drallison

John Brockman's Edge.org hosts a myriad of intelligent conversations with amazing people. Freeman Dyson, who died Friday, February 28 at 96 (RIP), was one of the contributors: sometimes right, sometimes wrong, often provocative, always interesting. I love that he never got a PhD and that he knew he really did not need that ticket.

No, chiplets will not save Moore's "law". They may provide another path to configurable logic beyond custom ASICs and FPGAs. It's kinda like boards and TTL logic but at the chip scale.

A nice book, clearly written with code available using literate coding techniques. Fairly easy to port to a new machine. Were I teaching compiler techniques, it would be on my short list for a textbook.

Nellie Bly pretty much invented investigative journalism. Even today her journalistic investigations are fascinating.

Obits in the national press:

NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle...

WAPO: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler...

The National Endowment for the Humanities does great work. https://www.neh.gov/our-work. Why should the White House want to close it down.

Using JAVA potentially gets you into intellectual property problems since Oracle claims that APIs (and, particularly JAVA APIs) are copyright and has been asserting ownership. It is a risk that is hard to quantify especially since it is up for a decision by the SCOTUS.

Personally, I think Go is clean, tight, and elegant whereas Java always seems a bit clunky and verbose.

For 100,000 feet, it seems to me that the particular programming language used to construct a banking system should not be a primary design choice issue. What is important are the features and use cases the banking system is to support, what the operating environment is to be, what the security environment is to be, how the system is going to be kept non-fragile, what APIs are going to be exposed to users, what scaling is going to be expected, what performance is required, and so forth.

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Computer Engineers need deep knowledge of mathematics and statistics, good reading and writing skills in English and (perhaps) other languages, usable skills and understanding in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, and exposure and interest in the liberal arts. Curiosity and groups social skills are both needed but are not "book learning".

The good thing for a new grad to know is that formal learning at a University is not the only way to learn. Any topic can be learned on your own; finding a study partner speeds up learning.

Back when I was writing C compilers the Bourne Shell was my nemesis. The Bourne shell did exercise nearly every "feature" of the C language. Compiling and then running the shell was a great test case for an optimizing compiler and turned up many bugs. But, when the compiled code failed, winding back to the underlying C through the all of the macros and optimizations was exceptionally difficult. I still remember many a late night trying to figure out what happened. (Thanks Steve, for many fascinating hours of struggle.)

A multi-tool tool for collaborative development from Maxeler Technologies.

I wish articles like this were more clearly written. What we know is that there are two satellites that will get with a few meters of each other. The 32,800 MPH number is not relevant as both satellites will be traveling at that speed, give or take a little; the relative velocity of one satellite with respect to the other is likely to be fairly small.

The author of this article appears clueless and clearly has not read the many excellent briefs for the Google v. Oracle case before the Supreme Court. A finding for Oracle may kill the golden goose.

Or, better, Guy Fawkes masks, for example, https://smile.amazon.com/Floureon-Vendetta-Costume-Cosplay-C...

IKEA has metal straws.

I knew Feyerabend in Berkeley in the early 1960's. He was an engaging character, a large personality, a brilliant conversationalist, always surrounded by an interesting collection of other articulate people as he held forth at the Mediterranean Coffee House on Telegraph Avenue. Right or wrong, his perceptive observations motivated further consideration.

My experience is precisely the reverse. Working scientists understand both the social sciences and humanities as well as science and math. On the other hand, people outside the sciences have very little understanding of science and math. And they are often embarrassed by their lack of knowledge and sometimes respond in anger.

Wow! So the person on the telephone who tells me in a soft Indian accent that my computer has a problem can now can authenticate themselves with authority, making it easier for them to get me (or my proxy) to enable remote administration so they can do real damage.

Security is difficult. Microsoft is supposed to be skilled at preventing data breeches and exploits, but apparently not. What can be done to prevent this sort of thing?

This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited. They serve different needs and have--surprise surprise--different costs.

How do they know that the material they discovered is the "oldest material on earth"?

There is a tension between the language (grammar) used to describe a language and the algorithm that is used to parse the language. In practice, a Pratt Parser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_parser) is often a good choice since it has the simplicity of a recursive descent parser but avoids the recursive plunge for objects like expressions.

This is a useful guide to reading all the briefing for the Google v. Oracle lawsuit over the legality of copyright for APIs currently under review by the Supreme Court. If SCOTUS finds in favor of Oracle, the impact on the computer industry will be cataclysmic.

Read this brief.

Read Maurice Herlihy's review article: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234355-blockchains-fro...

You will find that doing a cost-benefit analysis of Blockchains and their use in a variety of applications to be a useful exercise.

Acquiring the "college income premium" is not the reason for going to college. College and universities allow students relatively unfettered exploration of ideas and social interactions. While some of us manage to do that without the umbrella of academia, most of us fare better at a college.

Moreover, colleges and universities (especially the great research universities) provide a way to push back the boundaries of human knowledge and transfer concepts and technology to a new generation. College is where you meet friends and lovers.

Another reason why skipping CES this year makes sense. What were the CES people thinking when they booked her? What does Ivanka Trump bring to the party?

I lived the book. :-) (Full disclosure: Katie Hafner is a good friend.) Katie is an engaging and skilled observer of the social aspects of our complex society and the people that populate it. Other books of hers that you might like:

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier;

The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community;

A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano;

Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir.

This question is ambiguous and poorly stated. What does "best" mean? What websites are not indexed by Google?

He has several therapists for different problems. Ideally he would be in therapy all the time, but the economics are impossible. As it stands now, he gets therapy several times a week. Clinical studies seem to indicate that is too little for rapid progress.

It might be a good thing to define what you think Software Engineering means. The comments section shows that there is little agreement between HN readers. Software Engineering, particularly for large and complex systems, seems to focus on human management and interaction issues almost entirely. The technology of programmed systems plays a minor how those systems get put together. Mel Conway got it right: systems (recursively) mimic the organization that built them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Conway