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widdma

Re:XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:49PM (#39889736)
> given that Australia does daylight savings time

DST varies by state in Australia. Western Australia (UTC+8) does not observe DST.

Re:US DOE to offer $6B to keep struggling nuclear reactors online on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @08:11PM (#30368339)
It's worth pointing out AEMO's demand is for the grid, and residential solar typically does not show up on the grid. OpenNEM[1] uses estimates of residential solar to approximate the full load.

[1]: https://opennem.org.au/

Re:Implementing the Exponential Function on Monday June 29, 2020 @09:55PM (#23685697)
Nice article, thanks. For anyone interested in the topic, I highly recommend Trefethen's Approximation Theory and Approximation Practice. It's approachable, intuitive, and fun while still covering a lot of technical detail.
Yup, and make dirty power more expensive with a carbon tax.
Re:What If GPS Stood for “Galactic Positioning System”? on Friday February 02, 2018 @09:57AM (#16290931)
This is exactly what is already done! On Earth at least. Radio telescopes around the world observe (mostly) quasars to perform geodesy. This is the main method used to measure the Earth Orientation Parameters which is need for keeping GPS/GNSS calibrated.

With it, you can measure distances of several thousand km with a precision on the order of a few millimetres. The problem is that it's really expensive compared to GPS: at each site you need a reasonably size telescope, atomic clock, some serious storage, and a way to ship all the data to a central cluster.

Re:C as an intermediate language (2012) on Saturday January 20, 2018 @12:54PM (#16194403)
PyPy is written in RPython, which can be compiled to C. PyPy itself emits machine instructions like a regular JIT interpreter.
You can enter passthrough mode in Vimium with "i"
Re:Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Beginners on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @09:52AM (#15449741)
True, perhaps the author meant rationals.
Re:Vladimir Voevodsky has died on Sunday October 01, 2017 @01:19AM (#15376520)
I think if he did have mental health problems, like many others in the field, it's now more than ever to raise the point. If he didn't it doesn't hurt to raise the issue, because it is genuine.

If you suffer from anxiety and/or depression, there is help. Talk to someone. You're not alone, and you don't need to suffer alone.

Re:Show HN: A simple, tiny Vim and kilo-inspired editor on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @10:28AM (#15175500)
If you're after something lightweight, similar enough to be vim to be useable, and lua built-in checkout vis: https://github.com/martanne/vis

The structural regular expressions are also pretty interesting.

Re:Don’t Fall for Babylonian Trigonometry Hype on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @10:26AM (#15132363)
Every number has an infinite decimal expansion.

1 = 0.999... 1/2 = 0.49999...

etc.

In some ways it's a property of the representation, not something intrinsic to the number.

Re:Don’t Fall for Babylonian Trigonometry Hype on Wednesday August 30, 2017 @10:23AM (#15132343)
Pi isn't an infinite series, it is just a number. Sure, it can be represented as an infinite series, but so can any number! (Eg. 1 = 0.999999...)
Re:Android Oreo on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:07PM (#15067419)
This release introduces Project Treble with the goal, I believe, of fixing this exactly this problem.
For contex, Ross Ihaka is one of the original authors of R. This date back to 2008. Also see Ross Ihaka's 2010 paper: https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pd...
Re:Diving into the world of hash tables on Sunday June 25, 2017 @11:27PM (#14633848)
Since Python is an interpreter, it keeps a dictionary/hash table of the local and global variables. These can be accesses by the functions `locals()` and `globals()`.

`a = ... ` can be thought of as `locals()["a"] = ...`

(although you can should not actually modify the local variables this way)

> Different regions have dramatically different average commute times which don't directly correlate with population. Thus disproving your point.

Average commute time is not the desired metric here, see Duranton and Turner[1].

[1]: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Matthew_T...

Re:Iosevka – A Typeface for Code, from Code on Saturday April 01, 2017 @12:05AM (#14010344)
The slight curve to usually straight letters like 'v' and 'k' reminds me a bit of of Inconsolata. I really like this touch and makes a monospaced font flow. Is it also using Spiro splines?
> Not at all! Happiness _is_ correlated to shorter door-to-door time, but higher speed does not equate to shorter times if the distance grows as well.

Exactly! This is also related to the The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: building new roads just allows people drive more. (See Duranton and Turner.)

You can view this as an equilibrium. People will prefer uncongested roads until they become congested.

Surprising, yet simple when it's pointed out.

A problem I'd like to see a good solution to is selection bias. Unless there is some kind of reward, only people that really care are likely rate something

I think Netflix's move might help this. It certainly lowers the cost rating.

3D plots can useful when the data is intrinsically 3D. But forcing a 3D plot on 2D data, like a pie chart, makes it hard for a viewer to develop an intuition for the data.
I'd second the PGFPlots recommendation. Easy to create plots by hand or you can use matlab2tikz (mentioned but dismissed in the article) if you're coming from matlab.

I'd also second the latexmk recommendation!

I found matlabl2tikz to be superior to plot2latex. I did my honours thesis with plot2LaTeX+inkscape and my PhD one with a matlab2tikz, so I've had a fair experience with both.

I have created some high quality, complex plots out through matlabl2tikz with no problem. I haven't had the issues the author notes and I'd suggest they file a bug report. The m2t community is active and friendly.

The other bonus of m2t is you can edit the files in PGFplots, which is a powerful and complete language/library. For my use case, it was important that my plots be repeatable, so manually doing it with Inkscape would be tedious. Having easily editable source code allowed me to write scripts to filter the output to what I needed.

The one problem I did find is that pgfplots can be quite slow. This isn't m2t's fault though and can be overcome with TikZ's cache system.

Disclosure: I wrote the path simplification in matlab2tikz, but nothing else.

PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great.

However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.

Re:Show HN: Plot directly in your terminal with matplotlib on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @07:59AM (#13705107)
iTerm2's killer feature that I haven't seen in any Linux terms yet is tmux integration. Being able to treat a remote tmux session like a local terminal session — including tabs, splits and windows — is fantastic.
Re:Expanding Fact Checking at Google on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @09:28AM (#13695676)
> Google should not be prohibited to discriminate or censor search results[...]

You're right, filtering results would be a concerning step. I guess this is why they've added a fact check tag rather than a filter. I think it's a good solution.

But then again, free speech doesn't mean you have the right to have your results shown on the first page of Google. If they change their algorithm to preference articles with fact checking, is it the same as someone refusing to make a wedding cake for two dudes?

Re:The State of Go on Monday February 06, 2017 @07:38AM (#13578882)
Video here: http://video.fosdem.org/2017/H.1302/ (go_state.*)
The story is that Knuth chose '$' to denote math mode because math typesetting at the time was prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, fair enough. On MacTeX or texlive on Arch, it usually takes me a few iterations of `tlmgr install` runs before I have everything I need. "collection-fontsrecommended" is usually the (meta) package I install these days.

I wish texlive would move to rolling updates, or at-least make distribution upgrades easier.

LaTeX itself isn't over 2GB. The complete texlive distribution is about that large, but that's everything and the kitchen sink.

You can install a small base which comes in ~150mb, then add packages as you need.

Re:GodBolt: Enter C, get Assembly on Thursday December 15, 2016 @11:58AM (#13186023)
Maybe they meant distributes? Modulo (sort of) distributes over multiplication: (a * b) % c = ((a % c) * (b % c)) % c

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