegner wrote: post #3

Not super related to the content, but I love the "Show Code" button at the bottom of the article. So often sites either show code inline and break up my reading, or just dump the whole thing into a github repo, which loses context. That button is awesome, because I can read the whole thing to understand the problem, then review the code the next time through with better context. Awesome!

I agree that having a "Show code" button only at the end prevents disrupting the reading flow. In terms of "code with explanation" layout, I really like todos.js' approach: http://backbonejs.org/docs/todos.html It also works with images: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+Pro+Late+2013+Teardown/20... Most layouts nowadays fail to take advantage of the horizontal space available. It's just 2 colums in the end, but it…

Ooh that's really pretty.

I was going to bring up the IPython notebook functionality, in part because it was used as a follow-up to another xkcd strip ("Regex Golf", http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.... ), but I gotta say that one looks nicer :) The use-cases are slightly different, though.

Re: Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

#55

Post by nextstep »

maxerickson wrote: post #9
nextstep wrote: post #7

Does anyone know the answer to the "turn signal problem" he poses? Why does the beat frequency he observes match what he calculated?

Assuming you meant "doesn't", it's explained in the next section, the Zero-Delay Problem. edit: The frequency equation solved for time, using the adjusted values from the table: https://www.google.com/search?q=1%2F%281%2F1-1%2F1.04%29

Thanks
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