claudius

Fairly hassle-free. I have both the 2015 X1 Carbon (with Debian Jessie) and 2016 X1 Yoga (with Debian Stretch). I needed to install an extra xserver-xorg-input-* package for the touchscreen on the latter to work nicely and Firefox Aurora to get gesture support, but everything else just works.

The keyboard on the X1 Yoga is sort of meh, though.

Well, you usually need a university address or some endorsers to post to the arxiv, but true, most people could probably post that.

On the other hand, the arxiv is also the default method of communication in quite a few fields (physics and maths, mostly), to the point that while grant committees etc. look at your peer-reviewed papers, I essentially only check the arxiv for new developments, not the plethora of properly peer-reviewed journals.

> If you have forgiven Lenovo after last year's man-in-the-middle scandal, they continue to make the best keyboards

Meh. The one on my 2015 X1 Carbon is okay, but the keyboard and trackpoint are the worst parts of my X1 Yoga – the trackpoint only allows the "soft dome" caps (i.e. the convex ones, not the nice concave ones which save you a bunch of stress in the fingers) and the keyboard just feels very cheap and weird. The keypress is still well-defined, it’s just that the keys are incredibly shallow.

You shouldn’t have. Google trusted the phone too much, using it instead of the user-supplied secrets to determine who was allowed to access the account. Whether or not the account used multi-factor authentication seems quite perfectly irrelevant?

Somalian banks tend not to have passporting access rights to the EU market.

> The thing about speculative execution and out of order execution to remember is that you always get the expected result from a single threaded perspective.

Could you elaborate on this? I thought at least speculative execution was handled internally in the CPU and essentially not visible to the user apart from the performance impact?

I’m not sure what you refer to as out-of-order execution, is this execution reordering within the C compiler?

> If you throw in interrupts or threads, you know you must tread cautiously in C.

Naturally, yes.

> The problem is not that Kabbaj was lying. It's that he was too charming.

Elsewhere, this sort of thing would be called corruption, specifically bribery of a public employee.

Actually, no, the library-provided full-access website for APS journals is much nicer. If I want a preprint, I can usually find it on arXiv and last time I looked at it, I found sci-hub to have a rather confusing interface.

And wherefrom can you get Signal except for the Google Play store? I was looking for it a while ago to install on my phone but only found two other projects which were threatened by moxie and then shut down.

I have one in my work browser to redirect a journal’s website example.com to example.com.library.university.example.net in order to get the full access. Having a simple button for this made my life a lot easier, though I admit that it is somewhat of an unusual case.

For standard levels of indentation, I get that tabs may be useful, but in /etc/fstab, I absolutely hate them – how many do you put if the individual elements vary in size? Always just one, resulting in e.g.

    this_is_a_long_line<tab>defaults<tab>…
    short<tab>defaults<tab>…

with the following elements not aligning? Or however many are necessary to get things to align, which sort of destroys the semantic meaning?

I don’t know of a mechanism in quantum mechanics that would allow to pack information more densely (or even infinitely dense as would be required by O(1) random access times), what did you have in mind?

The author does address this point in part three of the series where he compares access times to a small area of a larger memory region. Even with absolutely sequential access to an array of size K, you first have to find this particular array in your larger memory region of size N, giving you total cost to iterate over the full array as O(sqrt(N) + K).

I am not sure how costly it is to iterate through your entire memory (assuming a no-op), but I would argue that eventually you reach some bottleneck and end up at O(sqrt(N)+N), too.

For the analysis in the article, it is enough to assume an unlimited amount of space into which you can put your memory as well as an unlimited amount of time. For your own analysis, you can of course make any assumptions you wish, but the author argues (and I agree with him there) that the spatial scaling O(sqrt(N)) for random access is both relevant in practice (as seen by the caching graph) and cannot be improved on when considering the laws of physics.

> The limits of the real world are good to remember but that does not invalidate Big O analysis.

No, it just means that you failed to take one specific bit into account and that your analysis may hence be less relevant to the real world. Much the same way we can say that integer addition is O(1), because usually we deal with fixed-size integers, we can say that memory access is O(1), because usually we deal with a fixed maximal memory size. Of course, integer addition is O(log(N)) and, according to the arguments made in the article, memory access is O(sqrt(N)).

> Here's why we don't: YOU CAN'T.

But that’s one of the main points of the article: You don’t have to. Asymptotically, you won’t be better than O(sqrt(N)) because physics does not allow it. You can put all the different caches in you want, you can buy the most expensive RAM there is, you can buy the best interconnect systems for the fanciest NUMA cluster you can find: You won’t beat O(sqrt(N)) if you wish to go to arbitrary N.

Of course, if you bound your problem size, you may well get O(1) access times and for some applications, it may well be sensible to consider the coefficient associated to the square-root scaling small enough to neglect it, but if you truly want to talk about algorithmic complexity (and not just the scaling of one particular implementation for one particular range of valid N), you should take that additional square root into account.

This already started to happen a while ago (couple months?) in Munich. Amazon packages are delivered by a specific Amazon delivery person instead of DHL as before. Now I don’t need to sign anything any more when at home and when I’m not at home, it will be left in front of my apartment door; whereas DHL either handed it over to a neighbour or a ‘closeby’ post office.

Not sure what I would do if a shipping went missing while in front of my apartment door, but from past interactions with Amazon, I’d assume they send a new one without asking questions.

That’s a lie. The EU was never intended to be solely a free trade area, it was conceived as an ‘ever closer union’ and a lot of work has been put into it becoming one since 1952.

De Gaulle certainly was right in vetoing the UK application repeatedly, given how much harm they have done to the common European project and long-time peace and prosperity on the continent.

> EU Commissioners are not elected democratically.

Well, they are suggested by the democratically elected governments of the member states and either accepted or rejected by the democratically elected European Parliament.

> Furthermore, they are required to take an oath to put the interests of the EU first, and not take any instructions from the countries they are from.

As they should, they are to work in the interests of the EU, not a single member state. German ministers are also required to serve the whole federal republic appealing to individual states is not looked upon very favorably.

> In addition to all that, the Commission has very close ties to big business.

Hopefully we can solve at least some of the issues with corruption and lobbying when the most corrupt country in the world[1], which has worked against workers’ rights and increased regulation to ensure public health and safety in the EU for the last four decades, leaves.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/when-a-mafia-expert-tell...

> rely on libc instead of the raw OS APIs?

The argument here is that on Windows and Mac OS X, the libc library is the ‘raw OS API’ and it hence makes perfect sense to rely on it if you want to support such operating systems.

The arXiv is not necessarily a tool where everybody can publish everything. It is primarily a tool for the community, which consists mostly of people with affiliations. If you want feedback for something as an outsider, go to conferences and present a poster.

No. It just means that there are some more events that may occur and may change the probabilities of some events slightly. That is, where before we assumed that decay only occurs through events A and B, with A chosen 45% of the time and B chosen 55% of the time, we now know (assuming all these findings are true) that there are actually B' and B'', chosen 0.001% and 54.999% of the time respectively, which result in the same outcome particle-wise but with take different paths to get there, resulting in different particle properties (momentum, mostly).

For systems using radioactive decay as seed, this should have very little effect, as the involved previously-unknown effects are extremely small and the properties influenced by them are unlikely to be used as a source of randomness anyway.

The wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_... has some somewhat helpful graphics at least explaining the relative abstraction levels of the different entities.

It depends. Clang, GCC and the Intel C++ compiler all support #pragma once perfectly. Personally, I prefer it, as it is only one line rather than three and I don’t have to think of a unique name for the header guard. Supposedly it breaks if you play weird tricks with the filesystem (s.t. the compiler thinks two identical files are actually different), but I have never encountered such breakage.

It absolutely is so black and white. If I buy a computer from you and you send me a parcel which explodes in my hands, no amount of hand-waving is going to get you out of this -- this even holds if you just distributed notes "Call this number to get your own personal computer free of charge!".

And just as a computer reseller/free-computers-for-everyone-distributor has an obligation not to send bombs to people who asked for computers, a website owner has an obligation not to serve malware to people who asked for content.

Okay, I understand that there are not that many usecases for a 500€ note and whenever I paid something >500€ in cash, I appreciated the flexibility of 50€ notes. But that Harvard Kennedy School also asked for the withdrawal of £50 and $100 notes? Again, $100 is probably not that useful, 100€ notes were usually a nice touch for Christmas gifts by parents/grandparents.

But £50? ATMs tend to give me a bunch of 50€ notes and I like them. Everybody likes them. They’re not too large that you can still buy gum with one and not too small that your wallet is all cluttered up. I understand that £50 is slightly more, but not that much more to go down to £20/20€ for it.

Hm. Mirakel 3.0 apparently doesn’t work, but 2.8.2 is still on F-Droid. Compared to the "Taskwarrior" app there, it seems much more polished, with the Taskwarrior app, I have a hard time figuring out how to e.g. add subtasks to a problem (or even hide existing subtasks from cluttering everything). Do you have an even better alternative?

I think even if Windows was not dependent on ARM, Intel would continue to own the PC/notebook market for a long, long time to come. As soon as your device is large enough to fit even a 30-Wh battery in, you can already afford to use Intel CPUs power-consumption wise. Cost-wise, they’re still more expensive, but so are all the other components in notebooks such that they don’t make that big of a difference. Consumers are also okay with higher prices for longer-lasting notebooks as opposed to smart phones which are replaced every 2-3 years.

All in all, ARM still sucks performance-wise. Yes, you can run a decent-ish desktop with it, but you really don’t want to do anything that takes any amount of CPU time (development, typesetting, gaming, even browsing the web thanks to today’s JS craziness).

Right now, yes. But these surcharges will be banned entirely from June 2017.

The difference is that using STL containers such as std::string or std::vector are very much the default in C++ (much the same way ‘safe’ code is the default in Rust), whereas you have to do some manual work in C to get them. The result is that using std::string and std::vector here is the natural solution in C++, whereas likely very experienced C programmers stuck to the manual approach.

Oh, yes, sorry and now it’s too late to fix (both that and the horrible formatting). Though I suppose it would have been a compile-time error, so at least it shouldn’t be exploitable :')