thisrod

45 ms·

541.
by thisrod 16y ago
I studied physics at a great university, got paid for it, and graduated as first author on a PRL. I've used everything I learnt, and things from courses I failed at the time. If you're doing the right course for the right reasons, it's ver
542.
by thisrod 16y ago
I used to work on this, and I don't get the "recent" part of the title. I knew most things the article mentions a decade ago, and the rest wouldn't have surprised me much. What a pity.
543.
by thisrod 16y ago
Could you please resubmit this, with the link done properly?
544.
by thisrod 16y ago
That works for my Gmail account. What about my HN posts? What if I don't have a reliable backup server of my own? Web 2.0 needs to abstract backup the way web 1.0 abstracted get and put. Venti does exactly that, and git might work too.
545.
by thisrod 16y ago
> rule number 1 of software: don't lose your user's data That doesn't scale to the scope of Gmail. The appropriate precautions to preserve old medical records differ in kind from those appropriate for old shopping lists. I'd like my Go
546.
by thisrod 16y ago
People have been thinking about induction for millenia - this essay describes what its author figured out in around 5 minutes. If you're interested, read Jeffries and Popper instead.
547.
by thisrod 16y ago
The original report is at http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20036542-250.html This is an obvious idea - didn't usenet do it? If it was destined to happen, it would have already, so I expect this to fail. It's interesting to ponder why.
548.
by thisrod 16y ago
Ceci and Williams demonstrate that the real problem most women scientists confront is the challenge of combining motherhood with a high-powered science career. The quoted statement is no longer true when "women" and "mother" are replaced
549.
by thisrod 16y ago
Why does scheme have syntax for multiple values at all? (define (g x y z) ...) (call-with-values f g) means the same as (define (g . xs) ...) (apply g (f)), and it's longer . If there's room for extra syntax, I think
550.
by thisrod 16y ago
Summary: the author, who is apparently not familiar with the terms "buggery act", "13th amendment" and "people's republic", realises that freedom ain't free.
551.
by thisrod 16y ago
I think the ultimate tool for understanding regexps is Russ Cox's notes: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ When explained well, the big picture of NFAs and DFAs is bog simple. I'm sure some of the details are messy, but I expect they rarely
552.
by thisrod 16y ago
How about, "Knuth submits!"
553.
by thisrod 16y ago
HN isn't just a Californian site. Many of us live in Australia, or have lived.
554.
by thisrod 16y ago
Scheme code that takes advantage of lexical scope with indefinite extent might qualify: The functions f, g and h use private variables x and y. (define f #f) (define g #f) (define h #f) (let ((x #f) (y #f)) (set! f <<
555.
by thisrod 16y ago
What's the problem? There's one user, it's their data on the drive, and they can do what they want with it. In any case, root isn't the solution. It's a bug in Unix that Plan 9 fixed.
556.
by thisrod 16y ago
There aren't any rules, but the feelings are usually strong ones. Consider the piece of rock in the article. It weighs tons, and has resisted gravity for centuries, so it would take horrible luck for it to fall off while someone was climb
557.
by thisrod 16y ago
You can peel a bandaid off, but you can't drag it along the plane of your skin. Replace the bandaid with a rock flake, the skin with a cliff, and the adhesive with ... best not think about it. In the jargon, "Pull down, not out!" There's a
558.
by thisrod 16y ago
You're right, and that's the point of it. If you play games where one set of moves means you'll certainly survive and win, then you're going to make those moves. It's like playing chess, with a loaded gun beside the board so you could shoo
559.
by thisrod 16y ago
Anathem gets my vote. It's a mystery, with things left for the reader to figure out. These things include where and when it's set, and what genre it's written in. A brilliantly apt form for a novel about science, which makes it hard to
560.
by thisrod 16y ago
Actually, both programs use the same algorithm, but they represent its flow of control very differently. The Pascal program could be written elegantly in any language.
561.
by thisrod 16y ago
Assange claims that Wikileaks would publish his own emails, if anyone submitted them. Presumably none of his correspondents have done so yet.
562.
by thisrod 16y ago
The Australian government will fail to censor the web next year. It has failed every year since 1996, when it first announced its intention to do so. This is smart politics. The government tells Australia's religious kooks that it's on Go
563.
by thisrod 16y ago
Why use a virtual machine when you have a real machine? It takes some cleverness to do safely, but the AI lab are a lot clever, and they've found a way: "Vx32 is a user-mode library that can be linked into arbitrary applications that wish
564.
by thisrod 16y ago
That's different. In Anathem , the world suffered one Manhatten project too many. Governments isolated the geeks and confiscated their toys as a survival measure.
565.
by thisrod 16y ago
"Disk-operating system" makes much more sense with the hyphen.
566.
by thisrod 16y ago
... in Pythagoras's dreams. It ain't so in our universe. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980327b....
567.
by thisrod 16y ago
Can't you get rid of the grid, and connect the cells randomly? I have an notion that Feynman did that, but I don't remember where I heard about it.
568.
by thisrod 16y ago
Does anyone take Ars Technica seriously anymore? The interesting part of this, for me, was the last comment: there's a public-key cypher that can't be broken in an obvious way using Shor's algorithm. That's really good to know.
569.
by thisrod 16y ago
This is not (really) a politics article. Yes it is. If you wanted a group of scientists to work on an urgent problem without distraction, giving their names to a reporter is the last thing you'd do. If, on the other hand, you wanted to b
570.
by thisrod 16y ago
Going by rumours I've heard from snake fanciers, Australian doctors don't like anti-venom as much as they used to. Besides being expensive, it's quite dangerous. They've gotten so good at keeping people alive that it's often safer to let

More ›