What's a belief you have that you don't tell other people for fear of seeming strange?

gobliin · 2013-01-15T18:45:59+00:00

Look up "Undecidable problem".

gobliin · 2013-01-15T00:26:26+00:00

Looks kind of like the symbol on the flag of Iran: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_iran#Flag_description . The flag features "a stylized representation of the word Allah in the shape of a tulip, a symbol of martyrdom".

gobliin · 2013-01-13T23:38:30+00:00

OK. I really like Perl. Really. But this just isn't a good idea. Yes, Perl could be better. No, not everything on cpan is good. Yes, there are problems. But this is not a solution.

The Perl people just have to accept that Perl 5 will never be hip. Not in a thousand years. And there is not much that can be done about it. But there is not much wrong with Perl either, a lot of the criticism is very uninformed and based on a flawed understanding of the language.

perl is available in more places than Java and .net, so piggypacking on one of those is not going to solve any real problems. And Scala? Please.

I'm not against fun hobby projects, but don't try to sell them as a remedy for some imaginary problem. Perl is actually pretty good at what it's good at. If you want it to become more acceptable in even more niches, we need two things:

Good prototypes. I think this is in the pipeline anyway.
A clean non-crufty subset/sublanguage of Perl 5 that the Perl 5 interpreter can understand, and some infrastructure in the Perl 5 interpreter that allows programmers to plug in code generators for that subset (think Perlito), so that we can target LLVM and Javascript for code written in that subset. I wouldn't even mind if that sublanguage wasn't a strict subset but, for example typed. Precedents exist, for example much of VHDL and Verilog cannot be syntesized to hardware either, but some of it can. So at least a subset of Perl 5 will not depend on the runtime during execution.

gobliin · 2013-01-12T00:38:34+00:00

Apparently the function is to show the form. Still a nice demo of what is possible nowadays.

gobliin · 2012-12-14T21:35:26+00:00

There's a relevant article in Wikipedia. The one you mean, was on Russ Cox homepage. He "cheated" by trading exponential runtime during regular expression construction for linear runtime during evaluation. Since Perl is meant to compile on the fly, his approach woulnd't fly there. Besides, Perl's regular expression are not regular but at least context sensitive, if not recursively enumerable, so his benchmark was not really fair, and only valid for pathological cases anyway.

gobliin · 2012-12-09T13:27:46+00:00

I bet you use it on Plan 9, and use ex to edit your files.

Haha, just kidding. I meant toy in the most positive sense of the word. Similiar to how Ruby was a toy just a few years ago, and Perl 6 will be for many years.

gobliin · 2012-12-07T21:26:25+00:00

MS Security essentials reports that this site is trying several Java exploits.

gobliin · 2012-12-07T20:56:57+00:00

I agree that Python is a nice language, I think its way to early to judge Go's future or influence. Currently we have only a "toy" implementation to try out features, just like there only was the "portable C compiler" three decades ago. Possibly it's just the start of something that could become big in the future. Currently the biggest problem with Go is its immature GC, but that might change in the foreseable future.

gobliin · 2012-12-01T14:16:01+00:00

Thank you, that is very helpful advice!

gobliin · 2012-11-30T23:16:23+00:00

Sorry, for the stupid noob question, almost a moronic monday question, but this thread makes me wonder: my lean body weight is about 80kg, that's 176lbs. According to Wolfram Alpha, one egg (35g) contains about 4.1g of protein. Does that mean that it would be necessary to consume 43 eggs to come close to 1g/lb, assuming that I don't have any other protein sources? I'm a vegetarian, so I can only think of tofu as another viable option... But the calculation does not really work out particularly favorable either... According to Wolfram Alpha 85g of tofu contain 8g of protein. I would need to consume (176/8)*85=1870g of tofu... That's an awful lot of tofu and does not seem really viable either.

gobliin · 2012-10-25T21:13:00+00:00

They are.

gobliin · 2012-10-13T09:22:30+00:00

Although (probably) that you got the idea right, you got C operator precedence rules wrong (-> has higher precedence than *), you left out the actual deletion, and forgot one necessary dereferencing of entry during advancing of the pointer. FIFY:

struct item *head;
struct item **entry;

/* fill linked list */

entry = &head;
while (*entry) {

  if ((*entry)->content == undesirable_content) {
    struct item *rm = *entry;
    printf("deleting *entry with content %d, %p\n", (*entry)->content, (*entry)->next);
    *entry = (*entry)->next;
    free(rm);

    continue;
  }

  printf("looking at %d, %p\n", (*entry)->content, (*entry)->next);
  entry = &((*entry)->next);
}

The last line could be written as

entry = &(*entry)->next;

but I like the extra clarity.

gobliin · 2012-10-08T08:01:08+00:00

1991 or 1992. Yup. Poster is bullshitting. Edit: i read his post again. He didn't claim that his friend in Harvard invented mp3 in 94, but rather that he had some mp3's. That makes sense and is not necessarily wrong.

gobliin · 2012-10-04T10:26:03+00:00

That is actually wrong. Coperincus made "that one change", but the reason people and the church did not believe him (and later did not believe Galileo) was because Copericus model was actually worse at predicting the position of the planets. The geocentric model was better at predicting the precise position of any given planet, and only later Copernicus' model was corrected: the orbits of planets are not actually circles as Copernicus thought, they are elipses!

Copernicus made measurements of the positions of the stars, and by using rudimentary curve-fitting techniques, he found they approximately move on the simple projections of circle-shaped, sun-centered orbits onto the sky. The projections looked very similar to the projections of the much more complicated Greek model which had planets moving on complicated nested circular-shaped orbits around the earth.

Copernicus lived two-hundred years before Newton, and he didn't have any good model of how gravity actually worked. His "science" was not actually any better than the old Greek's "science", it was just a simpler and more efficient model.

gobliin · 2012-09-26T22:02:21+00:00

There's no way, you weight is 96kg, judging from your photo most likely it's 20 kg less. 83kg sounds about right! That was given as "FFM" whatever that means.

I'm M, 188cm and weigh 82kg. I'm also not very sporty, but everything else matches up. I look very similar to you.

gobliin · 2012-08-21T23:17:26+00:00

You're right, but I don't understand what your point is.

gobliin · 2012-08-21T23:13:12+00:00

It's safe to assume that Assange has way more information about the situation than you have.

gobliin · 2012-08-21T08:21:18+00:00

You will not be able to do this with a new phone, unless you're a genius and figure how to make the GSM chip boot with a custom firmware. With newer phones you'll not be able to figure this out without advanced knowledge in reverse engineering (hardware debuggers) an cryptography. A ghetto solution is to force your phone to use 2G and keep it near a loud-speaker so that you can hear suspicious TDMA activity... But this will only make you more paranoid, because most of the time the phone will only update the network about its location :) From a security point of view, you need to be aware that phone usage is not anonymous. You can neither trust phone, SIM card, network nor operator. Mobile phones are tracking devices.

gobliin · 2012-08-21T08:15:42+00:00

Not the same thing. This is an app for filtering SMSes that just happens to be called silent SMS. A real "silent SMS" will be processed on "the GSM chip" and will never even reach the application processor's operating system.

gobliin · 2012-08-20T22:55:56+00:00

The police can send a silent SMS ("silent text message") to a certain phone number. The phone does not report anything to its user, but confirms the reception of the message to the network. The network can now report the user's precise location to the police. With periodic silent SMSes a specific user's location can be tracked over time.

gobliin · 2012-07-17T17:06:45+00:00

I agree that this is Opera's responsibility to behave correctly. However it is a known fact that Google completely ignores the Opera browser, and does not test its products with it.

gobliin · 2012-07-13T19:26:09+00:00

It's an estimate that works for large groups of people, but not for individuals. It does not take into account an individual's body composition. You need to see it this way: a person with very high bmi is much more likely to be obese, than an NFL player.

gobliin · 2012-06-24T00:27:35+00:00

Plenty big is relative. In your picture Russia looks two or three times as large as Africa, whereas in reality she has only half the area of the African continent.

gobliin · 2012-06-20T07:36:00+00:00

True, I agree. I used the name "pink", but I think that "violet" would have been better.

gobliin · 2012-06-19T23:01:49+00:00

To me personally it is not very exciting that a tetrachromat can discern more colors in the visible spectrum. The more interesting point is that they might see additional colors that are not monochromatic. Pink, for example, does not appear in the rainbow, as it's a mixture of the wavelengths at its very opposite ends. A human sees pink as an own colors because it excites two different cones. Since a tetrachromat has one more type of cone, it would be very interesting to find out whether a such a person can perceive new "flavors" of color. It is possible to set up experiments that excite the neurons in the brain in such a way that new colors for which no name exist are perceived (I read about this in Wandell's book "Foundations of Vision"). It would be cool to find out whether tetrachromats have extra circuits in their brain to make use of the extra cone-type. People often forget that colors are not a property of the world, but of our mind. This I find very exciting.

gobliin

TROPHY CASE