vmilner

834 karma · joined October 26, 2011

vmilneron I analyzed shuffling in a million games of MtG Arena (2020)

Yes - see the “Making bridge deals” section of:

https://sater.home.xs4all.nl/doc.html

vmilneron I analyzed shuffling in a million games of MtG Arena (2020)

Interestingly the method used to deal bridge hands for top tournaments doesn’t shuffle at all, it generates a random number between 1 and 52!/(13!^4) and maps that number to a corresponding deal of the cards.

vmilneron Ask HN: Old thread – Video Lectures pulled for lack of Subtitles

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039798

Is about Harvard and MIT being sued in 2015.

vmilneron Apple Books digital narration

This was demonstrated vividly when Andy Serkis read The Hobbit unabridged live for charity then did a separate recording as a commercial release. Both were great, but you could see how many minor flaws were in the live recording that would have had to be re-recorded in the commercial version. (I’ve no idea how long it took to record the Lord of the Rings which he did a year later)

vmilneron What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.

vmilneron What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.

vmilneron CLEAR is a pox on America’s airports

The ultimate British queue...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xHwUycV6wSY

vmilneron Ask HN: What is the best thing you read in 2022?

I love it so much. I am sad that the Halas and Batchelor animated version I watched as a kid seems to be unobtainable :-(

I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the public domain version as the text is far clearer and several large redactions are replaced.

vmilneron Everything I wish I knew when learning C

This used to be my bible when doing full time C programming around 2000 (together with the standard docs) but I’m out of date with the latest standard updates (as is this) but it may still be of interest.

https://c-faq.com/

vmilneron Everything I wish I knew when learning C

Thanks - it certainly was undefined in the original standard.

vmilneron Everything I wish I knew when learning C

  void main()

 Still non-standard in C?

vmilneron Goncharov: Why has the internet invented a fake Martin Scorsese film?

Ironically, Disney would _like_ Scorsese’s beautiful 1997 film “Kundun” to be fake (but it isn’t).

https://filmschoolrejects.com/kundun-scorseses-buried-master...

vmilneron Ask HN: What are your favorite books/courses of 2022? Why?

http://jdh.hamkins.org/lectures-on-the-philosophy-of-mathema...

vmilneron Why does calloc exist? (2016)

That footnote confirms the traditional position that a floating point zero need NOT have an all-zero bit representation.

vmilneron Why does calloc exist? (2016)

Yes. I was porting code to new machines and programmers had assumed it was compliant but it wasn’t.

vmilneron Why does calloc exist? (2016)

I encountered problems on some platforms in the 90s where zeroing the bits of an array of pointers or floats/doubles did not give you an array of NULL pointers or 0.0 values. The comp.lang.c FAQ file discussed this in detail.

vmilneron ‘Whisper list’ contains 40 politicians never to accept a drink from, MP claims

How on earth does a list of 40 people that’s never written down maintain any sort of resistance to “Telephone”/“Chinese Whispers” errors?

vmilneron YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option

I watch a lot of tutorial channels and almost the first thing I (and I assumed everyone else!) do is sort by oldest first to find the start point... :-(

vmilneron Why Is Tipping Everywhere You Checkout?

I suspect a common experience for Uk visitors to the US is getting off the plane, going to a hotel bar for the first time, buying drinks, paying for them, and then been told (possibly passive-aggressively) to ** off.

[It’s more usual to pay for drinks one at a time in Uk bars, and unusual to tip if not eating a meal.]

vmilneron What is an eigenvalue?

I think anyone starting a lin alg course could do a lot worse than watch all his "Essence of Linear Algebra" series before starting - then watch the relevant (c. 15 min) episodes as you take each lecture.

vmilneron What is an eigenvalue?

3blue1brown on this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PFDu9oVAE-g&vl=en

vmilneron UK grocery price inflation hits record 14.7%

A noticeable feature of the Sainsbury’s website is that weights encoded in the URLs don’t change with the weight in the webpage as shrinkflation happens. So the following link to 115g of ham still has 125g in the link itself:

\www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-british-cooked-ham-125g

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-briti...

vmilneron The essence of Reed-Solomon coding

LDPC coding (combined with BCH coding) is now used for most Western Europe digital and satellite TV in the DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 standards.

vmilneron Galois field instructions on 2021 CPUs

There is a finite field (or Galois field GF(p)) of size p for any prime p. This can be exhibited by integers mod p.

There are also finite (Galois) fields GF(p^n) of size p^n (positive integer powers of p)

These can be exhibited by polynomials with coefficients in the GF(p) field with up to n terms.

Eg for p = 2 and n = 3

1 + x

1 + x + x^2

1 + x^2

x + x^2

x^2

vmilneron Ursula Le Guin on Star Trek: TNG (1994)

The Orville is kind of an anti-bait-and-switch : it sounds a so-so premise (Star Trek with toilet humour) but rapidly goes beyond that into a really good show with a lot of really likeable characters.

vmilneron The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report

Yes, I’m British and when American friends first used the word “Telephone” in conversation I was very confused.

vmilneron Freeman Dyson and me

The Web of Stories interview is very good:

https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1

vmilneron We Become What We Behold (2017)

Yes - I don’t know if anyone tried this again in future episodes - it would be interesting to see.

vmilneron We Become What We Behold (2017)

Any excuse to show my favourite prisoners dilemma-ish video... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8

vmilneron Most people on antidepressants don’t need them

The anonymous "Voice of God" conceit always puts me off The Economist.