My first solution was RNG(hash(seed.toString() + string)), which would get rid of the correlation while still being deterministic based on the seed. It's also more robust than calling RNG 10 times since if you use the…
Fun game overall, took a little over 2 hours to beat. Some notes: - I found the decade theming of the packs a nice touch. - I'm mildly curious as to the maximum difficulty of the math problems. - I did find the combat a…
The 500 edits required for access to TWL is actually for all of the sites under the Wikimedia banner. If you're having trouble finding things to edit on Wikipedia, you can try their other sites such as Wikisource or…
The conclusion is basically (Larry) Niven's Law of Time Travel. From "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971): > If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then…
A while back I came up with the idea to carve out 4096 code points in plane 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane) for super-surrogates, and use three such surrogates (1 initial, 2 extension) for codepoints beginning…
Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St.…
RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.
Neat. However, I noticed that the page description reads "No stress, memory-optimized 3D Tetris variant.", but I can't figure out what's supposed to be 3D about it.
If you check the section "Extensions of the standard dictionary numbers" on the page you linked, there's a system for naming arbitrarily large numbers as -illions. The prime here is approx. 8.82 * 10^41024319, and…
Funnily enough, there was a short story about the killion published in the New Yorker in 1982: "The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big it can kill you." [1] [1]…
This reminds me of an old Roald Dahl story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator". A man creates an electric computer that can write short stories in a few minutes (this being written in 1953, when electric computers were…
You might be thinking of "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer, which can be found online at Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
I once read a story in which a human gave an extraterrestrial visitor a calendar to examine and they were confused as to all the inconsistency. I then wondered how they would react if we gave them a Malaysian wall…
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/
Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know…
Something I notice in the Kodak calendars image: rather than having extra days, the 1928 calendar simply has 364 days, but the 1989 calendar has an extra week in the last period. Did they ever explain the rule for…
The original version of the post [1] cited the article "Real programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by name. For some reason it disappeared in the later versions. [1] https://cboh.org/mel.txt
In the original version of the metric system, the base unit of mass was the grave, corresponding to the kilogram. 1/1000 of a grave was a gravet.
Everyone always mentions "The Library of Babel"; considerably fewer bring up the work that inspired it, "The Universal Library" (Die Universalbibliothek) by Kurd Lasswitz [1], which places its treatment of a library…
Thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679007 For some reason the blog post mentions the 31.4T record and the 62.8T record, but not the 50T record [1]. Weird. [1]…
qntm, creator of Hatetris [1], once did an analysis of this exact problem using brute force methods. While he managed to solve the problem for 4, 6 and 8 wide boards (including the minimum board height required,…
Posted three days ago, funnily enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820685 I've never had much faith in 2000s-era Twin Galaxies scorekeeping, ever since I saw their recorded scores for Pokemon Pinball in the…
I was a little surprised to see Fandom.com results come up in one of my test searches, given that they are notorious for being very far from "clean" (I counted 25+ uBO blocked when checking the page in Vivaldi, which is…
Curiously, back in 2016 there was a bet very similar to this one posted on Long Bets (https://longbets.org/712/) -- the bet required commercial self-driving cars capable of driving through Las Vegas by 2024. The…
This isn't the first polyabolo version of Tetris I've seen, though I think it is the first one with diagonal movement in addition to horizontal. I find it playable enough for my liking. Comments on the game: *…
My first solution was RNG(hash(seed.toString() + string)), which would get rid of the correlation while still being deterministic based on the seed. It's also more robust than calling RNG 10 times since if you use the…
Fun game overall, took a little over 2 hours to beat. Some notes: - I found the decade theming of the packs a nice touch. - I'm mildly curious as to the maximum difficulty of the math problems. - I did find the combat a…
The 500 edits required for access to TWL is actually for all of the sites under the Wikimedia banner. If you're having trouble finding things to edit on Wikipedia, you can try their other sites such as Wikisource or…
The conclusion is basically (Larry) Niven's Law of Time Travel. From "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971): > If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then…
A while back I came up with the idea to carve out 4096 code points in plane 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane) for super-surrogates, and use three such surrogates (1 initial, 2 extension) for codepoints beginning…
Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St.…
RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.
Neat. However, I noticed that the page description reads "No stress, memory-optimized 3D Tetris variant.", but I can't figure out what's supposed to be 3D about it.
If you check the section "Extensions of the standard dictionary numbers" on the page you linked, there's a system for naming arbitrarily large numbers as -illions. The prime here is approx. 8.82 * 10^41024319, and…
Funnily enough, there was a short story about the killion published in the New Yorker in 1982: "The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big it can kill you." [1] [1]…
This reminds me of an old Roald Dahl story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator". A man creates an electric computer that can write short stories in a few minutes (this being written in 1953, when electric computers were…
You might be thinking of "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer, which can be found online at Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
I once read a story in which a human gave an extraterrestrial visitor a calendar to examine and they were confused as to all the inconsistency. I then wondered how they would react if we gave them a Malaysian wall…
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations). [1] https://miraheze.org/
Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know…
Something I notice in the Kodak calendars image: rather than having extra days, the 1928 calendar simply has 364 days, but the 1989 calendar has an extra week in the last period. Did they ever explain the rule for…
The original version of the post [1] cited the article "Real programmers Don't Use PASCAL" by name. For some reason it disappeared in the later versions. [1] https://cboh.org/mel.txt
In the original version of the metric system, the base unit of mass was the grave, corresponding to the kilogram. 1/1000 of a grave was a gravet.
Everyone always mentions "The Library of Babel"; considerably fewer bring up the work that inspired it, "The Universal Library" (Die Universalbibliothek) by Kurd Lasswitz [1], which places its treatment of a library…
Thread from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679007 For some reason the blog post mentions the 31.4T record and the 62.8T record, but not the 50T record [1]. Weird. [1]…
qntm, creator of Hatetris [1], once did an analysis of this exact problem using brute force methods. While he managed to solve the problem for 4, 6 and 8 wide boards (including the minimum board height required,…
Posted three days ago, funnily enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30820685 I've never had much faith in 2000s-era Twin Galaxies scorekeeping, ever since I saw their recorded scores for Pokemon Pinball in the…
I was a little surprised to see Fandom.com results come up in one of my test searches, given that they are notorious for being very far from "clean" (I counted 25+ uBO blocked when checking the page in Vivaldi, which is…
Curiously, back in 2016 there was a bet very similar to this one posted on Long Bets (https://longbets.org/712/) -- the bet required commercial self-driving cars capable of driving through Las Vegas by 2024. The…
This isn't the first polyabolo version of Tetris I've seen, though I think it is the first one with diagonal movement in addition to horizontal. I find it playable enough for my liking. Comments on the game: *…