Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Interesting to consider the total complexity of that approach though.

An iterative fibonacci solution runs in linear time. Calculating the N'th fibonacci number requires O(N) serial operations.

A fully parallel, recursive solution without memoization requires that each value in the sequence is computed more than once. Consider the example of fib(4):

   fib(4) = fib(3) + fib(2)
   fib(3) = fib(2) + fib(1)
   fib(2) = fib(1) + fib(0)
You can see, that if we run this in parallel, the value of fib(1) has to be calculated twice. As the tree of operation branches out, more and more duplicate calculations are required.

A quick google suggests that the time complexity of the recursive approach is O(2^N).

Comment · 5 years ago
You don't need any specific instructions. The hex encoded double contains the final binary representation of the floating point number. So no conversion is required to load it, except maybe for swapping around bytes on some architectures. Conceptually:

    double v;
    memcpy(&v, "\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\xe4\x94\x40", sizeof(v)); // LE
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Does the chance of seeing a vaccine-defeating mutation increase after injecting parts of the population with a less-effective vaccine (compared to the baseline scenario of no vaccinations at all)? What mechanism is responsible for that?

The answer is only obvious to me if both the original virus variant and the mutation compete for some kind of shared resource. But that shouldn't be the case here, right?

Comment · 5 years ago
Unless I'm misinterpreting the tweet, she suggests that a partial vaccination campaign will somehow lead to a higher rate of mutations?

As a non-biologist, it's not immediately obvious why that would be the case. What's the mechanism that increases the chance of mutations in vaccinated hosts?

Comment · 6 years ago
Maybe that was done to prove the point that the language, unlike most other programming languages, does not have any built-in English assumptions?

Also I think the examples are actually quite comprehensible even to non french speakers.

Comment · 6 years ago
There is https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

Most CSV files do not follow this standard of course. But you could normalize all CSV files to RFC4180 (or any other consistent format) as the first step of your processing pipeline.

Comment · 6 years ago
Well you're right, I misremembered. Also I just looked it up and I think it was actually a Panda and not a Punto (only owned it for a short time around 2009 and it was already close to worthless when I bought it). Still, I think it doesn't change the point much: at 500kg you're closer to a small car than to the lightweight moped for which these exceptions were made...
Comment · 6 years ago
Some (maybe only slightly related or relevant) background:

In Germany, there is a pretty serious problem with dangerous driving and street racing: In the last ten or so years, there has been long string of downtown races that have killed numerous innocent bystanders in all major German cities.

This went so far that recently the German law has been changed and killing somebody while participating in a street race is now treated as "first degree murder". This year, the first conviction under this law was upheld by the German "supreme court". Still, street racing is on the rise.

Now, the uncomfortable truth is that the demographics of the offenders skew towards young German men that do not consider themselves to be culturally German or even European.

I am not trying to enter a debate on the how much value different cultures place on life.

What I am trying to do is to point out that when you consider how the human mind works, it is almost inevitable that these issues are starting to appear to be interlinked. What you have here is a very hot debate on road safety, which is already a topic that is very emotionally charged for a lot of people. Considering that there does actually seem to be a cultural correlation, it is somewhat predictable, if sad, that the public debate around here is now slowly starting to turn into an cultural/ethnic argument.

My personal opinion is that we need a massive crackdown on street racing and dangerous driving to prevent this topic from turning into yet another ethnic fault line in Germany.

Comment · 6 years ago
This "tiny cube" weighs 500kg. For comparison, the first car I owned, a Fiat Punto, also had 500kg.

In hindsight, I'm happy that I wasn't allowed to drive it at age 14 without a license; I'm pretty sure that I would have killed somebody...

Comment · 6 years ago
Unemployment in Germany didn't go up much because they reclassified the "unemployed" as "furloughed". The end result is the same though, recipients are living entirely off government assistance.

7.3 million germans are currently fourloughed. That is 21% of the workforce!

Comment · 6 years ago
I also feel like the project recommendations on Github have become really... stale.

At some point, the sidebar would display a new set of projects almost every time you hit refresh. Now, there hardly seems to be any rotation at all; I've been seeing the same projects for weeks. Somebody should check if the cron job for updating the list has crashed :)

Comment · 6 years ago
In Germany there are, as far as I know, also a number of ways to get an exception. The normal way to attend Uni if you did not get the right Abitur from your high school however is to simply repeat high school from age 18 to ~21. This is called "Zweiter Bildungsweg" (Second Path to Education).

There is the colloquium doctum in the Netherlands, but you're still at a relative disadvantage if you're not put on the right track (VWO) as a child. So while the Dutch do a lot of things much better than the Germans, I think this one is only marginally improved.

Also cost of living in the Netherlands is far from cheap and as far as I know the Uni doesn't really help with that. So I'm still not sure how one would go about completing five or six years of full-time studies here without any financial assistance, either from their parents or by taking out a loan?

At the end of the day, it's always possible to go to Uni somehow, even if you had the bad luck to get sorted into the wrong bucket as a child. But it obviously takes much more effort than would have been required if you were placed in the right high school from the start. And even once you are admitted to Uni, not having a steady stream of passive income puts you at a huge disadvantage compared to most of the other students that do have it.

So my point is that, even in Europe, having wealthy and well-educated parents still puts you at a huge advantage when it comes to education. It's not exactly a solved problem here either.

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