ackalker

A very inspiring story of perseverance and the ultimate payoff. I wonder if it will take off the way the discovery and subsequent development of the transistor (which had a similarly difficult birth process) did for electronics.

>I believe that we will need to make some structure that allows for people to work who want to earn more, and still support a considerable number of people who just aren't employable in the future. There don't have to be just winners and losers like this article posits, it isn't us versus them, and technology shouldn't be vilified.

I believe what you're hinting at is the idea of "(unconditional) basic income". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Interest in this is rising, there are some scientific studies, and several pilot projects have been run around the world, with generally positive outcomes.

Very interesting article. Minor nit (just a typo I think): in the definition of flatMapError, shouldn't mapError be fmapError?

That's why they're called unit tests. They are supposed to test precisely one unit of functionality, while assuming everything else works as specified (using mocks if necessary). Taking into account the effects of microcode execution on the test result is in fact a kind of integration testing.

This piques my interest. When was the last time anyone read the source code of (g)libc "cover to cover" before using it? Does anyone know the precise implications of (not) defining any of the myriad sensible permutations of its "feature test macros"? Is anyone even sure that those implications are actually implemented correctly before relying on them?

I read the article, then I clicked on the link concerning the lawsuit. Then my jaw dropped as this notice (in 24pt font) is thrown in my face:

"Your activity looks suspicious to us. Please prove that you're human."

I call double irony. Thank goodness CAPTCHA triggers can't put me in jail (yet)...

I very much doubt that just marking a partition as OpenBSD is the end of the architecture specific stuff. Somehow the firmware in your computer has to actually boot the OS. Unless things are setup in a way which is acceptable to the firmware with regards to booting (be it mandatory filesystems, directory structure and file formats, master boot records, partition table entries and corresponding flags, GUIDs, bootsectors, etc.), nothing much is going to happen when actually trying to boot it.

From the article: "it’s a really good idea to go and read the UEFI specification. You can do this. It’s very easy. You don’t have to pay anyone any money. [...] You can find it [right here on the official UEFI site]. You have to check a couple of boxes, but you are not signing your soul away to Satan, or anything."

Before people click on that link and start thinking the author of the article is a damn liar (the link takes one to a menacing "Access Denied" page which prompts users to login or register (which in turn involves filling out a form and possibly paying a large amount of money)), here is a link to free downloads of the specification documents (as PDF files):

http://www.uefi.org/specifications

And by the way, no need to check any boxes at all, just click any of the links and the download should start right away.

...which can compile a(n older, preprocessed, but none the less) Linux kernel "on the fly", while booting:

http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html

>Being able to stream a collections of bytes (and collections of collections of bytes, recursively) is one case that I find myself wanting when sending data between programs at the command line.

If you don't mind using JSON as intermediary format, you might like to have a look at jq: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/

jq can also convert raw (binary) data to JSON objects containing strings (and vice versa) for further processing. Naturally, jq filters can be pipelined in many useful ways.

Well as for simply supporting Lua in browsers, aside from the obvious Emscripten/ASM.js way, which would work for practically all browsers which support JavaScript, Lua can run as a PNaCl app in Chrome/Chromium, see: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lua/nkcnhkobblkmia...

Of course this is only a proof-of-concept which just runs a Lua REPL in the browser. I wonder if it is possible (and if so, how hard it is) to make the browser run <script language="lua"></script> code.

afaict, work on grub2 started back in 2004, and a backport patch[1] of the 'paranoid' A20 checking for grub legacy was posted to the bug-grub mailing list back in 2006.

In fact, the very first reply[2] to that patch makes exactly the same point I did above: why not use grub2?

[1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2006-07/msg00015....

[2]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2006-07/msg00025....

Nice writeup, but[1] I'm wondering, could the author have saved himself from a lot of grief by not using an ancient, outdated bootloader in the first place?

[1]: I don't want to spoil the fun, but look at [2] in the article and wonder: who the hell is still using grub 1? Even mainstay isolinux (which in addition has to deal with lots of weird / broken BIOS implementations of cd booting (El Torito, anyone?)) does a lot better.

Nah, I use telnet to browse the Web. No, not using that newfangled Line Mode Browser thingy over at CERN, I mean straight to server port 80.

Ah the Covox[1] craze, sweet memories.

BTW: I think you meant to say "parallel-port-to-DAC", where "DAC" all too often meant just a simple cobbled-together resistor ladder.

Who cares about HiFi when you can have actual sampled sounds instead of tinny beeps? :-)

Thank you for a nice challenge, and thanks for the interesting link :-)

As someone who is genuinely interested in AI, I'm very curious if lateral thinking like we demonstrated can ever be matched by a machine. I'm watching things unfold with great interest.

"EHS said No Upside-Down People. Period."

Well, they didn't say anything about cows, did they?

Hey guys, you're MIT hackers. Involve a cow, will you? Upside-down, if at all possible...

I'll see you and raise you a © .

Which in my book is c, the speed of light in a vacuum, 299792458 m/s, a mere 9 digits, but inscribed in a circle using Steinhaus–Moser notation[1] is equivalent to a number so mindbogglingly big that I'm not even going to attempt to calculate its measure.[2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinhaus%E2%80%93Moser_notatio...

[2]: Not that it makes any sense to perform this operation on c, but I think that use of © in this way is much more interesting than its current usage.

1. Bribe some politicians

2. Get some telecom / spectrum management laws repealed / rewritten

3. Replace the board of directors of the local equivalent of the FCC

4. Profit!

Seriously, I think it is quite hard, next to impossible to just go shopping for some spectrum in any country with a population density and / or wireless telecom infrastructure above a certain level, unless you are a major corporation or government entity.

Please try kbrock's fork at https://github.com/kbrock/c4 Check out his 'longs' branch.

This is a snippet of email I sent to a friend just a few days ago. Besides the slow startup, I think these numbers speak for themselves...:

    $ sudo ps_mem
     Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program
    
    [...]
    412.0 KiB + 137.5 KiB = 549.5 KiB       vi
    [...]
     12.2 MiB +   2.7 MiB =  14.9 MiB       gvim
    [...]
    968.9 MiB +  94.3 MiB =   1.0 GiB       atom (7)

That's with no file loaded in any of the editors, gvim brimming with plugins, Atom freshly installed. Sad, really.

'Was' obviously is in past tense. If there is high likelyhood of it being Ebola, the article should have made that clear in the very first (few) paragraphs, like stating that further tests are being done to strengthen the confirmation.

Edit: Ah, I understand now that the CDC has a rather peculiar definition of "case" of illness, see giarc's comment below for a link.

Headline: "First confirmed case of Ebola confirmed in the United States: CDC"

Article: "[...] an unnamed patient was being tested for Ebola [...]" (emphasis mine)

Besides the obvious pleonasm in the title ("confirmed [...] confirmed" doesn't make it doubly so), nowhere in the article does it say that anyone is certain that this man actually has Ebola, as obviously, tests are still being done. Until the results of these tests are in, there is no confirmation.

Is this some kind of reading comprehension test being dumped on HN? For what nefarious, crowd sourced, statistical research project? <grin>

From what I gather from the article, the systems which RAM scrapers attack were running on general purpose computers, with very similar vulnerabilities.

Why isn't sensitive software like this built and audited with the same concern for reliability and security as avionics, medical equipment, SCADA, etc.? Certainly the cost in financial losses caused by these attacks makes this a pertinent question.

The example [listen] link points to a .mid file which some browser setups don't know how to handle (for instance, my Chromium simply downloads the file whenever I click the link, then downloads it again when I click the file in the bottom download bar).

Please offer an example audio rendering in a media format which is more generally supported, thank you.