edmccard

There is a difference, though, between a finite state machine and a Turing machine with a finite amount of memory. An FSM cannot recognize context-free languages, but a Turing machine can--even when it's implemented on a computer without infinite memory.

(Actually, you only need a pushdown automata for context-free languages--I forget what the next step up in the hierarchy is, the one that does require Turing completeness)

>we haven't seen a brain injury epidemic during that time but certainly we've seen social and economic policy changes during that time

That doesn't rule out a correlation between brain injury and homelessness; the social and economic policy changes might have the effect that fewer brain-injured people get the care they need to avoid becoming homeless.

>It COULD make sense if lead only causes problems when inhaled

I think inhalation of engine exhaust is the main "delivery method" for lead pollution from leaded gasoline.

It's not that OneDrive is modifying files "as it syncs"; it's that it involves Sharepoint, which adds certain metadata to documents that it handles, and has probably always done so; here's a stackoverflow question about it from 2010:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2762841/how-can-i-stop-sh...

EDIT: I see that 'ppog has already mentioned this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7624293

>Is there something other than the substring 'Drive' that gives the expectation of a fully generic file synchronization tool?

I don't think anyone is expecting OneDrive to be "fully generic" (I believe that 'emeraldd was referring to the "tries to do intelligent things" portion of the sentence he quoted).

It just seems that people are unaware of the fact that putting certain kinds of documents into "document libraries" or "team site libraries" involves automatically adding metadata to those documents (from the OP's example, html comments and "xmlns:..." attributes were added to html files).

>I'm inclined to think that the causes behind an area being slow to remove leaded gasoline could also affect crime rates.

The statistics show a 20-year lag between the banning of leaded gasoline and reduction in crime rates. So even if "unwilling to ban leaded gas" and "high crime 20 years later" could be correlated, it seems less likely that the same things that cause "willing to ban leaded gas" are also the cause of "lower crime 20 years later".

>I for one do not see how to implement it.

(referring to an allocation-free strstr if strings had an associated length)

If a string was a (pointer,length) pair, then strstr would return a pair (pointer+offset,length-offset) where, just like in the original strstr, the new pointer points into the existing string. No allocation needed

(But what about the pointer-length pair that has to be created? Well, it will live on the stack just like the return value from the original strstr, which has to be stored somewhere also.)

You already know this, but...on the Ramen Project Page itself (buried below all the "Back this Project" links) is a "How It Works" sections that seems to contain exactly the information the Peeker was looking for (I watched the video, and he must have said "how does this work" or some variation of that 5 or 6 times)

Why not just put that (or a link directly to that section) somewhere prominent on the home page?

>The first link I clicked was at the bottom left: Project

Well, if I was looking for information on how Ramen worked, a generic link in the footer called "Project Page", under the equally generic heading "Product" is not the first thing I would click. And if I eventually got there, and saw what looked to be a page intended for backers (it has a blurb and options to back at $2.00, $10.00, etc.), I probably wouldn't notice the "How it Works" section buried three screenfuls down the page.

>maybe 2% of the comments I see are unreadable-grey.

Maybe that's the problem? That is, maybe bad comments are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, like the weather; everyone talks about them but nobody bothers to downvote them to unreadable greyness.

(either that, or there are voting rings that devote themselves to upvoting greyed-out comments).

"Doubt" is another one; borrowed from old French doute in the 13th century, with the "b" added by scribes in the 14th century.

There's a bit in Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ where the pedant Holofernes is ranting about how the "b" should be pronounced in those two words, but as you say, it was always silent.

EDIT: Turns out "salmon" and "solder" were originally "saumon" and "soudor", with the "l" added in the 18th century (agsin to reflect the Latin spelling)

_why was known by more than just the HN community;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

>See, but what if I'm writing a little script using Bash to run on my server? Does it go in Unix? Or programming? Or serverfault?

That would depend on why help was needed--is it a problem with expressing a certain programming concept in Bash? or with portability across various Unixen? Or with the proper way to invoke some server managament program?

If someone genuinely doesn't know which stackexchange community has the most relevant expertise to help with a problem, there's a mechanism in place to handle that; just post a question somewhere and see if it gets migrated or closed as "belongs on xxx".

Will this tend to discourage dogecoin market manipulation like that discussed here about a week ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126153

>But when you compare it to Java and C#, C++11, the language (based on language specification word/page count), is smaller than Java

I watched the presentation where Herb Sutter said that, and I think that claim is disingenuous, because the Java Language Specification is much wordier than the C++ spec.

For example, the section on integer literals in the JLS is 1.5 times longer (measured by word count) than the same section in the latest C++ draft. Is it because Java's literals are more complex than C++? No, it's because of things like explicitly listing the minumum and maximum numeric values of int and long literals (in each of decimal, hex, octal and binary)

In general, I think that the terseness of the C++ spec is not a good measure of the relative simplicity of C++.

_>Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing._

Since most website ad revenue is based on cost-per-click and not cost-per-impression, am I a thief every time I view an ad without clicking on it? (And evidently clicking an ad without intending to buy anything is "click fraud", so it's damned if you do, damned if you don't)

I see that in a later comment you admit that stealing might be too strong a word; I think any word is too strong if it attributes moral failure to anyone who doesn't respond to advertising. Whoever said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half", he didn't go on to say "therefore, half the population are thieves and freeloaders."

_>If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing."_

What you call "getting something for nothing" used to be just part of what was called "the cost of doing business." But anyway, "deserving" has nothing to do with it. Publishers can decide who gets to view their content (maybe by refusing adblockers) and users can decide what content they want to view (maybe even by paying for it).

And more to the point, if a publisher decides that anyone, "freeloader" or not, can view their content, they can still use whatever tactics they want (including moral pressure with language about "stealing" and "deserving" and "something for nothing") to convince people to move from potential sources of revenue to actual sources of revenue. And users can decide whether or not to respond to those tactics.

tl;dr: if a website needs its viewers more than its viewers need its content, complaining about the mean, naughty users is not very productive.

>Is the D scope + unrecoverable error different from Go's "defer" and "panic"?

D's scope guard is similar to "defer", but it has three forms: "scope(exit)", "scope(failure)", and "scope(success)". So instead of a deferred function that tests "if r := recover(); r != nil {...}" you just do "scope(failure) {...}"

D's unrecoverable error is just a matter of having an exception hierarchy where "Exception" and "Error" are separate subclasses of "Throwable", and by convention you prefer not to write "catch (Throwable t)" or "catch (Error e)".

> From the 23andme TOS:

> ... Make sure to discuss your Genetic Information ... before you act upon the Genetic Information

The problems are not about what someone might do with their "Genetic Information", but with the accuracy of the "Genetic Information" in the first place. The false positives/false negatives mentioned in the FDA's warning letter[1] are not referring to misdiagnoses based on the 23AndMe's results, but to misidentification of genes in those results (as the letter describes it, "false genotype results")

In a nutshell: 23AndMe claim that the genetic variants in their results are (to some degree of accuracy) genetic variants that you actually have; the FDA says that 23AndMe have not provided enough evidence for these claims.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2...

>but zombie ants whose brains are hijacked by an infectious fungus.

This is the fungus that causes ant zombification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

> I believe it said Roosevelt was advised against the wiretapping but went ahead with it anyway.

That case (wiretapping, advice against from Attorney General Robert Jackson) is different from the one tokenadult is referring to (intercepting telegrams, advice in favor from Assistant Solicitor General Charles Fahy).

>It sounded like you started off by agreeing and ended in disagreeing, but I can't tell where the switch was

It makes sense if you read the last sentence as describing (and sarcastically mocking) the opinion of the author of the Forbes article as to what is newsworthy.

>And you do that, IMO, by attaching punishments to actual harm, not to an increased likelihood of harm (which must always be an estimate only).

If you restrict the basis of decision-making to certainty rather than "estimated likelihood", you would have to throw out pretty much everything mankind has ever learned using the scientific method (where evidence can support, or inrease the likelihood of a theory, but never prove it).

For example, the link between smoking and lung cancer. It's impossible to say of any specific case of lung cancer that it was definitely caused by smoking, but there is enough evidence for increased risk, so that deciding to quit based only on a likelihood is a reasonable thing to do.

>the legislator who drafts the speeding laws and the bureaucrat who sets the speed limits for particular roads can't possibly know as much as the driver

In the case of speed traps, that's irrelevant; the limits there are not abnormally low because the legislators and bureaucrats are using unsound information, but because they intentionally ignore (or don't even bother acquiring) recommendations which indicate that a higher speed would be safe.

That was Odin32, right? I remember looking forward to that, and hoping that it would be better than the win32s extensions for 3.11 (plus the .dll whack-a-mole that entailed), but in the end I just switched from OS/2 to XP.

>Is second edition complete?

Chapters 9-12 are still empty in the stable release, and only partially done in the draft version.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/Draft/index.html

>Go look up Harrisburg and how their trash->energy plant as worked out.

Or look up Lancaster, PA (one county over from Harrisburg) and how their trash->energy plant "is considered a national model for waste disposal, featured in industry trade publications."[1], and how they (Lancaster county) are in the process of buying the Harrisburg facility.[2]

[1] http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/08/tale_of_t... [2] http://lancasteronline.com/article/local/856655_County-waste...

>Just who came to the residence beyond some scary looking guys in SUVs who said they were FBI.

From the article, "the Suffolk and Nassau police, which The Guardian reported were the authorities that effected the raid".

As to the downvotes: you could have pointed out the discrepancy between "Feds" and "cops" (the article's title was changed to reflect that) without turns of phrase such as "we have only her word", "hearsay", "I'm not calling her a liar".

The percentages on that page are labeled "Youth Employment Rate" (not unemployment), which would explain why they are higher in the "No Disability" column than in the "Disability" column.

The one that made monads finally 'click' for me was "What the hell are Monads", from 1999:

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~antoy/Courses/TPFLP/lectures/MONADS...

I think they are claiming that they are not using deterministic encrpytion[1], which can be used to allow searches of encrypted data, not that their software is "non-deterministic".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_encryption

EDIT: Or maybe you know that and I missed the joke.

Sure. Just find two billiard balls that are indistinguishable unless God exists. Give them to your Bible-blind friend, and try to guess whether he switches them behind his back or not.