andars

Github's status page shows past month uptime, but I would be interested in seeing past year. It seems to me that Github has had a couple of major outages recently. Then again, they stand out more than normal operation.

"new Hacker News rules"

I think this should read: current weeklong experimental policy on Hacker News.

I also don't feel like this list of books justifies getting flagged, even during this reprieve from political discussion. If loads of comments start flaming, maybe then. But right now it is just a list of suggested books to read.

I can see dedicating the vast majority of one's time (even 100+ hours a week) to doing something you deeply care about. I would say, however, that the vast majority of people, even entrepreneurs, are not in a situation where their work satisfies that condition. I can only suppose Mr. Bosack's work did.

Nonetheless, idolizing 15 year olds who work 130 hours seriously rubs me the wrong way.

Honestly was having a hard time determining whether the linked article was satire or not. The picture of the kid who looks 8 years old at the end put me over the top.

What happened to childhood? I hope this ideal is isolated and not every 12 year old wishes they were a "founder".

The electoral college makes a lot more sense when you think about electing a President that represents the states, rather than the people.

In case anyone else is interested in reading it, the relevant RFC is here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1504-int1...

"If you cant afford the tax, you should move out and sell/rent out"

This makes zero sense to me. Someone bought the property 50 years ago and now is the sole owner, but it is reasonable to force them off their property / out of their home? I get it, other people are willing to pay more for it, but it is the owner's property.

In that case, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

If you are interested in this stuff, I have heard that the book Geometric Algebra for Computer Science is good.

You can find the first chapter as a pdf download here: http://geometricalgebra.org/downloads/ga4cs_chapter1.pdf. It contains some code examples, and the complete source code is here: http://geometricalgebra.org/sandbox.html

Originally read this as "plans to launch (rocket-bearing) satellites" (as in satellites which carry rockets), which would have been interesting indeed.

I suppose all satellites have thrusters, but that isn't what came to mind.

Since you only work with 90 degrees, you don't even need the full machinery. In my solution I used (a,b) -> (-b,a) and its dual.

I'd say if it depends on how you think about complex numbers. If your understanding of the imaginary unit is limited to "that thing that when you square it you get -1", I agree with you. But if you think of the imaginary unit as the 2-blade in the geometric algebra of R^2, I would argue it is one of the best ways to think about 2D geometry.

"it's still fair to say Newtonian mechanics is an "incomplete" view of the universe"

The arguments back and forth on this fascinate me. On one hand, on some scales, Newtonian mechanics is "correct enough" to give results that work, and so in that sense it is just "incomplete" in that its domain is restricted. On the other, relativity and QM change everything. These new theories may reduce to Newtonian mechanics given certain assumptions, but Newtonian physics says things about the structure of spacetime that are incorrect (e.g. velocity is not additive). In this sense, one can fairly say that Newton's mechanics are not just incomplete, but wrong.

Sweet. Thanks for the reference.

Hopefully these cards will become more widespread.

You're probably right, but I guess it would be a possibility if we just replaced the battery in current phones.

For the other things I didn't necessarily have a battery in mind (doesn't change your point though).

Would it store music, or just information about music?

What kind of revolution are you expecting? Loads of people already have smartphones and I don't see them switching, and you can already get a flip phone for < $10.

I can see the appeal, but it still seems way easier just to put a cheap computer in eah location with equivalent compute power to a phone and carry around the SSD.

FPGAs in desktop/laptop computers. That would open all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Energy from nuclear fusion.

Highly dense electrical energy source. I want to see electric planes, phones that last for months, drones that stay in the air for days, etc.

Some kind of magical security system so we could return to native code instead of putting VMs on top of VMs. No idea if this one is feasible or how it might be achieved.

Cheaper IC foundries. I think there might be a market for old processes if they were substantially less expensive.

I don't understand. If you already are planning on using it with 3 monitors, what is the advantage of making it so portable? Why not just leave a slightly larger device where the monitors are and use the small device as storage / boot disk?

The timing is everything. I read it as a "whatever" in response to the news.

Note that that tweet has since been deleted and so it probably shouldn't be considered an official statement of the company. My guess is that the employee in charge of the twitter account did a bit of a 'yolo'.

Interesting opinion. However, this isn't current U.S. law. See, for example, the numerous successful suits against Toyota for unintended acceleration.

In addition, it may soon be questionable to say that an occupant of a vehicle is "operating" said vehicle if it drives entirely autonomously.

This is not relevant. If a corporation builds a product that kills people, the corporation is responsible. No corporation is responsible for the behaviour of humans.

Yeah, I can definitely relate. I'm a current EE student in an equivalent course and am still getting used to being so rigorous with everything. Anything Fourier is starting to look pretty edgy (esp. since most the transform integrals don't converge in the normal sense).

Was your undergrad in math?

This doesn't strike me as a reasonable analogy.

1) Microchips don't grow autonomously in the first place, unlike organisms.

2) The article's point is that not only do humans have the "mask artwork and silicon wafers", but also the genes that other organisms use to regenerate portions of their body. A closer equivalence would be "the instructions on how to rebuild the missing half of the microchip from what remains".

Question I've been wondering about for a while: where does PCI fall into this? Do modern x86 PC systems still use in & out at all?

I don't think so. We aren't interested in reconstructing the signal, so if we have 10 samples of the flashing screen we will have 10 bits.

If I'm wrong please correct me.

Looks like they are. Actually a good idea IMO assuming they are just using them as robust 8 bit interconnects and not actually Ethernet.

Unlikely. It will be a phased array so they will need some spacing between the antennas. I've heard mention of ~pizza box size