widdma | 1 year ago | on: XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams
widdma's comments
widdma | 4 years ago | on: US DOE to offer $6B to keep struggling nuclear reactors online
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.
widdma | 5 years ago | on: Implementing the Exponential Function
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.
widdma | 7 years ago | on: California Votes to Require Rooftop Solar Power on New Homes
Yup, and make dirty power more expensive with a carbon tax.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: What If GPS Stood for “Galactic Positioning System”?
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.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: C as an intermediate language (2012)
PyPy is written in RPython, which can be compiled to C. PyPy itself emits machine instructions like a regular JIT interpreter.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Qutebrowser – a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI
You can enter passthrough mode in Vimium with "i"
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Elliptic Curve Cryptography for Beginners
True, perhaps the author meant rationals.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Vladimir Voevodsky has died
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.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Show HN: A simple, tiny Vim and kilo-inspired editor
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.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Don’t Fall for Babylonian Trigonometry Hype
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.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Don’t Fall for Babylonian Trigonometry Hype
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...)
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Android Oreo
This release introduces Project Treble with the goal, I believe, of fixing this exactly this problem.
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System [pdf]
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...
widdma | 8 years ago | on: Diving into the world of hash tables
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)
widdma | 9 years ago | on: Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
> 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...
widdma | 9 years ago | on: Iosevka – A Typeface for Code, from Code
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?
widdma | 9 years ago | on: Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
> 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.
widdma | 9 years ago | on: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down
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.
widdma | 9 years ago | on: High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route
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.
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DST varies by state in Australia. Western Australia (UTC+8) does not observe DST.