jcdreads

"The spray forms a water-resistant layer, meaning it can be cleaned using only water."

This sentence does not lend the rest of the article much credibility.

Imagine a single thermonuclear explosion: one big enough to destroy a large city. The bomb doesn't weigh that much compared to the amount of energy released. A gigantic amount of energy comes from a small amount of mass. The c2 in Einstein's formula is the speed of light squared; it's a really huge number.

As for the wisdom of the NIF as public policy, that's something on which reasonable people can (and do) disagree. I'd only point out that the first government to master the goal of break-even fusion (getting more energy out of the reaction than is put in to trigger the reaction) will gain a _ridiculous_ economic advantage over the rest of the world, to say nothing of the non-economic benefits of energy independence. It's the kind of big bet that rich nations can (and in my opinion should) take.

Even if you assume a local mercator projection (centered on your business or whatever) you still need to know that the earth is spherical. Otherwise, you're likely to assume that an 0.1 degree change in latitude is the same distance as an 0.1 degree change in longitude. To correct this erroneous assumption (for small distances) divide your longitude differences by the sine of your latitude.

Primary source:

http://www.latexsearch.com/LatexTool/

Somewhere, Cory Doctorow dances a little jig.

Yes: I switched about 14 years ago. It took me about three (frustrating) weeks until my Dvorak speed caught up to my querty speed---it isn't noticeably faster for me---but my wrist and hand pain completely disappeared after about a week.

Furthermore, if you actually switch back even for a few minutes once a week or so, your Qwerty typing won't atrophy much at all.

However, I wouldn't bother switching unless you're pretty sure that you're going to be spending several hours a day typing, and mostly on the same small number of computers. Reconfiguring any modern computer back and forth between Qwerty and Dvorak is easy, but it's completely maddening for anyone with whom you share a computer.

Well, the commissioner can't do that. Congress and the President do that (or don't).

Were he the _author_ of the tax code then this would be deliciously ironic. Since he is the commissioner of a large federal agency, I'd imagine (indeed, hope!) that he has better uses of his time than preparing his returns. Like fixing <your least favorite thing about the IRS/>, for example.

Here is a great description of how Alan Kay and friends wrote the Squeak (Smalltalk) VM using another (Apple) Smalltalk:

http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html

Also consider that a bunch of languages (most?) consist of a kernel (or other VM) written in something native (like C) surrounded by a bunch of libraries written in the language itself. Off the top of my head: python, java, clojure, most schemes, etc. are like this.

For ridiculous exercises in bootstrapping minimalism, check out Ian Piumarta's work on Cola:

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/objmodel2.pdf

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/colas-whitepaper.pdf

Perhaps instead of replacing our crappy mattress with a new one I can instead regale the lovely wife with group theory: "Look, honey. It's our old friend Z2xZ2xZ2."

Won't she be pleased!

In four lines of code he's hidden a ton of complexity and can now completely avoid thinking about all the low-level garbage.

Markdown similarly hides (automates) all the details of how it generates HTML from source, and in exchange you give up control over (many) aspects of what the target HTML looks like.

My car abstracts away from me the details of fuel-air mixtures, gear shifting, battery recharging, and so forth.

In all of these cases if I want more control I can go get it. The point is that I don't _have_ to: I can drive the kids to school, document something in reasonably nice HTML, and get a damn window on the screen without having to think (as much) about it.

Here's raw data for doing your own (US) inflation adjustments:

http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/uscpi

I can't believe no one here seems to be using http://urlshorteningservicefortwitter.com/

AOL's branding problems (viz. the "Platform A" mess; you _do_ remember Platform A, right?) are emblematic of the larger problems they face as a company. They sit atop a great pile of technologies on the advertising side, and a great set of sites on the media side, but imagine trying to get anything innovative done at a place that is steered like this by its marketeers. The good programmers leave because of the inertia, the good marketers leave because of the branding they have to work with, etc...

An article that combines the TSA, iPhones, and Ron Paul. HN gold!

Edit: Geez, people. Lighten up!

My guess is that it stopped because there are no longer any HN readers who both like xkcd and don't check it anyway. We reached xkcd-awareness saturation a couple of years ago.

Logo was my favorite thing about 4th and 5th grade, and I've not touched Logo code since then. Having not touched it in the 25-odd intervening years, my memories of struggling to hold a whole program design in my head are relatively clear; and it is amazing how much easier programming is now. Something to remember if my kids start wanting me to teach them to program a couple of years from now.

I love that just from the title, before clicking and without even having yet seen the little (harvard.edu) beside it, I knew immediately that this was a Greenspun article.

In Boston, they then build in lots of random 30-minute delays after the trains have left.

Decent commentary (and a more sensibly written article) can be found in this previous HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804831

This is a very cool idea, but when folks express power savings in units of kWh/year it makes my head spin. So...

100 kWh / year == 100,000 W / (years/hour) == 17.1 W.

so we save 17 W per computer. This is good, though less impressive-sounding.

Another way of looking at it is that a kWh of electricity costs something like $0.10. Saving 100 of those a year is ten bucks per computer. $10 per PC per year is nothing to sneeze at if you have a lot of computers.

It's Apple's attempt to convince people of the wisdom of enabling Time Machine.

Do not assume that "scared away by compiler errors" means the same thing as stupid or not intellectually curious.

I know at least one would-be programmer who is not scared away by complier errors, but he is almost comically infuriated by them: not their presence, but their customary vagueness and unhelpfulness. Such a tool as this might provide an intellectually curious sort like him to learn proper syntax for common programming concepts without having to dig through man pages or web pages, and without lots of trial and error.

Right. To pipe something is to use it as a conduit. A pipe is a tube for piping fluids. A pipe is also a typographic character: |

The pipe character is used to indicate that the output of process A is piped to process B. I guess it's a pun. My apologies for horribly overexplaining.

Anyone with experience with both this and Oracle Coherence (formerly Tangosol Coherence)? I'd dearly love for this to be a reasonable alternative to Coherence, which I love but which is fabulously expensive.

So I once happened to be at a company where I was lucky enough to have several colleagues join me in an SICP reading group. We squatted in a conference room once a week and plowed through as many sections as we could during lunch.

The key feature of the reading group, I thought, was that we were able to identify, right in our production code, right there in the conference room, instances where we used particular idioms from the SICP section under discussion. It was that identification of actual fancy SICP concepts (in scheme-world) in the familiar production code (java-world) that made this particularly worthwhile; folks (including me) saw a whole bunch of places where our java codebase would be (or had already been) improved by applying what we were reading about in the book. It was among the more useful exercises of my professional career so far.

So perhaps this django-based discussion group could include illustrations from a reasonable open source codebase (django itself?).

Sounds like great fun.

Quote from the end of the article:

“Will a company be able to operate completely on these games? No,” Mr. Yoshida said. “After all, we’re talking about the kind of games people make sitting in a cafe with a laptop.”

A person sitting in a cafe with a laptop might be able to operate completely, though.

If I were hosting a SaaS offering that was Javascript-heavy, I might deploy the site in such a way that IE users were prompted to download the Chrome plugin, thereby allowing my app to run at a tolerable speed.

We recently gave up on GWT at work for precisely the reason that IE6 and friends are waaaay too slow to do anything meaningful in GWT. Had we had this option we might have stuck with GWT instead of rewriting in Flex.

That people have the same legal rights as people is known as the "doctrine of corporate personhood." An indie film from a few years ago explored what _kind_ of person a corporation would be is here:

http://www.thecorporation.com/

(spoiler: a sociopath)

The original paper claims that highways are about 1/3 of the reason.