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helicon

48 karma · joined September 11, 2013

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helicon··on Al Gore’s New Movie Exposes the Big Flaw in Online Movie Ratings
Begs the question why does the IMDb voting system allow reviews before the movie's release date?
helicon··on Generating all permutations, combinations, and power set of a string (2012)
Posts like this are why I love HN. I recently wrote a program to find anagrams of a given string (a Countdown solver if you live in the UK).

It includes a really naive method for generating all possible permutations of the string, but reading this post I can immediately see a far better way to do it.

That's my weekend taken care of! thanks to the poster and author.

helicon··on Master Plan, Part Deux
Forgive me if this is a silly question but when he talks about "beautiful solar-roof-with-battery", is he talking about car roofs or roofs of buildings?

An electric car with a solar roof that charges all day would be pretty cool.

helicon··on SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time
I think it already is pretty overcrowded and this has become a problem that NASA/ESA and others are thinking about. Here is a good ESA video on space debris:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN_CvGJKMOs

helicon··on SpaceX Launch Livestream: CRS-8 Dragon Hosted Webcast
Not wanting to be overly dramatic, but as someone who wasn't around in the sixties this feels like our moon landing!
helicon··on Model 3 Unveiling [video]
I don't mean the range so much as it sounds like he could be hinting that the car will be capable of being fully autonomous. Considering the price point for the entry level version is ~35k, could we be about to see the first mass market self driving car?
helicon··on Model 3 Unveiling [video]
Yesterday Elon Musk tweeted this[1]:

"Tomorrow is Part 1 of the Model 3 unveil. Part 2, which takes things to another level, will be closer to production. "

And back in January he tweeted this[2]:

"In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY"

Do you think he is saying the Model 3 will be fully autonomous?

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/715307847890903041

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

helicon··on Cryptography: An Introduction (2011) [pdf]
I'm currently working through Cryptography 1 on Coursera and struggling with some of the maths involved, so hopefully this will help.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto

helicon··on How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights (2015)
"the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them"

The problem is our power is diluted.

helicon··on A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
Ah... But let's say you and I have already met up in a training camp in Afghanistan or Syria and installed an apk on our smartphones!

But those are interesting points.

helicon··on A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
But the fact is we can't stop people cooking up nerve gas and anthrax in their garages if they want to. Just like we can't stop them building their own encrypted apps. Banning it won't stop a determined group.
helicon··on A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists
The IRA were known to recruit top stem students from universities in Ireland during their campaign to make bombs. Surely an entity as large and as well financed and ISIS would have little trouble finding bright young engineers & technologists sympathetic to their cause to simply build their own encrypted services? And then so much for the spooks 'backdoors'
helicon··on How do astronauts connect to the Internet in space?
I took it to mean the laser would be based on the station and so could transmit directly to a ground station cutting out the extra 22,000 mile extra hop to the geosync satellite?
helicon··on How we turn $199 Chromebooks into Ubuntu-based code learning machines for kids
I disagree. Although that technology is wonderful, you will still always need the kind the drive and determination to do figure things out for yourself.

It's one thing being shown how to do something, it's another thing to work it out for yourself, in much the same way as studying maths or physic etc.

helicon··on J002E3
Apollo 12 was struck by lightening shortly after launch. I wondered initially if this was the reason for the "extra long burn of the ullage motors".

But according to the Apollo 12 wikipedia page: "a small error in the state vector in the Saturn's guidance system caused the S-IVB to fly past the Moon at too high an altitude to achieve Earth escape velocity".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12

helicon··on July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind (2013)
this is amazing
helicon··on Ask HN: Best current Linux-compatible laptop?
seen this review of Dell XPS 13 on hn a while back. Not 14.04 but may be of interest:

http://www.jx0.org/2013/12/dell-xps-13-developer-edition-rev...

helicon··on Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]
I like it ;) Might borrow that one
helicon··on Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]
Isn't this still TDD though?

My understanding was that writing tests first is known as Test-First development which is a subset of TDD. TDD allows you some flexibility to write code first as long as the tests 'drive' the development process?

helicon··on Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused
I agree. I think most if not everything he said can be applied to learning almost any discipline. I studied physics at university and I definitely recognize the authors description.
helicon··on The descent to C
A great resource for learning C is CS50 on edx:

https://www.edx.org/course/harvardx/harvardx-cs50x-introduct...

helicon··on Teen Reported to Police After Finding Security Hole in Website
I think this is one of those situations where the analogy just doesn't work, but well done for trying!
helicon··on Help me figure out how I lost this bet to an engineer
He said she only bought the dress recently. They did a image search and found a local store that stocks that particular dress - and she had checked in with foursquare?