prestonbriggs

If you look at some of the other Christmas lectures, you'll see he's often (always?) wearing the same outfit. So, tradition!

Doing a good job of constant prop means doing a thorough job of implementing the best algorithm in the best paper. And to do that, you need to build a form of SSA. And to do that you need to compute dominators. And to do that, you need to build an appropriate form of the CFG. Don't need a PhD to do all those things (not inventing anything new here, just using other peoples' beautiful results), but it's still plenty of work to build a fast & thorough implementation, with lots of testing required.

Can't possibly be economical; but of course, the experience will teach you a lot.

Yes, memorizing everything (all the music) helped hugely in practicing. I used to believe it was because I didn't have to read the music, and could focus on fingers, etc. But maybe the memorization effort (and it wasn't hard, as you mentioned) was enough to establish a framework, and the bulk of my practicing was hanging new details onto the framework.

Has anyone used this approach to memorize music? E.g., for playing an instrument.

I used to be able to remember plenty when I was young and practicing a lot. And certainly professionals can remember significant amounts (and not just the music, but performance details, fingerings, etc).

Seems like a different mechanism, relying less on visual and spatial associations, more on hearing. But perhaps it's similar in that you learn a structure and attach details to it.

Or, having developed a good memory for music, can we use it to help memorize random facts? Perhaps associating them with places in a song.

Indeed. But consider the 2nd sentence, the conclusion, and the twitter post.

On the other hand, I certain agree with your idea about teach/using handwritten recursive-descent parsers. Here's an old book that presents it pretty clearly, along with a nice approach for error handling. Maybe you can find it in a library. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540082408

Compilers have parsers, not languages. Many languages have more than one compiler (e.g., C), and the various compilers may use different techniques for parsing.

I argued for years in favor of keeping the minimum runtime of a number of samples; never found much support.

Golly would crush them all.

Happens in other fields too. When I worked at Tera, I (and plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls. Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and smart. Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our IQ would drop and our understanding would fail.

Except maybe some of it stuck. Hope so.

Eh? IBM 704

One of my favorite moments in literature: "... and nothing more was said - may God forgive me - of duodecimal functions."

Cynically, I think the publishers have a deal that Apple won't publish manuals.

Then again, crows collect shiny things too.

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize I've over simplified. Things were more diverse. At the time, there were significant academic compiler projects in the US written in PL/1, SETL, and Lisp. ML (as in Standard ML of New Jersey) work was getting started. I knew older guys who were interested in Algol 68. In academia, I saw no PCs and most grad students didn't have one.

When I started grad school, in 1986, I'd written a lot of Pascal and used Turbo Pascal on my PC. But the school used Sun workstations with unix, so I had to learn C pretty quickly. Nobody seemed to use Pascal. There was a Modula II compiler around, but it was a resource hog and never popular. Oberon was published about the same time. I thought it was pretty cool and worked on a compiler for it, though the language evolved out from under me. My impression is that none of the Wirth languages made much of an impression in any of the US grad schools in that era. Of course, I didn't see everything that was going on, but I saw most of the compiler work. Almost 100% in C, moving eventually to C++.

Cool, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic!

Of course lots of musical instruments require chorded inputs. Pianos, guitars, trumpets, most woodwinds, even trombones.

I remember the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766301 Is this what growing up in those tenements leads to?

Peter Matthiessen's book "Killing Mr. Watson" centers on a similar story in south Florida.

I'm 63. When I was a kid (pick an age), there weren't anywhere near as many programmers as there are now. So while I believe lots of older programmers have gotten out of the field, one way or another, I think the remaining ones are simply hidden in the crowd.

It's interesting to read about the 10,000-year clock while thinking about Canticle.

The kids look fine, but the older folks look pretty bad, I think. So many of the captions are of the form: So-and-so waiting. For what? Nothing much, I'd guess.

At the bottom of the page are links to other pages of Hedges' work. There are a number (e.g., in London) showing single men living alone. Often pensioners (OAPs).

Perhaps your guess that the particular tenements in Glasgow were reserved for families is right.

Reminds me of the Bronx, from a train window, in about 2005.

I was pretty surprised at the 17 knots in a fjord.

Here's a link to the CADR paper: http://www.unlambda.com/lispm/memo528.html I like these; they describe a microcoded machine in more detail than I can usually find.

Not much about Lisp here. It describes the design of a microcode-based machine that could be used for all sorts of things. You could use it to implement a PDP-11, an x86, or whatever (though it's biased towards 32-bit machines).

Google "microcode" and you'll get a start. Hennessy and Patterson will carry you further.

Wikipedia disagrees. Skara Brae was occupied about 3190 BC. Earliest Egyptian pyramids were started about 2630. The Great Pyramid was built about 2560 BC.

There's a lot of oil money in Tulsa, has been for decades. I'm not sure they'll notice.

I have a sister who recently bought a house in Tulsa. Their house is so large it's got rooms she's forgotten about... Pretty new, pool, nice neighborhood. Cost less than $300K. I don't know about the school district (Jenks). I'd sure like to see some progressive voters move down there.