Hacker News Reader

atondwalon Light completely stopped for a record-breaking minute

Yes, conservation of energy.

atondwalon A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95

Unless it's about text editors. Then you can't get _anything_ done if you don't use ed.

atondwalon Faster Than the Speed of Light?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here, but a lot of physicists were trekkies before they were physicists.

> Physicist has an idea -> Science fiction author writes idea -> Future physicist now has (dumbed down version of) idea.

atondwalon Useful Unix commands for data science

    echo "1\n2\n3\n" | tr '\n' + | bc

atondwalon Link between quantum physics and game theory found

No, it's that Bayesian players can take advantage of corellated quantum oracles in ways that give them acess to new equilibria in a way that preserves some of the old equilibria, such that the max of the new set of equilibria is always equal to or greater than the max of the old set. Which is rather non-obvious.

In addition, your statements "quantum-entangled systems can transfer information useful to game players" is wrong, or at least misleading. Entangled particles can't communicate information any better than classical methods. (Well, unless you're concerned about privacy, but that's a whole other issue which doesn't effect the game...)

atondwalon Study: Reddit used by 6% of adult Internet users

Here's my subscription list, ranked by popularity (you might want to read it backwards...)

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=tMxvZrRQ

atondwalon 15-year-old girl invents flashlight powered by the heat of your hand

You're probably just the only two who read the comments...

atondwalon What could the NSA do with a quantum computer?

> solving such equations with classic computers is done in something like O(n^3) or O(Cn^2) with a huge C, but quantum computers could reduce this to O(log n) or something like that.

If you're referring to the algorithm I think you're referring to, you only get the speedup if your linear system is Hermitian and has O(polylog(n)) nonzero entries, which doesn't really help us if we care about things like weather modelling.

atondwalon Texas teen makes violent joke during video game, is jailed

>He made the comment on Facebook not within a League of Legends game.

And here I thought we had a deterministic algorithm for putting LoL player behind bars...

atondwalon Sublime Text 3 Public Beta

You don't really need multiple cursors in vim. Visual mode is much more powerful than dropping a bunch of cursors at the right places in lines or blocks of text, and if that's not enough, :s commands handle pretty much every usecase. If you're _still_ unsatisfied and want some corner case that's best satisfied by multiple cursors, then you can use the plugin. I installed it thinking it might be useful, but I still haven't found a use case where I prefer multiple cursors to visual mode or ex commands.

atondwalon Google Hangouts adds remote desktop support

> I don't see much difference between it and GTalk utility-wise.

You see online/idle/offline/mobile/mobile-idle icons and status messages in hangouts?

atondwalon Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays

No, he's saying that what's stopping the average artist to get a high a royalty percentage as Justin Timberlake and stopping pandora from paying radically less for the music is collusion among the major record labels.

atondwalon Google Gay Marriage

Swastikas are a little different though. It's been decoratively used for apolitical reasons for thousands of years on all sorts of things, but was only really flown as a flag starting with the NAZIs in the 1920s. There's a lot of architecture, even in Europe involving pre-NAZI swastikas. And before and even shortly after the NAZI party adopted it, it was used a a good luck symbol in the west (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in_...).

atondwalon Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data

porn. It gets transcoded enough that the stego could fly through as just another lossy transcoding. Better yet, lossy transcode it to something and back, then stego, as long as your target has a copy of the same transcoder and knows what you're using as reference. You should also be careful to strip metadata as to which transcoder you're using. They're PETABYTES of the stuff floating around.

And if you're willing to pay a few bucks for private cams, there's no way anyone else can have a copy of your screencap, so no amount of clever transcoding will get them a reference copy.

atondwalon In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

> These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.

Do you never do sanity checks? If you want to compute the number of drives you need for GMail, you estimate, do the computation, make sure they agree, and then have someone check your work.

atondwalon How cash secretly rules surveillance policy

sendspace link for those without springer access and weak google-fu

http://www.sendspace.com/file/77f7sn

atondwalon What happens when the Secret Service uses a NSL on you

>The constitution is not a suicide pact.

Isn't it? It seems like it was intended to be a set of fully strict provisions, and if they didn't work, everyone had to agree on changing it.

atondwalon Math notes to take you from one year of college calculus to grad student level

This is extrordanarily good. For a similar, but more in depth covering of the same material I reccomend

[Osborne --- Advanced Mathematical Techniques: for Scientists and Engineers](http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Mathematical-Techniques-Scien...)

and for a much more indepth, but less pedagogically useful (more of a reference) [Arfken --- Mathematical Methods for Physicists, Seventh Edition: A Comprehensive Guide](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Physicists-Sevent...)

In addition anything by Penrose tends to target a lay audience, but quickly build up formalism and cover concepts interesting to even practicing physicists.

atondwalon Math notes to take you from one year of college calculus to grad student level

Well, there's a difference between holding-a-grad-degree level, and being a grad student. On the other hand if the implication was that undergrad degrees teach your relatively little in comparison to what they should, then yes.

atondwalon Lenovo splits the Think brand into a separate group

Alternately all the important bits of pacman output are in /var/log/pacman.log and everything that _requires_ manual intervention is posted on the archlinux.org site. You should not update before checking the arch news.

atondwalon Lenovo splits the Think brand into a separate group

If all the initscripts and kernel updates break Arch, then you probably made a mistake or two in some conf file installing it. (eg not having /boot correctly in the fstab will break you on every kerenl update, for example)