Popular Articles (Page 27)
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π Rue de L'Avenir
The Rue de l'Avenir (transl.βStreet of the future) was an electric moving walkway installed at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It ran along the edge of the Exposition site, from the Esplanade of Les Invalides to the Champ de Mars, passing through nine stations along the way, where passengers could board. It was designed by architect Joseph Lyman Silsbee and engineer Max E. Schmidt, designers of The Great Wharf Moving Sidewalk installed at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, the first-ever moving walkway.
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- "Rue de L'Avenir" | 2024-01-05 | 295 Upvotes 118 Comments
π Wikipedia-grounded chatbot βoutperforms all baselinesβ on factual accuracy
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- "Wikipedia-grounded chatbot βoutperforms all baselinesβ on factual accuracy" | 2023-07-17 | 233 Upvotes 177 Comments
π Xv6
xv6 is a modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix in ANSI C for multiprocessor x86 and RISC-V systems. It is used for pedagogical purposes in MIT's Operating Systems Engineering (6.828) course as well as Georgia Tech's (CS 3210) Design of Operating Systems Course, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Delhi and as well as many other institutions.
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- "Xv6" | 2015-11-14 | 350 Upvotes 47 Comments
π Duffs Device
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
Loop unrolling attempts to reduce the overhead of conditional branching needed to check whether a loop is done, by executing a batch of loop bodies per iteration. To handle cases where the number of iterations is not divisible by the unrolled-loop increments, a common technique among assembly language programmers is to jump directly into the middle of the unrolled loop body to handle the remainder. Duff implemented this technique in C by using C's case label fall-through feature to jump into the unrolled body.
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- "Duff's Device" | 2020-05-25 | 145 Upvotes 59 Comments
- "Duffs Device" | 2016-10-21 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Duff's device: do + switch fall-through = loop unrolling" | 2009-08-13 | 16 Upvotes 11 Comments
π Law of Jante
The Law of Jante (Danish: Janteloven) is a code of conduct known in Nordic countries that characterizes not conforming, doing things out of the ordinary, or being overtly personally ambitious as unworthy and inappropriate. The attitudes were first formulated in the form of the ten rules of Jante Law by the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (En flyktning krysser sitt spor, 1933), but the actual attitudes themselves are older. Sandemose portrays the fictional small Danish town Jante, which he modelled upon his native town NykΓΈbing Mors in the 1930s, where nobody was anonymous, which is typical of all small towns and communities.
Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological term to denote a social attitude of disapproval towards expressions of individuality and personal success, it emphasizes adherence to the collective.
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- "Law of Jante" | 2024-07-31 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "The Law of Jante" | 2023-11-19 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Law of Jante" | 2023-05-23 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Law of Jante" | 2017-09-30 | 87 Upvotes 61 Comments
π A Tesla Valve
A Tesla valve, called by Tesla a valvular conduit, is a fixed-geometry passive check valve. It allows a fluid to flow preferentially in one direction, without moving parts. The device is named after Nikola Tesla, who was awarded U.S. Patent 1,329,559 in 1920 for its invention. The patent application describes the invention as follows:
The interior of the conduit is provided with enlargements, recesses, projections, baffles, or buckets which, while offering virtually no resistance to the passage of the fluid in one direction, other than surface friction, constitute an almost impassable barrier to its flow in the opposite direction.
Tesla illustrates this with the drawing, showing one possible construction with a series of eleven flow-control segments, although any other number of such segments could be used as desired to increase or decrease the flow regulation effect.
One computational fluid dynamics simulation of Tesla valves with two and four segments showed that the flow resistance in the blocking (or reverse) direction was about 15 and 40 times greater, respectively, than the unimpeded (or forward) direction. This lends support to Tesla's patent assertion that in the valvular conduit in his diagram, a pressure ratio "approximating 200 can be obtained so that the device acts as a slightly leaking valve".
The Tesla valve is used in microfluidic applications and offers advantages such as scalability, durability, and ease of fabrication in a variety of materials.
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- "Tesla Valve" | 2021-08-12 | 100 Upvotes 40 Comments
- "A Tesla Valve" | 2019-12-18 | 197 Upvotes 42 Comments
π Kasparov versus the World
Kasparov versus the World was a game of chess played in 1999 over the Internet. Conducting the white pieces, Garry Kasparov faced the rest of the world in consultation, with the World Team moves to be decided by plurality vote. Over 50,000 people from more than 75 countries participated in the game.
The host and promoter of the match was the MSN Gaming Zone, with sponsorship from First USA bank. After 62 moves played over four months, Kasparov won the game. Contrary to expectations, the game produced a mixture of deep tactical and strategic ideas, and although Kasparov won, he admitted that he had never expended as much effort on any other game in his life. He later said, "It is the greatest game in the history of chess. The sheer number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess make it the most important game ever played."
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- "Kasparov versus the World" | 2018-04-28 | 256 Upvotes 60 Comments
- "In 1999, Kasparov played chess against 50000 people." | 2008-12-10 | 33 Upvotes 25 Comments
π Unsolved Problems in Economics
This is a list of some of the major unsolved problems, puzzles, or questions in economics. Some of these are theoretical in origin and some of them concern the inability of orthodox economic theory to explain an empirical observation.
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- "Unsolved Problems in Economics" | 2022-05-17 | 157 Upvotes 237 Comments
π OK Soda
OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity. After the soda did not sell well in select test markets, it was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nationwide distribution. The drink's slogan was "Things are going to be OK."
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- "OK Soda" | 2020-04-07 | 254 Upvotes 128 Comments
π Flanderization
Flanderization is the process through which a fictional character's essential traits are exaggerated over the course of a serial work. The term flanderization was coined by TV Tropes in reference to Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, who was caricatured over the show's run from a good neighbor who was religious among other characteristics into an evangelical "bible-thumper". Flanderization has been analyzed as an aspect of serial works, especially television comedies, that shows a work's decline.
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- "Flanderization" | 2022-09-09 | 251 Upvotes 131 Comments