Darts, Dice, and Coins
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice. Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
Hasnain says:
"This writeup is my attempt to give a quick survey of various approaches for simulating a loaded die, ranging from simple techniques that are highly impractical to the very optimized and efficient alias method. My hope here is to capture different intuitions about the problem and how each highlights some new aspect of simulating loaded dice. For each approach, my goal is to explore the motivating idea, core algorithm, correctness proof, and runtime analysis (in terms of time, memory, and randomness required)."
This is a really interesting look into stats and randomness.
Posted on 2014-03-28T21:43:45+0000
Introducing Michael Abrash, Oculus Chief Scientist
The Path to the Metaverse I'm tremendously excited to join Oculus, and when I think back, it's astonishing how unlikely the path to this moment is. I've told most of the parts of this story before, but never all together, and the narrative, now spanning twenty years, just keeps getting more remarkab...
Hasnain says:
Abrash and Carmack working together again. This is huge.
Posted on 2014-03-28T20:51:40+0000
Under the Hood: warp, a fast C and C++ preprocessor
Meet the engineers who code Facebook
Hasnain says:
This is a really good blog post on speeding up the C/C++ preprocessor.
Posted on 2014-03-28T20:43:43+0000
This Little-Known iOS Feature Will Change the Way We Connect | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
A new iOS app called FireChat is blowing up in the App Store. But it's not the app itself that's causing such a stir; it's the underlying networking technology it taps into.
Hasnain says:
Sensationalist headline aside, it's cool that iOS supports mesh networking. I did not know this.
Posted on 2014-03-28T17:24:47+0000
THREES - A tiny puzzle that grows on you.
It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more...
Hasnain says:
"It’s all in good fun, at least we’d like to think so, but try as our logical brains might, we still got the same “cloning feeling". Especially when people called Threes, a game we poured over for nearly a year and a half, a clone of 2048. Others rifled off that they thought 2048 was a better game than Threes. That all stung pretty bad. We know Threes is a better game, we spent over a year on it. And obviously, Threes is the reason 2048 exists."
Posted on 2014-03-28T16:49:18+0000
mbcrawfo/GenericMakefile
GenericMakefile - A generic makefile for use with small/medium C and C++ projects.
What it's like to use Haskell
By Andy Friesen Since early 2013, we at IMVU have used Haskell to build several of the REST APIs that power our service. When the company started, we chose PHP as our application server language, i...
Well, I'm Back: Introducing rr
Bugs that reproduce intermittently are hard to debug with traditional techniques because single stepping, setting breakpoints, inspecting program state, etc, is all a waste of time if the program execution you're debugging ends up not even exhibiting the bug. Even when you can reproduce a bug consis...
Hasnain says:
This sounds like a really really useful tool.
"Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr."
Posted on 2014-03-26T05:32:54+0000
Microsoft makes source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows available to public - The Official...
News and perspectives covering the top stories, events and activities from Microsoft. The content for this blog includes the official information and stories from all of Microsoft's primary businesses.
Hasnain says:
"On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time."
This is a good gesture. Though the license doesn't allow redistribution from what I can tell.
Posted on 2014-03-25T17:19:10+0000
Haskell for all: Introductions to advanced Haskell topics
Many people bemoan the sharp divide between experts and beginning Haskell programmers. One thing I've noticed is that "advanced" Haskell topics all have one thing in common: there exists only one good tutorial on that topic and only the experts have found it. This post is a collection of links to wh...