copper

Just curious: how much would I have to pay to get cleartax pro?

Also, you might want to fix the Mr Bose example: "ClearTax (an Income Tax website) rode to his resuce". I'm not entirely sure that I consider the story to be a positive endorsement, by the way :) It seems too contrived to be true.

Edit: I found out there's a demo video from HN. You might want to make that link a tiny bit more prominent. I love the video, by the way.

I assumed he referred to the PE file format, but it looks like Microsoft actually makes a spec available for it.

It's actually rather fun to watch in person, though I can understand why you think it's bizarre. It's, as far as I can see, really ceremonial - though it remains a big deal for the security forces personnel involved.

Oh, they're very much real, (mind you, I don't know what a a splarge is) except that they don't turn up in daily conversation.

Perhaps the most interesting part of how they're doing it is that they have an algorithm that doesn't rely on the results of other test takers, except for the eventual statistics.

Also worth seeing: http://testyourvocab.com/hard.php

Indeed, though in my case that's purely from geographical considerations :)

Sadly, that website says that he's on vacation and not accepting new clients.

fwiw, that's true for cs and stat, and I assume for math too. What I refer to is something like this:

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/AND+AND+ti:+riemann+ti:+hypothes...

This is a particularly egregious example; but if I'm looking for something on a different subject where I don't know some of the notable researchers, or don't know what I'm looking for, it would take me a lot more time than I'd like to spend to filter out the more interesting papers.

According to this explanation, the behaviour isn't completely specified: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/558#comment-2698

Downvoters should probably know that she's the one who wrote the article.

A better model would be something like what the Real-World Haskell book used when it was under development: allow comments (anonymous or otherwise) on each paragraph, and refine the content based on those comments. Of course, this does have the twin problems that it doesn't keep results private, and makes credit assignment a real pain :)

Even with all the problems it has, I actually prefer peer-review right now. Some of the stuff that gets self-published on arXiv is of sketchy quality, and there's just no quick way of figuring that out by just reading the abstract if a 'known' person hasn't co-authored it.

Well, if you really want an undergrad option, there's one in Delhi :)

http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/textile/public/department.php

Ah, well - we /do/ come from different worlds. My initial reaction to the word "codes" is to look for the "plz send me the" somewhere before it.

That said, at least (some kinds of) EEs seem to have it better - the basic Spice simulator was released under a permissive license a really long time ago, and there are people like Fabio Somenzi who make available things like CUDD (it's also used commercially.) Mind you, these have a significant overlap with CS, where the culture is different. I would be very happy to see a good open-source EM field solver, for example.

Coverity's Prevent[1]? I use it for C++, and while it's not free, the pricing is /very/ reasonable.

[1] http://www.coverity.com/html/prevent-for-java.html

Well, for example, how about sorting out a lot of pdf documents I have in a folder called papers/ ? I do use Mendeley now but there are some leftovers from before that I really don't want to sit and sort through (not to mention the fact that I probably may have multiple copies of some of them.)

> The Nokia 1100 isn't just the biggest selling mobile phone ever, it's the biggest selling consumer electronics device, having sold over 250m units.

It was also the most sturdy phone I've ever had. As anecdotal evidence, it survived being dropped into a swimming pool. My 1100 died some years ago, and I still miss it.

As for Nokia surviving the deluge of cheap Chinese knockoffs, I dunno. A large number of similar manufacturers have managed to appear in India over the last few years, and they seem to be eating up Nokia's marketshare in the really low-end phones

Look at this phone, for example: http://www.spiceglobal.com/SpiceMobiles/Model.aspx?Id=191 - at ~40$, it is pretty good.

Mind you, there have been people working on clearing up trapped charges. I doubt there's been much usable progress (IIRC, the methods involve some kind of irradiation of the dielectric, which is difficult to perform in situ.)

textfiles.com would have quite a lot of ascii art from back then. Memories :)

You also need to keep 32-bit and 64-bit shared libraries, and then keep them (more or less) in sync - admittedly, linux distros do manage that more or less invisibly.

Mind you, when it comes to nvidia cards and the claims that newer versions of flash make about hardware video decoding, it's not funny anymore.

It's what happens if you use cedet/ecb on lots of code. I like the code completion and other features they give me, but it is just too slow to keep on always.

Isaac, do you think you could add this problem to the shootout? I believe (and am therefore almost certainly wrong) that there isn't any benchmark there that derives almost purely from compiler theory.

The initial code was supposed to be written in a straightforward way. That said, I was playing around with the code, and using tcmalloc with the original C++ code gives a better speedup (something close to 40% with the provided example.)

The final list of changes is supposed to be with the internal version, and roughly seem to show a 20% change over and above what the basic std::map -> ext/hash_map replacement. I'm not sure if I should add the percentages, or multiply them along to get the final runtime, though that doesn't make much difference, really :)

You're right that there may not be much improvement, but I've seen the google dense_hash_map do better sometimes than the basic SGI hash_map.

Edit: the code repo has the unoptimized versions. Oh well, at least I can get the satisfaction of seeing the 30% myself :)

The most instructive part of this are the listings from the changelogs alongwith the resulting improved performance. I'm really enjoying the C++ tunings. I wish they did show the results with the google hashes, though.

Isn't SiFT still patented, though?

> lasted for well over a day

I've never had the spare money to buy a smartphone, but isn't that /ludicrously/ low? My cheap little nokia brick lasts (under normal usage) for a bit less than a week. Admittedly, the power drawn is not comparable, but I'd still think the manufacturers would try to give the users a somewhat longer battery life.

Factor, Racket, and Lua all have ffi's that are very easy to use. I've never quite liked Lua's metaprogramming, though (macros are very useful when you're writing bindings.) and my least favourite Lua quirk would be the lack of integer types - both other languages have fairly sane (and performant!) numeric towers.

That said, I'd give a higher priority for the language in my browser to be safe: some kind of correctness guarantee would be nice. Or even, while we're at it, some kind of way to analyze the script and say "this script GETS from urls x,y, and posts data d to z"

Intel recently let Achronix use their fabs for 22nm FPGAs , so this is not really a new move by them either (that said, Achronix was a /tiny/ deal. This one may not be.)

http://www.achronix.com/products/speedster22i.html

FWIW, Buzz has a far better S/N ratio than twitter: I find people like Terence Tao, in particular, to be particularly insightful when they're not hampered by a 140 character limit.

That's true for almost all of the startups (and in one case, a company that just filed for IPO). It wasn't too hard to match this data to LinkedIn for quite a few people I know :)

Doesn't this violate some kind of privacy laws, anyway? (Edit: I mean the fact that the US Government is releasing data, not the fact that it can be mined)