Thanks for the tip regarding Fossify, they do seem to have a nice clean set of apps!

Meh. He only had $23.50 in his account.

I’m all for the “SLEEP 8 HOURS” bit though. I need more of that in my life.

You had one job.

Two percent of the population is actually pretty huge. Historically, 3.5% has been the threshold after which change has almost always happened.

Hey, I think I’ve seen you before! Didn’t you play in the “look at all those chickens” movie? Love your work.

If the F-35 was made solely out of aluminium, like an equal-mass paperweight, the price of the raw material would be about 0.013 million USD per aircraft. In reality it sells for about 80 million. I doubt it’s price will soar because of the cost of aluminum.

We just let them do it.

I hope my country stops participating in Eurovision. There’s no saving it.

I get the impression this is a video-only thing because you need multiple vantage points of the scene. You can still extract a single frame in the end of course (like the article itself does), but you’ll need to shift around meaningful distances, like attack submarines do with Target Motion Analysis.

That’s 25 attoseconds, no?.. If so, that’s impressive.

The power record holder right now is the Măgurele laser in Romania, at 10 PW, but it lasts a thousand times longer, at 25 femtoseconds I believe. I can’t find clear info on pulse duration anywhere. They do intend to decrease pulse durations it seems.

Porque no los dos?

I think “blitzkrieg” matches somewhat: don’t stop to engage every stronghold, just drive around them, isolate them, and cut off their support networks.

That’s the longest time I’ve ever heard someone take to build up a comeback. Be on your guard!

This doesn’t make sense to me. The ultimate value of shares is in the dividends they represent, no? If there are no dividends ever, what are they sharing in? Is it just a postponement until future dividends? A share in control of activities?

I get that there’ll be speculation that will keep values increasing, and selling can net a profit, but what does the last share-holder get?

Twitter links get a downvote from me, sorry.

In Soviet America, a wrong turn takes your life.

Feeding money to Russia was madness and had to be stopped as a priority. Nothing ridiculous about it.

Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

TL;DR

If you’re short on time, here’s the key engineering story:

• McIlroy’s first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.

• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.

• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.

• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.

• McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.

• Using Golomb’s code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.

• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.