turbofail | 15 years ago | on: On Tesla's induction motor
It was a custom-made SRM made by someone else. They were intending to use it in an electric vehicle.
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turbofail | 15 years ago | on: On Tesla's induction motor
Another permanent-magnet-less motor design is the switched-reluctance motor. Its primary advantage over the induction motor is its dirt-simple rotor construction - it's essentially just a properly shaped chunk of iron, where an induction motor would require a copper squirrel-cage.
Its disadvantage relative to the induction motor is that it requires some cleverness in its controller and/or sensors in order to run at all. I actually wrote some control software for one as a side project - it was a somewhat frustrating experience (though a good portion of the frustration was due to malfunctioning hardware).
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: The most common phone number: 214-748-3647
It seems like if this explanation were to make sense, whoever implemented the string-to-number conversion was careful enough to implement saturating addition, but careless enough to not use a numerical type large enough to hold every possible phone number. I don't know if I buy that.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities
For my computer architecture class at Berkeley, they decided to give Bb a try. It lasted about three weeks before they gave up and reverted to the tried and true command-line scripts for submitting assignments and viewing grades. Hopefully canvas will fare a little better.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: What Kind of Mother?
The Quora responses reveal an important point regarding Dr. Chua's book: the book was written in response to the failings of the super-strict parenting style.
The WSJ excerpt makes no mention of this, which is a bit misleading.
On another note, my mother attempted to raise me in such a manner, but she was always too busy working to do a complete job of it (she didn't bother with my older brother as much, as he was way more self-motivated than me). I'm actually a bit curious as to how Dr. Chua managed to find time to hound her daughters like this while being a professor.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: How to represent strings, the heavy way
Related paper by Boehm:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/local/reading/proceedings/spe91-95/spe/...
If I recall correctly an implementation of "ropes" ships with the Boehm GC sources.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Derivatives of Regular Expressions
Google to the rescue!
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=A0F...
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Zero programming experience and badly want to learn. Where to start?
If what you're comfortable with is lower level stuff, one possibility is to look at an implementation of an object system in C. In particular, I found reading the Python source code to be helpful when learning about object orientation.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Scheme 9 from Empty Space (new edition)
Here's the license, copied verbatim from his LICENSE file:
Scheme 9 from Empty Space -- A Comprehensible Scheme Interpreter By Nils M Holm, 2007-2010
* Do whatever you want with this code. * If the code doesn't work, don't blame me.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Scheme 9 from Empty Space (new edition)
Also of possible interest is the link to the actual interpreter source code.
http://www.t3x.org/s9fes/index.html
Only problem is, you have to navigate your way through a maze to get to the actual code from there.
I wrote a quick hacked-up web crawler (in emacs lisp, of all things!) to solve it because I was too impatient to do it for real.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Rotifers may reveal the secret of elongating life
The Wikipedia article on epigenetics goes over some mechanisms.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: The Adaptive Function of Masturbation in a Promiscuous African Ground Squirrel
The curious part to me was the possibility that masturbation reduces the chance of STI. How does that work?
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: The Hardy Boys - The final chapter (1998)
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Animaniacs has withstood the test of time for me. Actually I found it a little better than before, as some of the humor went over my head when I was a kid.
turbofail | 15 years ago | on: Physicists Dream Up the Antilaser
Interesting note, one of the physicists mentioned in the article is Chong Yidong, one of the co-maintainers of emacs.
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