Hacker News Reader

Zaakon Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Yes, thank you. That's exactly the one I was thinking of.

Zaakon Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

That reminds me of a story about Richard Feynman visiting a physics class outside the US. The diplomat types were very upset with him for pointing out that their books and classes were terrible, teaching things like the energy of a ball going down an incline without taking rotational kinetic energy into account.

Zaakon SpaceX aims to put man on Mars in 10-20 years

If you boost something up to orbital velocity and LEO altitude but don't circularize, its orbit still intersects the atmosphere, if not the earth. The delta-v required to keep from falling back down would be better used to push into whatever transfer orbit you want.

Zaakon SpaceX aims to put man on Mars in 10-20 years

The propulsion system from Earth to Mars could just be a scaled-up version of the systems we've been using to send probes to Mars for decades.

Yes, it would be wisest to send at least two trips, so that equipment can be ready for the crew when they arrive. (Especially if you're making return-trip fuel from local resources.)

Radiation is a problem for a manned mission to Mars, but I understand the numbers work out to less lifetime risk of cancer than smoking. (So send former smokers without any cigs and you've improved their expected lifespan.)

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct and its descendants. Many of the problems have been solved, with an expected 10-year timeline.

Zaakon Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?

Good point.

On a related note, I would like to see a "perverse" compiler and library which exhibits random behavior when undefined behavior is specified by the language.

Zaakon Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?

Reduce is trivially parallelizable if you can ensure your operation is associative, but you have to work in languages like Epigram and Agda to guarantee that.

(retract "he's wrong")

Zaakon Inside Google's Secretive Data Centers

Essentially what happened was you had to have a manager approved justification for running a windows machine, whereas previously it was left entirely up to user choice.

Google also has a habit of releasing information to the public as if it's current, whereas it's actually what they were doing a few years previously. I wouldn't be surprised if that video segment was three or four years old.

Zaakon The one second war: Finding a lasting solution to the leap seconds problem

Wouldn't that make a mess though?

Zaakon [dead]

> In fact my last department (in the US) lost a promising prospective PhD student to France after she realised she'd probably have her PhD three or four years earlier if she did it in Paris instead of California.

I'm really glad to hear that. Hopefully it will keep happening, and US universities will realize that they have to fix things if they want to keep the best candidates.

Zaakon [dead]

The lasting record of science is made of publications. The process of science is made of people. If our current system is making scientists who are too specialized to do the science we will need in the future, we're doing it wrong.

Zaakon Atmosphere's worth of dry ice found at Mars south pole

Re-spinning the core is unlikely to be the best approach. Winding a giant cable around the equator and pushing a giant current through it is probably within our capacity, though orders of magnitude more expensive than any project ever attempted.

Zaakon Fukushima: Radiation Detection Using Artifacts in CCCD Image?

Also make sure to get a variety of angles to the suspected source. The sensor is pretty planar, so will probably have a much smaller response when it's edge-on versus facing directly towards or away.

Zaakon World’s 2nd deadliest poison, in an aquarium store near you

IIRC it took like six months to kill her though.

Zaakon Trying Haskell

On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, a type declaration cannot possibly tell you /why/ unless the type system encodes a significant portion of our physical world.

This encoding is left as an exercise for the reader.

Zaakon Trying Haskell

That's a very interesting question. I made a stab at removing the invariant enforcement from the AVL tree code, but it was more involved than I expected.

In this specific case, it doesn't matter much since compilation takes less than a second on my underpowered netbook. I'm curious whether it's an issue for a program of significant size.

Zaakon The US Government Keeps Harassing a UW Researcher Who Speaks for WikiLeaks

All seriousness aside, how do we fed-ex ourselves across borders?

Zaakon The Google Vortex

Agreed. Some people choose to leave Google to start their own companies. Some people choose to stay in the situation they have at Google. Choice is generally a good thing.

Zaakon The Distribution of Library Book Circulation Is Not a Power Law

Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

Zaakon ZX81: Small black box of computing desire

Probably the best way to get something like that would be to build it yourself. It may not be the kind of project you're looking for though.

Zaakon GCFS: a Garbage-Collected Filesystem for Linux

To avoid race conditions you would need a way to create a pre-detached directory.

Zaakon The mother of all Android malware has arrived

Does Google take that fee, or does it go to the mobile carrier?

Zaakon Google IPO? No Thanks (2004)

Is there anyone currently giving the sort of advice that motley fool used to give before they changed for the worse?

Zaakon How should I get started with programming? Which language should I learn first?

   (1) DO INTERCAL
       DO FORGET #1
       PLEASE GIVE UP

Zaakon Color wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works

It's possible you're an anomalous trichromat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Anomalous_trich...

Zaakon Paul Graham's Dilemma

Everyone has a different level of risk aversion. Some people want to play it very safe, and others are willing to take large risks if the possible rewards appear worth it.

Zaakon A Homebrew CPU from scratch

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs/

Zaakon BofA mails your PIN to the same address as the card it unlocks

I live in the US, and I don't think I've ever seen a chip+pin card.

Most stores will take ATM/debit cards (using PIN) as an alternative to credit cards (using signature), but the ATM/debit cards use magnetic stripe like the credit cards.

Zaakon How do emulators work and how are they written?

Also, the 6502 has been reverse engineered from micrographs, so perfect transistor-level emulation can be done.

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=517

Zaakon A call for industry-wide pixel-doubling

Economy of scale for hdtv displays.

Zaakon Why U.S. Galaxy S Phones run Android 2.1

I agree. Though the only unlocked vanilla android phones I know of are the ones from Google. Good devices, but limited selection.