dhruvmittal

I get the impression that most people arguing in favor of the 3 laws have not actually read I, Robot. There are many places in pop culture that the laws appear, so it's not impossible that someone might quote them devoid of context.

To catch people up: I, Robot is a collection of short stories largely follow either (a) robopsychologist Susin Calvin or (b) robotics engineers Powell and Donovan as they attempt to diagnose anomalous behavior by examination of the 3 laws of robotics, highlighting the logical flaws and traps of these simple laws. A secondary theme is the use of robots as a mirror or lens through which particular human behaviors can be blown up and examined, largely through the absence or magnification of particular traits.

In universe, the 3 laws are considered to be practical engineering safeguards (and eventually, over hundreds of years, a fundamental building block to the function of the positronic brain)-- even as they are shown to the reader to be the origin of many conflicts.

I thought OLED burn-in was something I'd have to just deal with down the road when I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S (windows tablet), and that the machine was going to be on a two year countdown before becoming annoying.

So far it's been about 30 months with, no issue. I've taken no active steps to fight against burn-in, but also haven't completely disabled the default screensaver (a wobbling word art thing that displays the name of the tablet model after about 5 minutes of disuse). I've been checking for burn-in periodically as I'm suffering from a bit of upgrade-itus, and that would be a fantastic excuse.

The hardware looks slick, but are my emails going to bounce when my not commercial comcast/spectrum/at&t/whoever has a maintenance outage? I'm not sure it's too useful to bring that out of the datacenter and into my house...

OCaml as well-- the first place that comes to mind is Jane Street.

>The screenshots are so bad, not even the juniors I work with would consider deploying this. It's mind boggling.

Not defending the UI too much but I'm imagining this is something built and deployed on government contract in the late 90s or early 2000s (when it was considered high technology that they could do this from a web page in the first place?), occasionally migrated to whatever marginally newer system is required by law while consuming the minimal amount of funding.

It's a damn shame but a lot of govt. stuff ends up in this exact boat because nobody wants to pay to improve something that "already works."

For all that the outline is an insane looking site with 3/4 screen ads, it is also true that it doesn't do any of the shenanigans (redirection, slowing down the page to load ads, etc.) that the author calls out in the article.

Hopefully now we can all agree on Wayland and start moving a little faster towards {application,driver,etc} support and capabilities.

I feel like Ubuntu's Mir pushing was one of the big things holding back Wayland from widespread support and adoption.

I'd love to dump X without feeling like I'm shooting myself in the foot sometime in the next few years.

This is extra lazy on their part if this is legitimately an effort to hit the enterprise market, where users might not necessarily have the freedom to install Chrome on their company machines. Or it's an attempt to force corporate IT into approving chrome.

I've never used surf, but I really do like tabbed. It plays super nicely with most tiling window managers I've used, and lets me get the single best feature (ymmv) of i3 on xmonad.

Can confirm. My MA research was on an EMD Li-ion cathode material and I get approached by recruiters for companies I haven't even heard of every so often.

I tend to use vim for fortran/java/haskell/python/clojure/scala/bash/latex.

Recently I've been working in a C#/F#/.NET world with Visual Studio + the vsvim plugin. It's a decent substitute for the most part, but I hadn't realized how much I valued not having to wait 30 sec 4 min (depending on project size) to load files. Also, occasionally I'm doing some plumbing work and find myself trying to use registers and macros, which seem to be missing.

[joke about that imagination being your own subjective experience here]

I immediately love that this is taught in Haskell. I hadn't learned how excellent Haskell is for (non-hpc) computational physics until well into my Masters, where I began to replace my python analysis scripts.

And it's a far sight more elegant than my first Numerical Methods class, which used MatLab.

So, my company issued development machine is a beefy desktop full of xeons and graphics cards (necessary for the specific work I do). It's fantastic for 95% of my work life but sometimes I want a computer in a meeting with me to take some detailed notes, have a document/code on hand, or give a presentation.

Obviously, there are ways around all of those situations. I can email my slides to the presentation machines in the conference rooms, etc. But they don't really beat the convenience of just grabbing the computer I used to make the ppt and knowing that everything will work. Sometimes I get quite jealous of colleagues with laptops.

And then, of course, there are the aforementioned cases of travel or wanting to work from home instead of coming in.

About time-- I always thought it was absurd for them to keep apt-get and apt-cache separate "for historic reasons." I used to have the hardest time explaining that the occasional new ubuntu users (to say nothing of all the people who were convinced that they needed to type "apt get [packagename]" then "apt install [packagename]".

Crapturtles all the way down.

Many linux distros release a new version every 6-12 months, depending on the distro. While ubuntu offers 5 years of support on long-term support (lts) releases, desktop users tend to like the latest version and reinstall or upgrade every 6 months. A lot of the time, upgrading to a new release causes packages to skip forward by several versions. This often breaks packages with kernel dependencies, like graphics drivers, so it's common to advocate a fresh install every release. If you choose to remain on a lts release, you can easily run the same install for many years-- the price you pay is not necessarily having the latest shiny packages in return for a fairly stable system.

Archlinux, as a rolling distribution, does not have new release versions. Packages upgrade continuously-- as long as you pacman -Syu somewhat frequently, you avoid skipping package versions, reducing general breakage. Of course, most frequent maintenance is the cost you pay for a smoothly running archlinux system, but it's nice not to worry about reinstalling while still having the shiniest new packages.

I've used archlinux on my personal laptop for roughly 4 years now, and I've only reinstalled once when I upgrade to an ssd about two years ago. Prior to that, I used to install the latest fedora every 6 months.

One of the more popular Stylish "themes" for the site disallows just the javascript blocking text selection, avoiding the center-aligning.

I just finished my massdrop ergodox a few weeks ago, and I'm loving it. One of the things I like the most about it is the way the left and right hands are separate, allowing me to keep them about shoulder width apart in a very natural position. That was actually the biggest selling point to me over something like the kinesis or the TECK. The split layout feels like it's really revolutionizing the ergonomics of typing.

I do this pretty often, and people pretty much always complain. Less so people my age (college-aged), but a lot of professors, TAs, and my parents all claim that it's entirely too creepy. My parents have actually told me that they'd prefer if I just looked at the screen the whole time.

But on the other hand, why would I look at what I'm typing? I already know what it says- I hardly have to read it again. A good typist knows when they've hit the wrong key and should be able to correct for it without having to read.

While I'm sure that was all super meaningful to actual designers, that was probably the funniest thing I've read all week. Particularly page 21's "magnetic dynamics."

In my experience, they let you fly with one blade if it's loaded in the razor itself. They did, however, make me throw out my spares when they told me this. I've found that if I'm not checking a bag, the trip is usually short enough that I don't really need more than one blade.

Didn't Windows Phone's mail client break gmail threading for the longest time? I remember a huge hubbub over this a few months ago (or maybe a year or two?)

I got excited because the title led me to think the machine somehow went directly from water to wine with no additional ingredients.

You can get twilight on android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...], or redshift on linux (flux is also available, but redshift is more functional). I think f.lux is available for jailbroken ios devices, as well.

I had the same experience, but with a TI-83.

It's worth noting, at least for the companies on this list that I've interned at, that the listed numbers look like it they are for a well qualified software engineer (with at least a summer or two of industry experience prior to the internship), an MBA student, or a MS/PhD student. In my experience, the actual intern salary at these companies is significantly lower (about 60% the listed salary on average).

While it's true that they didn't drop support for Skype when they acquired it, and even continued to update it, what are the chances they'd have said "Hey, let's port skype to qt and put it on linux!" on their own?

I really wish more people recognized this relationship between the number of pixels and power necessary to drive those pixels. Journalists seem to constantly call for higher pixel densities on everything, ignoring the practical reasons and tradeoffs that must be considered.

The current Macbook Pro/Air situation is fairly elegant- it's a simple tradeoff between portability and resolution when you choose between the two 13" Macbooks. And it's not as if you get shafted by that choice, given how similar the machines are aside from their displays.

Some research needs to be done on how distracting Glass is to drivers. I'm particularly interested in comparing the distraction caused by using Glass to navigate compared to the typical built-in navigation systems that ship with most cars today.

I suspect that Glass would beat out the Garmins and Tomtoms.