s-phi-nl

This reminds me of the voteview project, which calculates dimensions for members of the US Congress.

http://voteview.com/ Blog at: https://voteviewblog.wordpress.com/

I have a screenshot of that which I could upload to Dropbox if anyone wants.

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668197

Incidentally, the Supreme Court recently confirmed this in Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, by a vote of 9-0.

Note that he says "I wasn't particularly good at history or physics" (emphasis added), not "I was not any good at physics." As other comments point out, there is enough to physics besides math that someone (who was good at math) could easily do well in physics without being considered exceptional.

I do not know, but I suspect this is exactly why RMS dislikes SAAS: because it can technically obey a license without having to give users the freedoms he designed the GPL to give.

I have experience of performers, when not accompanied by a piano, choose to perform intervals closer to 1.50000 than 1.50001, so it seems they prefer them.

However, the answer is more complicated than that. Quoting directly from my acoustics textbook:

"Research on the intervals played or sung by skilled musicians shows substantial variability in the intonation from performance to performance. These variations are frequently larger than the differences between the various tunings. Studies of large numbers of performances have shown that deviations from equal temperament are usually in the direction of Pythagorean intervals (Ward 1970).

"Several investigators have found that performers tend to stretch their intervals (including octaves), even when unaccompanied by a piano. Many choral conductors prefer the third in a chord slightly raised, especially in sustained chords or cadences, to avoid any suggestion of 'flatting' the chord, a particular nemesis of choirs. How much of the apparent preference for sharpened intervals is due to constant exposure to pianos with stretched turning is difficult to determine."

The Science of Sound, Third Edition, by Rossing, Moore, and Wheeler, p. 187.

(Ward 1970) is "Musical Perception" by W.D. Ward, in Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory, Ed. J. Tobias.

I appreciate the link, and that article has much good discussion. I would not exactly call it a "duplicate", though: it is in French and this article is in English. I think both threads are valuable.

Someone recently did something like this for a programming language research conference. http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2014/10/21/is-popl-one-communit...

Link to the chapter: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/rage-against-the-machine...

This stems from the concern (valid, in my opinion) of preserving the collection. If you let just anyone enter the physical library to access it, your risk would be higher that someone would accidentally damage or take some of the collection.

For what it's worth, my understanding is that the Library of Congress has similar restrictions for accessing at least some of their archives.

While it is not exactly what you are describing, you remind me of one clip from Yes, Minister: http://youtu.be/G0ZZJXw4MTA

Can you give an example? That sounds interesting.

Can anyone compare this with PyXLL[1]? It does require add-ins, but xlwings requires a VBA module. From the instructions, importing the two seem about equally complicated.

I am more curious about technical differences than the difference in license (I know that PyXLL is closed source, while XLWings is F/OSS, BSD-licensed).

[1] https://www.pyxll.com/

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/830/

"We can't be sure, but we've analyzed genes on several of your chromosomes, and its hard to avoid the conclusion: at some point, your parents had sex."

FWIW, Modern Operating Systems is the classic book by Tanenbaum. You are correct, however, that my edition has a circus on the cover, not a dinosaur.

Seems like the author did not put too much care into this list.

It is meaningless to nitpick about whether a language is declarative or not since the term "declarative" lacks a good definition. Robert Harper, a programming languages researcher, lists 6 separate definitions and concludes, "It seems to me that none of them have a clear meaning or distinguish a well-defined class of languages. " [1]

[1] http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/what-if-anyt...

PG himself once cautioned about the connection between personal liberty issues and hacking:

  I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger.
  If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's
  probably civil liberties.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934880

So I would be somewhat careful about using that reasoning.

Would you please make a post to HN when the challenges are back up for newcomers? I could also just send you an email and you reply when you can.

Thanks.

I know that professional orchestras (a job with a strong interpersonal component) do "blind" auditions behind a screen until the final round and then meet with the auditioners to evaluate the interpersonal component.

As far as I know it works fairly well.

Could you expand "defines Fibonacci numbers as an element of its endomorphism ring Z[x]/(x^2 - x - 1)" in a few more words? Are you saying that Fibonacci numbers are themselves an element of its endomorphism ring (despite not obviously being a morphism)? What does "Z[x]" mean (I have a feeling it is mathematical notation forced into plain text)?

Thanks.

I think ruttiger may mean that 2013 is the product of three unique primes (e.g. 30=2 * 3 * 5 would be another example, but 50=5^2 * 2 is not).

Note that this is partially a result of the Knight Foundation grant to Development Seed that was reported a couple of years ago. http://www.mapbox.com/blog/knight-invests-openstreetmap/

Nice work!

They recently changed their membership standards to not discriminate against homosexuals. http://www.scouting.org/sitecore/content/MembershipStandards...

On your second paragraph, see http://xkcd.com/756/.

I know tptacek was talking about systems still under development, but I immediately thought of DJB's NaCl (http://nacl.cr.yp.to/) when I read that statement.

This reminds me of the Chapel programming language (http://chapel.cray.com/), which seeks to be a relatively high-level language for all parallel computation.

They differ in that Harlan is just for GPUs, while Chapel aims to be good for all parallel computation. Also, Harlan uses Lisp syntax, while Chapel's syntax is C-based.

Any comments on similarities/differences between them from those who know either one better than I?

Another reason why going to Russia might not have been the best idea.

Time for some articles on the innards of Lua (or Smalltalk, Scheme, Erlang, Forth, or Haskell)?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 for a former discussion.