LowKarmaAccount

There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance.

On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x height your mouse was is. You could then click to tell the OS that you wanted to wanted to reflow the page using that x height as a reference point. If you pointed your mouse at the horizontal scroll bar, a vertical line appeared, and you could scroll left to right. This is sort of like pressing Control-l on Emacs. Instead scrolling and getting the desired result by trial and error, you could tell the OS exactly what you wanted to do. It was very useful for scrolling within pictures.

You can see a video of this here [1] at 46:50.

[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932

Unless you have a real emergency and need assistance, it's best to avoid the police whenever possible, even if you've done nothing wrong. Local police forces have many officers that are poorly trained and believe that they have plenary power or act as if they do in any situation. Of course, this isn't true about all local police officers, but if you don't know which officers are the good ones, you should just avoid all police whenever possible. Even large "local" police departments have very negative reputations in America; especially the NYPD, LAPD and Chicago PD.

I think that that stories on HN about FBI abuses of power are popular because people expect more from the FBI. It's comforting to think that there is a highly trained law enforcement group that can intercede when a local department is incompetent or inadequate, and the realization that the FBI can be just as bad or even worse than local law enforcement is disheartening.

When I was in high school I looked into making a micro-power plant using the Seebeck effect for the Intel Science Talent Search. I thought about using liquid sodium as a heat sink, which is what some heliostats use. Solar power towers use the captured energy to power turbines, but this isn't very efficient, so I thought I would add thermoelectric generators to capture some of the energy that is lost as heat.

I ended up not doing this because the Seebeck effect isn't really a useful power-plant (in the broad sense of the word) when you have a small temperature gradient because it is really inefficient, although it is useful for thermometers and other low power items, and for some exotic things like Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, which is what powers Voyager and other long distance spacecraft. It becomes worth using when you have a large, consistent energy source, which is usually geothermal energy. But the small temperature difference between the human body and the flashlight and the low efficiency of thermocouples means that this project won't seriously compete with battery powered flashlights. However, it is a cool idea and could have some niche uses.

> The problem was that the formula for deciding who required preclearance is a static rule that does not allow for the evaluation of any events after 1972. Therefore, regardless of how much a state or other jurisdiction changes, they could not change their status under this law. If they were originally on the preclearance list, never had another voting anomaly, elected minorities to every position in the state, and had 100% minority turnout, for decades on end, they would remain on the preclearance list, because of what happened 40 years ago.

That's simply not true. You can seek exemption from section 5. It's called "bailing out". A county or state on the preclearance list that has not been discriminatory for 10 years (see [1] for criteria) may sue to be exempt from Section 5. Many counties have done this successfully; the state of New Hampshire successfully bailed out as recently as this March.

States or counties that were found to be discriminatory could also be "bailed in." Arkansas and New Mexico, LA County in California, as well as several other counties were bailed in.

In other words, the Voting Rights Act was built with a mechanism to self-destruct when it was no longer necessary. Congress overwhelmingly approved an extension of the VRA in 2006 after extensive research and testimony. If a state or county was still covered in 2013, then it had a problem with discrimination within the past ten years, which is the minority thought the opinion that "things have changed" was foolish.

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/misc/sec_4.php

Tuesday's Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, was a power grab by the court majority that strayed wildly from precedent. From SCOTUS blog:

"Regarding deference, not that long ago, the Justices believed Congress held something close to plenary power when it crafted remedies addressing racial discrimination in voting. In case after case, the Justices made clear that they would not second-guess congressional judgments on the subject. Even as the Justices began looking more rigorously at particular types of congressional remedial action elsewhere, they repeatedly distinguished the invalidated laws from the VRA and celebrated provisions like preclearance as paradigmatic examples of permissible congressional action...

"The decision significantly diminishes Congress’s ability to craft future remedies for racial discrimination in voting and beyond. Indeed, after today, an administrative agency acting within the sphere of its expertise enjoys more discretion than does Congress when acting in the realm in which its power was once viewed to be at its apogee.

"At oral argument last winter, Justice Kagan bristled at the notion that the Court, rather than Congress, was the proper institution to decide when remedial action in this realm was needed. Justice Scalia was nevertheless convinced that “[t]his is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.” Today’s decision makes clear that a majority of the Court shares this view. Earl Warren would have been astounded. William Rehnquist, too."

http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/how-big-is-shelby-county/#...

> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done out of VC-istan dues-paying as young people take on pager duty for the job they think will get them investor connections in 6 months so they can do their own gigs (ha!)

The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough". The result is that you get things like Google Calendar. What's wrong with Google Calendar? John McCarthy put it best:

"Now of course Emacs is merely and editor but nevertheless is does permit significant user modifications and the modern operating systems do not. Let me give an example: one thing that I have done is to add a feature where you can put in a file, the name of another file and even also a location in that file. And then with a single key press it will search forward till it finds its file name and go to that filename in place. And I use it for putting references to email messages in my calendar file. That's just one of the uses of it and I asked about the new Google calendar file. Can you put a reference to email messages in there? And the answer is not only can't the user do it, but even the implementers can't do it, but to me anyway it's very useful. When I receive email about a meeting or a seminar, or something like that, to be able to put a link to the email itself into the calendar file and Emacs permitted me to do that myself, without my even having to become a real expert in the inners of it, and I think this will be important. "

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/mccarthy-elephant-2000

The quote is from clickbox 9. That page has a horrible layout.

NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is genuinely interesting, but it doesn't change its field in a significant way.

Of course, Wolfram didn't come up with the proof himself. That was done by Matthew Cook while he was working for Wolfram Research. Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.

If you live in the United States, once you have enough information, you can use the IRS's whistleblower program to report him. You can get up to 30% of the penalty and tax money that the IRS collects if you wait until the idiotic budget sequestration is lifted.

Just make sure that you have solid information, because: "The IRS is looking for solid information, not an “educated guess” or unsupported speculation. We are also looking for a significant Federal tax issue - this is not a program for resolving personal problems or disputes about a business relationship."

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Whistleblower-Informant-Award

Although the U.S Supreme Court consists of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, it is also very non-diverse. All nine of the U.S Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale law school (Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard to Columbia).

This means that what were probably the most formative years in the justices' legal careers were all spent at the same institutions.

The design is inconsistent. If you only use color to signify buttons, making top and bottom banners with the same solid color as buttons is confusing, especially when several buttons are embedded in the top or bottom banner.

That aside, it is a good, clean interface.

> The F-35 requires more than 8 million lines of code, compared with about 2 million for the F-16 and less than 1 million for other fourth-generation fighter aircraft

The F-35 is programmed in C++, while the other aircraft are programmed in Ada, which is one of the reasons that there is so much more code. When you have to code, test, and maintain 8 million lines of C++ in an environment where a single bug can be deadly, you should expect delays.

The choice of using C++ to write a system that is designed to never crash and the obvious ignorance of the "mythical man month" does not give a good impression of Lockheed's management.

Amazon's information is incorrect. According to WorldCat and Google Books, the book is 513 pages, not 650. Also, its copyright date should be 1980, not 1979.

It looks like even Reuters engages in link baiting now. This is a non-story. In the original Guardian article, Snowden says that the FBI was at his house asking questions before the release, but only because they were concerned about his disappearance.

> When Booz Allen checked in with him, Snowden said he was suffering from epilepsy and needed more time off. When he failed to return after a longer period, and the company could not find him, it notified intelligence officials because of Snowden's high-level security clearance, one of the sources said...The government did not know Snowden was the source for the stories until he admitted it on Sunday, the sources said.

So the Feds "hunted" for him the same way a parent "hunts" for his child that has wandered off in a store.

droopyEyelids was correct in saying that I was talking about software innovation from a CS standpoint, so I didn't respond to the first reply to my comment. After reading your comment, I realized that I should make it clear that I'm using David A. Wheeler's definition of software innovation [1]. It was linked to on HN a few years ago[2]; it has an excellent listing of important innovations. The list was made to show that the most important computer innovations weren't patented.

Wheeler does include the Internet (internetworking using diagrams, leading up to the Internet's TCP/IP)as an important innovation.

On the page I linked to [1], Section 6 is called "What is not an important software innovation?", which inspired my post in part. I'll quote a portion of it below:

" As I noted earlier, many important events in computing aren’t software innovations, such as the announcements of new hardware platforms. Indeed, sometimes the importance isn’t in the technology at all; when IBM announced their first IBM PC, neither the hardware nor software was innovative - the announcement was important primarily because IBM’s imprimateur made many people feel confident that it was “safe” to buy a personal computer.

"An obvious example is that smartphones are not a software innovation. In the mid-2000s, smartphones rapidly became more common. By "smartphone" I mean a phone that can stay connected to the Internet, access the internet with a web browser capable of running programs (e.g., in Javascript), and install local applications. There's no doubt that widespread smartphone availability has had a profound impact on society. But while smartphones have had an important social impact, smartphones do not represent any siginificant software innovation. Smartphones typically run operating systems and middleware that are merely minor variants of software that was already running on other systems, and their software is developed in traditional ways.

"Note that there are few software innovation identified in recent times. I believe that part of the reason is that over the last number of years some key software markets have been controlled by monopolies. Monopolies typically inhibit innovation; a monopoly has a strong financial incentive to keep things more or less the way they are. Also, it’s difficult to identify the “most important” innovations within the last few years. Usually what is most important is not clear until years after its development. Software technology, like many other areas, is subject to fads. Most “exciting new technologies” are simply fashions that will turn out to be impractical (or only useful in a narrow niche), or are simply rehashes of old ideas with new names."

[1]: http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813110

There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1], which Richard Dawkins describes as:

"A book that is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."[2]

By the way, the Wikipedia page about Jaynes' book uses part of that quotation, but cuts off the last sentence.

Dawkins provides a good summary of the book:

"Jaynes notes that many people perceive their own thought processes as a kind of dialogue between the 'self and another internal protagonist inside the head. Nowadays we understand that both 'voices' are our own - or if we don't we are treated as mentally ill...

"Jaynes's suggestion is that some time before 1000 BC people in general were unaware that the second voice - the Gilbert Pinfold voice - came from within themselves. They thought the Pinfold voice was a god: Apollo, say, or Astarte or Yahweh or, more probably, a minor household god, offering them advice or orders. Jaynes even located the voices of the gods in the opposite hemisphere of the brain from the one that controls audible speech. The 'breakdown of the bicameral' mind was, for Jaynes, a historical transition. It was the moment in history when it dawned on people that the external voices that they seemed to be hearing were really internal. Jaynes even goes so far as to define this historical transition as the dawning of human consciousness. There is an ancient Egyptian inscription about the creator god Ptah, which describes the various other gods as variations of Ptah's 'voice' or 'tongue'. Modern translations reject the literal 'voice' and interpret the other gods as 'objectified conceptions of [Ptah's] mind'. Jaynes dismisses such educated readings, preferring to take the literal meaning seriously. The gods were hallucinated voices, speaking inside people's heads. Jaynes further suggests that such gods evolved from memories of dead kings, who still, in a manner of speaking, retained control over their subjects via imagined voices in their heads. [2]

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=yq1xDpicghkC&printsec=front... (page 392)

> I've been saying this for a while but I think what is happening, and what many developers haven't noticed yet, is that we have exhausted the utility of software for software's sake...

> Software was interesting on its own a decade ago, but the industry has grown up, its time to do things now.

Smartphones are important because they allow people to use computers in a manner that wasn't feasible in the past because of the size of computing devices.

However, smartphones have not produced any important innovations from a software point of view. They are not innovative because they don't need to be; they are simply the logical consequent of the advances in the miniaturization of hardware.

The market saturation you describe is not the result of a glut of innovation, but rather is just a consequence of developers porting existing desktop functionality onto a smartphone. You can take pictures and use voice recognition software to ask where nearby restaurants if you carry around a desktop or a laptop; you just probably wouldn't want to.

Actually, smartphones are a good example of how non-innovative and illogical the computing world can be. Underneath the touch-based interfaces, they run on a kernel written in a memory-unsafe, non-garbage collected, insecure, and inexpressive language that was designed to target the PDP-11. Because the operating system is so flawed and incompetent that it can't be trusted to prevent rogue processes from stepping on others, you end up with a lack of a useable file system and awful communication between apps. Of course, the joke is that these restrictions are almost worthless because you can almost always bypass the system security and jailbreak the device; then maybe you can do something useful with your phone without.

Its part of a larger trend in the computing world to ignore history and reinvent wheels, and call it innovation. Case in point: web apps, which, unless you are replacing a legacy application, are a terrible idea. Not only will they always face latency issues, but they also use awful languages designed to serve and manipulate text and are at least twice as slow as native code. Software on smartphones is interesting in the same way that a "Hello world!" program is interesting to C programmer; the programmer is so surprised that he has fought an unfriendly, unintuitive system full of kludges and managed to output text to the screen without the program crashing and dumping core that he doesn't notice how trivial the output is.

Of course, what we have today is better than nothing. In a way, the massive and unnecessarily resource intensive process that we have now is uplifting because it shows the determination of the human spirit; just imagine what we could accomplish if we invested in the right things.

I'm surprised that many of the little tweaks that Apple has added weren't available sooner. For example, on iOS 5 you could adjust the screen brightness via the double-click home menu on the bottom on the iPad, but not on the iPod, which was bizarre.

Have you had a chance to beta-test any of the previous iOS releases? It is possible that other iOS releases had lag issues that were fixed before the release to the general public.

>Let's face it; look to the Samsung vs. Apple case to see how it is the laymen making billion dollar calls.

The damages were reduced to $600 million after the judge ruled that the jury's used an "impermissible legal theory" to award damages, and ordered a new trial.[1] The jury foreman had a technical background and lied during voir dire by failing to mention that he had history of suing others for patent abuse.[2] He was the one he told the other jurors to ignore prior art and assume that Samsung had violated the patents.[3] So it isn't fair to say that laymen decided the damages.

After the trial, a patent('380, bounce-back) that Apple relied heavily upon during the trial to prove that Samsung was "infringing on their innovative designs" was invalidated by the USPTO.[3] This means that if the jury had been competent and searched for prior art (which the foreman with technical experience told them to ignore), or if Samsung had been allowed to present evidence demonstrating prior art, it is probable that no damages would have been awarded at all.

[1]: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130301161659602

[2]: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121031200136965

[3]:http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130402121308772

The court's opinion is classified. The DOJ is trying to block a FOIA suit filed by the EFF to release the opinion.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...

BenSchaechter, you've been hellbanned for at least 506 days, probably because of your submissions. Normally I don't tell people that they've been hellbanned, but since this is your post that has been linked to I thought you should know that not everyone can see your response to their comments.

Edit: @coolsunglasses, thanks for the follow up. I can see why a YC moderator would think that his posts are linkbait.

Section 215, known as the "business records" portion of The PATRIOT Act allows "FBI agents to obtain any "tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," a broad term that includes dumps from private-sector computer databases, with limited judicial oversight."[1]

That Section 215 exits is public record. However, the government has a "secret interpretation" of the law that allows itself many more powers than what is written in the publicly accessible version.

Only congressmen on the Senate Intelligence committee were briefed on the secret interpretation. With the exceptions of Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, who tried warn the American public without revealing anything classified (in 2011), the rest of the congressmen on the committee did not have a problem with what the NSA was doing. Many of the congressmen on the SIC are ex-military or receive large campaign contributions from defense contractors and/or the intelligence community.

[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20067005-281.html

The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any information that they don't strip before releasing it (which they won't) could be traced back to a certain person or organization that the metadata is about.

The Boston bombers weren't caught because of cellphone data. They were caught because they engaged the police in a gunfight; one of the brothers escaped, and he was caught because a man reported that his boat had a blood trail on it.

I don't think than Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagan made contributions as important as:

Galois — 20; Markov — 25; Abel — 26; Ramsey — 26; Ramanujan — 32; Riemann — 39; Turing — 41; Von Neumann — 53, etc.

But Erdős, Cantor, Newton, Archimedes, and Gödel (though he starved himself to death) lived past 70. So not all great mathematicians die young.

> Yes, even logged in. I think the idea that you're any safer because you clicked the log out button is incompatible with understanding how the web works.

If you don't share an internet connection with anyone else, or have a unique browser fingerprint, then logging out won't do much. If you do share an internet connection with other people, or use a coffee shop wi-fi access point and have a non unique browser fingerprint, then logging out makes it harder to determine who you are.

Nate Silver doesn't forecast House races because there isn't enough good polling data. He does predict Senate races; he was 31 for 33 in 2012. He predicted that Republicans would win in North Dakota (a 92% probability) and Montana (66% probability). Democrats won both races.

Here is the link to his 2012 predictions:

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/fivethirtyeights-20...;

Just click on the Senate forecast.

This article was written in 2005. I've read Friedman's columns since, and they haven't gotten any better.

Look at this [1] piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about Friedman's ramblings two years ago about a "radical centrist president".

Friedman lost a lot of credibility when he advocated for the Iraq War.

[1]: http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/tom_friedman_still_wrong.ph...

Here is the HN discussion about the BBC link

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495

> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me that C was the “language of the future”, and the right choice. (Rob went on to do all sorts of things, like invent the Go language.) And so it was that early in 1980, the first lines of C code for SMP were written.

So Wolfram appears to be saying that C, the "language of the future", was much better than that old Lispy stuff he had been using. But then he goes on to admit that he spent lots of time reinventing features that are obvious in Lisp:

>It got even weirder when one started dealing with multi-argument functions. It was quite nice that one could define a matrix with m:{{a,b},{c,d}}, then m[1] would be {a,b}, and either m[1,1] or m[1][1] would be a. But what if one had a function with several arguments? Would f[x, y] be the same as f[x][y]? Well, sometimes one wanted it that way, and sometimes not. So I had to come up with a property (“attribute” in Mathematica)—that I called Tier—to say for every function which way it should work. (Today more people might have heard of “currying”, but in those days this kind of distinction was really obscure.)

Really obscure? To who? C programmers?

The cartoon ban might be an attempt to make rotoscoped film pornography illegal.