cecilpl

Video games are real-time. There's a hard limit on the number of cycles you can make use of per frame.

11 cycles spent mispredicting a branch is 11 cycles you can't use for better-looking IK or smarter pathfinding.

I have memorized my password in both modes.

All it takes is a quick glance at the keyboard to know which "mode" I'm typing in. Because whenever I type dvorak the keyboard looks Dvorak, when the keyboard looks qwerty it switches my brain that way.

I don't have Qwerty as an option on my computers. It's dvorak only.

Typing full time on Dvorak for the last 12 years has, I'm convinced, saved me some wrist and finger pain.

Every time I'm forced to jump back onto qwerty for a co-worker or my wife's laptop, I hate it with a passion. It feels like I'm doing finger gymnastics the whole time, rather than actually typing.

AKA a sales tax. Which don't generally lead to broad-scale layoffs when they're imposed. Did California have massive layoffs when they raised their tax on everything in the entire economy in January? How about when Canada introduced a brand new 7% across the board sales tax in 1991?

As a business, the standard way of responding to that kind of tax is to raise your prices correspondingly (to an appropriate level set by your supply/demand curves of course).

Don't oppose the Act because it doesn't bring about the best possible world. Oppose it only if it's worse than the currently existing situation.

Which large companies that sell health insurance have gone bankrupt due to being wasteful with money?

The incentive to "not waste money" in the health insurance industry is "deny coverage when possible". Is that really the best way to provide healthcare for all Americans? Presumably that's the real goal that we all share, and we're just arguing about the best way to do it.

If government-provided health insurance is too wasteful, why does the American federal government spend more money on healthcare than most other countries (not even counting the American private healthcare expenses), with worse outcomes?

Just out of curiosity, I assume you'd also consider abusing the "minus world" glitch in Super Mario Bros to be cheating, assuming it happened to let you finish the game faster? That glitch is nearly identical to the Half-Life case you described.

But isn't it obviously returning a list? It's a list comprehension!

I made this mistake too. In fact, even after reading that most people wrote [8] instead of [8,9,0], it took me a solid minute or so to figure out how anyone could possibly think the correct answer was [8,9,0].

This is something I've noticed happens very often while debugging. I make certain assumptions about the code and even when staring it right in the face it's hard to see where my assumptions differ from the code as written.

My assumption in this case was "why would you calculate the between lists if you weren't going to use them right away".

First sell-off - late 2011 whne the price dropped from $30 to $5.

Enthusiasm @ $50. Greed @ $130

New paradigm over the last couple days.

It came to me that the vast majority of modern society is completely independent of the actual people executing it. There are very few jobs that could not be done just as well by another person with the same training.

Most jobs are like coded modules. They have well-defined inputs and outputs - even creative jobs can be defined in terms of "create something people will pay for".

The system is what runs the world, not the individual people who carry it out.

I can't count how many times I've wanted to search for news about something, typed in my search, and hit "news" from the navbar rather than the results bar thus erasing my search term. Why do I have two ways to get news?

I love explaining in depth and enjoy the opportunity to explore the boundaries of my knowledge. "Actually, I don't know! Let's find out!" comes out of my mouth often.

But so many people seem to get irritated or annoyed when I (inadvertently) expose their lack of knowledge. I still haven't quite figured out why, but I've been told on more than one occasion to "Stop grilling me!" when I'm simply curious about someone's job or how they see things.

I never took a speed reading course or lesson, but I cannot recall ever having subvocalized. I find myself hitting 750 wpm on speed reading tests with decent comprehension. Not great, but decent.

To use a computing metaphor, I feel like I'm reading with two threads - one to take in all the words as quickly as possible, and a second one to pick the important ones out of the stream. The first thread is completely unconscious, to the point where if you ask me to find a specific word on a page of text, I can always pick it out within 2-3 seconds.

But I feel like a greyhound, itching to run at top speed. Reading fiction is a constant struggle to keep myself chained, forcing myself to imagine the scene playing out, when all I want to do is speed ahead to find out what happens next. It's like an internal war, and it gets worse at the climatic moments.

Always prefer asking for forgiveness over permission unless you're doing something irreversible.

For every ε > 0, are there only finitely many triples of coprime positive integers a + b = c such that c > d (1+ε), where d denotes the product of the distinct prime factors of abc?

I'd actually recommend people to make the switch if you ever happen to take a two week vacation where you're still on the computer. Your hands will thank you.

It's even worth the continual comments from my coworkers - "What the fuck is wrong with your keyboard?". Actually, that's a lie, the 16-year-old inside me still loves those comments. :)