demallien

That link was the most interesting thing I've read on HN all day. Thank you!

My favorite quote: "As a historical remark, it's interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn't something that occurred to people gradually, after they'd already been using computers for decades. Instead it occurred to them immediately, the minute they started talking about computers themselves. People like Leibniz and Babbage and Lovelace and Turing and von Neumann understood from the beginning that a computer wouldn't just be another steam engine or toaster -- that, because of the property of universality (whether or not they called it that), it's difficult even to talk about computers without also talking about ourselves."

Oh, do you want to know a strategy for 2048? You won't win every time but you should get passed that score regularly with it....

Probably not. The aircraft would have been at the extreme edge of the radar's range, and in an area that is probably not getting scanned terribly often.

Jindalee uses a directable beam to scan the area or interest. It takes hours to do a full sweep of its entire range (bear in mind that with over the horizon radars you have to do a 2D sweep, not the 1D sweep of a standard line of site radar). Generally speaking, the radar tends to be targeted on areas of specific interest, not just randomly sweeping (the sweep pattern depends on current threat profiles). Maybe if Malaysian authorities alerted Australia quickly enough they may have pointed the beam to the right area, but as I understand it the alert didn't start going out until much later. Disclaimer: ex RAAF radar engineer...

1) hotels don't use keys. The dodgy hotel guest can be shut out with the stroke of a key at the reception desk computer.

2) when things go wrong, hotels have staff on hand to deal with the situation.

3) hotels have insurance for when things go badly wrong.

All of these things cost money, which is partly why hotels are more expensive than AirBnB. The author assumed a lot of risk when subletting through AirBnB and is now complaining when the risk went wrong. I have very little sympathy for him / her.

The people I do have sympathy for are fellow residents of the apartment block, who had a reasonable expectation that their building wouldn't be turned into the site of a free for all sex party. They didnt get any say in this, and didn't receive any compensation. That is unfair.

Yes, exactly. I fully believe that there isn't much discrimination in tech at the entry-level. On the other hand, after 20 years in the industry, I have never seen a woman promoted internally. I have seen women climb up the ladder by changing jobs, getting recruited into a higher position, but women never seem to get picked internally to go into senior engineer or team leader positions. That has got to have a major impact on salary by the end of a woman's career.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the Mac update system actually uses this code - if it starts failing they can't send out any more signed updates to people. Far better to wait one or two days more to make sure that you're not about to break some of the more important functionality in the OS, I would think.

I guess Google doesn't give a fuck about security either <end sarcasm>

I really hope that this kind of publicity will finally make Android phone manufacturers to get off their butts and provide better firmware updating for their devices.

Also, the article doesn't say, but does anyone know how Google provides patches for security vulnerabilities? Can the patch be applied against all versions of the firmware that contained the bug, or does the manufacturer actually have to upgrade the whole firmware? If it's the second, Google shares responsibility for the poor security situation.

Well that sucks.

Is anyone here a big follower of the Chinese space programme? I follow "western" space efforts pretty closely, but with heavy military involvement, a preoccupation with face-saving, and the language barrier, I find the Chinese programme nigh on impossible to track. Do they have the same sort of spending split that NASA has with respect to the manned v. unmanned programmes? Or does their unmanned programme get substantially more than a pittance? As things stand, I'm not even able to tell if they are actually serious about space outside of military use, or if it's all just a prestige play. Anyone care to fill in some detail?

Think of it more as a Venn diagram with the two circles mostly overlapping. The radius of each circle will be bigger than the distance between the centres of the two circles... That's what I'm trying to say.

Yes. I didn't read the whole paper, just the abstract, but I would not be surprised to learn (based on previous studies) that the difference between men and women is smaller than the variance amongst men, or the variance amongst women, which is the case for nearly all non-primary sexual differences between men and women.

I really think you are misinterpreting what pg said, and I say that as a card-carrying equal opportunity feminist (you can check my HN comment history for proof). He is not saying that women should be not encouraged, he is saying that encouraging women at ycombinator application time is not the solution, and that the solution needs to be applied earlier, because a prerequisite of an ycombinator founder is that they be a hacker, and a hacker needs ten years experience.

It's like getting upset that there are no 5'2 guys playing in the NBA. Although height is not a job requirement, if you don't have it it is highly unlikely that you will get the job, unless you can demonstrate that you have other skills to make up for height (speed, highly accurate shooting, and a 5' vertical jump for example). To bring the analogy back to ycombinator, I'm pretty confident that a woman that shows up with only 6 months experience hacking, but she already has a decent chunk of her product built, that the ycombinator crew will consider her application very seriously, because she would have already demonstrated that her lack if experience was not a handicap to her hacking.

No, there is no secret project sucking up the engineering resources for the simple reason that we know where the engineering resources have been spent. iPad Air. iPad mini retina. Ios7. Mavericks. iPhone 5s. Mac Pro.

That's a big bunch of products to roll out in one year. Which does not mean that we won't see something different, like a 20" tablet, or Kinect style controls on a new Apple TV, but the fact is that Apple have released a large number of best in breed products this year, so we don't need to speculate on where engineering resources have been spent - the answer is right in front of us.

Nice. Is that O(e^n)?

Out of curiosity, why do you divide the rand() by 100 before applying the mod?

Ok, I can think straight up of one huge use case. With 64 bit integers, I can blend all four colour channels of a pixel in one hit. For graphics operations this is a huge performance boost. (For those unfamiliar with the concept, you allocate 16 bits of the integer to each of rgba, which are only 8 bit values. The extra 8 bits per channel allows you to handle overflow on operations, which means you can do an op in all four channels simultaneously).

I find UML Class diagrams useful for a one-look document describing the overall architecture of a piece of software. Where they are weak is that you really do need a couple of paragraphs of plain English describing each class as well, and there's not really anywhere to put that on a UML Class diagram. The other really useful diagram in UML is the sequence diagram. If you write out the Sequence diagrams for a few key processes in your software, you've gone along way towards giving a roadmap to people that need to get in and modify the code. These are both documentation use-cases though. Using UML as a design tool (other than very informally on a whiteboard) seems wrong to me.

Where on Earth do people learn to write this crap? Someone must be teaching it, because it's extremely prevalent, particularly from people in marketing.

One if the minor joys of my life is that as a native English speaker leaving in France, people often ask me to "correct the English" of press releases. When I run into word salad like your example I just tell my interlocutor that I don't understand what they are trying to say. After many minutes of them explaining, I rewrite the paragraph in plain English :) begone marketing-speak, I hereby banish thee to the low gates of Hell!

Nah, the big black box thing only works if you haven't left a bunch if other less mysterious crap lying around. If we colonise the Moon, we'll have to leave the monolith elsewhere. Callisto or Ganymede look like likely customers... Though quite frankly we're starting to get to the point where we've left enough stuff lying around that our entire solar system's mystery quotient has been seriously compromised...

It's not so simple in real life. I use this style of error-handling for only one type of project: a library with unknown users. In that case, as I can't make assumptions about the existence of better error handling systems, it gives the most flexible result. But at a price, I know have to document the error codes, and I had damned well better also provide APIs that allow my client to meaningfully recover from the error.

In most I have worked on, this type of error handling is completely inadequate. Think multithreaded applications. The code that needs to handle the error your code just generated isn't in the call stack. This happens very often in my experience, and I have found that the best solution is to post some kind of notification message rather than returning an error code. This creates a dependency on the notification system though, so it's not always the correct solution.

The thing that I dislike the most in your example was when you propagated the error from function a out of function b. my most robust code mostly uses void functions. Error codes are only used in cases where the user can actually do some meaningful action in response to the error, and feNkly this is rarely the case. Instead I try as much as possible to correctly handle errors without propagation. It frees up the user of my APIs from having to worry about errors, and in my opinion thus should be a design goal of any API.

Preaching? Hardly. My first paragraph was all about how India is going to be one if the countries hit the hardest by climate change. Once you understand that, you have to try and come up for an explanation as to why they are acting against their own interest. India needs more developed countries to stop polluting, and I really don't see how throwing a spanner in the works does not seem to me to be a winning strategy for convincing the big polluters to stop. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they have a really cunning plan, but we're talking about a country that got into a nuclear arms race with its neighbour, so I'm thinking that we're not talking about diplomatic geniuses playing a game if geopolitical chess. I would be happy to be wrong, but in the mean time my money is on the Indian government doing stupid things for base political considerations.

Actually India is going to be hard-hit by climate change on several fronts. Firstly, many parts of southern India are low-lying and will be affected by rising sea levels. Then there's the effect that India is in the tropical zone - they've already experienced devastating monsoons and this is only predicted to get worse (see Typhoon Yolanda) as time goes by. Lastly, those glaciers aren't far away, they're right there in the Himalayas - India can expect to have major problems with drinking water supplies as those glaciers melt.

I'm not up with Indian politics, but I rather suspect that the current refusal to deal with emissions is more about climate change denialism mixed in with a sense of anti-colonial defiance than anything else. Don't forget that it's actually easier, politically speaking, for a developing country such as India to adopt renewable energy than it is for the developed world, goodness knows they have the engineers to make it happen! We need baseload power, our society has been constructed expecting it to exist, but as Indian populations get electricity, it's not going to be a major drama if electricity supply is intermittent - that's still way better than no electricity at all.

For info, even in a completely "nominal" launch there are holds. This is particularly true when you have a tight launch window. The idea is to build some slack into the countdown to allow for the possibility if correcting any unforeseen problems. This is possible because at certain points in the countdown you can safely wait for fairly long durations. So the countdown is started early with respect to its launch window, and if any minor problems crop up they can be corrected during the planned pauses without slipping the launch time, and hence missing the launch window.

You're right, Tesla doesn't have a 1mm steel sheet beneath the battery - it has a 5mm thick sheet [1]: "Musk explained that damage to the armor plating on the bottom of the vehicle was inflicted by contact with debris of a specific shape that resulted in a lever action, puncturing the bottom of the Model S. He noted that 25 tons of force would be required to make the three-inch-deep puncture in the quarter-inch-thick armor plating."

[1]http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319728

You weren't asked for a definition of "felony" you were asked a reasonable question about what you meant by "negligeable felony" - most likely because most of us would be willing to accept someone done for shoplifting a pack of cigarettes when they were 17 (as an example). Why are you dodging the question? At least to me, it makes you seem like a shifty politician trying to hide her agenda.

If Mail thinks that an email is spam, it doesn't load images by default.

I don't know what you mean by progress (you may already be at a level that is considered quite strong by a non-chess player), and I'm not a brilliant chess player myself, but my personal experience was that I very quickly progressed at the beginning, just by learning a decent selection of game openings. If you know enough of them to a decent depth, you first 5-6 moves can be made very quickly without sacrificing position. If you're playing against someone that hasn't studied openings, you have a good chance of creating an insurmountable lead in those first 5-6 moves, as well as saving time for thinking later in the game.

If you're playing against a good player, at least you won't immediately cede the game in the opening.

The next step that I found helpful was to play against a computer, but to have a real board set up, where I could play through different options to see where they lead. Here you have no time limit, so you can really take your time. I found that if I forced myself to take a minimum of five minutes of doing this, I could regularly beat the computer (in this respect it seems a bit binary - at a given difficulty setting, the computer beats you every time, until one day you skill edges past the computer, and now you beat it every time - there doesn't seem to be a phase where the outcome is unsure).

These two tactics advanced my game to a point where I could win about 50% of the time on blitz-chess sites - the good players would still thrash me, and I would completely thrash novices. Getting better from that point seems more difficult though, and seems to revolve around sinking massive amounts of time into the habit. Increasing your opening library knowledge gets exponentially expensive. Improving your mid-game analysis speed also seems to be very slow (although this seems to be linear, not like the opening library). I stopped developing chess at this point because I realized that I wasn't prepared to spend the time needed to become a competitive chess player - I'm good enough that I can beat most non-regular chess players, and that's good enough for me...

I see your point, but this sort of work would be coming more from the makers of stuxnet than the makers of health insurance websites...

I'm guessing that many Apple Maps users don't use Maps in that way, but more for finding a specific address. Personally, on my iPhone if I want to find a business I do it through Yelp, which comes with the added bonus of being integrated with Siri. You can ask for an itinerary from there and it shows it in Maps, it's all very easy as a workflow.

For example, living in Paris, if I want to go to the CNIT (a shopping centre located at La Defense), Apple Maps itself refuses to give me the address. But if I ask the Yelp app, it points me straight to it, and from there I click on a link and I have my itinerary in Maps.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the remaining flaws in Apple Maps are so easy to route around now that they just aren't much of an issue.

I don't know about you, but I personally assume that everything I'm posting online is publicly available, including to my parents, and regardless of whether or not they are users of the service that I am posting to. I have very little faith in Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. to not decide to publish all of my private information. As the saying goes, information wants to be free.

I think it comes down to how directly related the book in question is to the work you are currently doing. If you're trying to debug a problem and to do so you need to understand a system that was previously a black box to you, well, you shouldn't feel bad about leaning back and reading a book or two - until you know enough to fix the bug. This also applies when trying to optimise systems.

If the book is something that is not directly related to the job at hand, for example you want to know a bit more about Git or Vim, as tools that you use every day, this is also fair game, although I would expect it to be done more as a one-hour block here or there, particularly when you're tired and not able to focus on coding.

If it's about some new technology that isn't going to be of direct benefit to your employer it's a little trickier. In those cases it comes down to your current workload. If you have deadlines coming up this is not the thing to be doing. On the other hand I have noticed in my career that it's quite common for things that I have read from pure personal curiosity to turn out to provide game-changing insight into my job. That afternoon you wasted reading about a reverse engineering technique came into play when a library you bought wasn't working correctly and the supplier is stone-walling you. That book on SQL databases turned out to be really useful when you all of a sudden had to manage a large data set.

The thing is that any decent employer should be OK with you spending a portion of your time in pure learning mode. If they aren't it's more of a signal that you should be looking to change jobs, rather than that you are goofing off.

Well, not always. Estonia for exemple is really cheap, at least compared to France, Germany etc