For me the biggest riddle is: why something instead of nothing ?

That's the question that prevent me from being atheist and shift me to agnosticism.

There is both in superposition.

At my institution there was a student revolt, chartwell was kicked out and it is a work co-op. The quality has increased, the employees are better treated and the cost stayed the same, and stupid rules like that are no more !

Your view on parrots is wrong ! Parakeet don't understand but some parrots are exceptionally intelligent.

Africans grey parrots, do understand the words they use, they don't merely reproduce them. Once mature they have the intelligence (and temperament) of a 4 to 6 years old child.

> Your view on parrots is wrong !

There's a good chance of that.

> Africans grey parrots, do understand the words they use, they don't merely reproduce them. Once mature they have the intelligence (and temperament) of a 4 to 6 years old child.

I did not realize I could discuss with an African grey parrot the shared experience of how difficult it was to learn how to tie my shoelaces and what the feeling was like to go to a place every day (school) which was not my home.

I stand corrected.

  if you apply quicksort to 2^20 random integers, at some point you're sorting 2^17 8-integer subpartitions

why not use an 8 wide optimal sort network for those 8 integers?

I think because they are not necessarily consecutive.

Embarrassingly parallel sort, lol.

Work got me an hp elite book a few year ago and the only thing negative I have to say about it is that the screen is pathetic! Otherwise it's a decent yet overpriced (unless you buy hundreds of them each year like my work place does) laptop. I used to run arch Linux at work but I was denied my favorite OS this time because it's wasn't compatible with the EDR software... So i cannot tell you how bad it is with Linux.

It still hold its charge but then I mostly work on it plugged either via RDP from my personal workstation at home or from the docking station in my office at the campus. So it has less than 50 charge cycles.

the acronym is NAC for N-Acetyl-L-Cystenine (the L is implied). With ACC you could theoretically have S-acetyl-L-Cystenine and that not the antidote !

I did try that weird linux on fat32 distribution but like you I completely forgot its name. I remember that I installed it because I wanted to run bitchx and be able to send ping of death!

2 * 1000 is 2000 ;)

I think you meant 2**1000

the syntax for formatting ate your star https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

For anyone else who, like me a moment ago, doesn't know the meaning of ** but is curious: it's how many (but not all) programming languages express "to the power of", aka 2**1000 = 2^1000

> 2**1000 = 2^1000

The reason for using `**` is that `^` is widely used for bitwise exclusive-or. So commonly `2**1000 != 2^1000`!

I think Fortran used ** because EBCDIC didn't have ^ or uparrow. ABC and Python followed Fortran rather than C on this point. units(1) supports both.

BCD, actually, given that Fortran dates from the mid-1950s. EBCDIC only appeared more or less around Fortran IV, in the early 1960s. Many printers in those days had a 48-character chain/train. After upper-case letters, digits, and a few essential punctuation marks (like . and ,), you weren't left with many options. The 60-character set of PL/I was a luxury back then, let alone lower case.

Hmm, I guess you're right. Also EBCDIC does have ^ apparently, though not ↑: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC#Code_page_layout

But IBM's BCD character sets, including the 48-character ones you allude to, didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCD_(character_encoding)#Examp... (though Honeywell's did)

There are a lot of decisions in Fortran that stem from the absence of useful characters. .LT., .LE., .EQ., .NE., .GT., and .GE. is another.

C uses ^ for bitwise xor and a function for exponentiation, though.

No, C does not have an exponentiation operator! Possibly you meant "and not a function for exponentiation".

I should have said "followed Fortran rather than BASIC".

I meant exactly what I said. C uses a function for exponentiation. Nothing that uses ^ for powers follows C's lead.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/numeric/math/pow.html

Oh, I interpreted "a function for exponentiation" as being part of a list of things C uses ^ for. It didn't even occur to me that the sentence had an alternative parsing where it was part of a list of things C uses. C does indeed use a function for exponentiation. And time flies like an arrow!

He's explaining that C was not the reason for picking * over ^

Interesting, thanks!

And != means ≠

Oh that's why i did not get any upvotes /i

Wow, I didn't know that you could write

  like
    this
      for
        code
          blocks

It’s been around since at least occam, maybe longer

If they achieve their goals; I don't know of any tech company I would trust with a direct write access to my brain.

I shudder to think what capability the execute bit would grant.

You literally give them write access to your brain every time you interact with social media.

you have the causality reversed....

Go on