nickolai

a daisy-cutter. they're 30k a pop.

The Tropico series also do this pretty neatly (especially 3 and 4) - you can follow your 'tropicans' from their family home to the job, to the market for food, doctor, church etc. A policeman would follow your orders and run after someone you ordered arrested. Traffic path-finding is not perfect though.

But in Tropico, it is rare to have more than a thousand agents at any one time - whereas I think Sim City '13 has to simulate at least a couple orders of magnitude more agents. Not sure about that - I didn't buy the game.

>The title only suggests something unique about Go to those who didn't read the article.

The thing is, many people use the title to determine whether the article is worth reading. As is, the title suggests that there is something unique about Go that reduces the bandwidth needed by the program, implying that this is something that other common languages fail to achieve. This is obviously impossible (any widely used language is capable of serializing an output byte stream in any way the programmer desires). As a result, the title sets off the alarm for "Language fanboyism", and "mathematically impossible claims", and goes swiftly into the "don't bother" pile together with "universal lossless compression algorithm invented!"[1], "perpetual motion machine" and "My favourite X language is faster that C/C++/Assembler!1!1"

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

>It feels odd to me that people can be so sure that games have no influence yet images of thin women in magazines has such a strong influence.

There is clearly an invitation to mimic the presented behaviour in both cases, however whether or not people follow up on this is another issue - mainly shaped by social norms. Being thin is socially acceptable and encouraged(whether or not it is a good thing is irrelevant). Killing people - isn't.

Also the action presented has to be related to the context it is presented in. An ad shows thin people in everyday life - so kids try to imitate by starving themselves in everyday life. Wargames present murder in context of a military conflict - well since we are NOT in the middle of a military conflict, there is no point imitating.

To be fair,

In any sufficiently-long comment thread, the probability of someone making $STATEMENT, approaches 1.

>> With the grasshopper technology the cost of a flight to orbit basically is the cost of rocket fuel...

>Even my car costs significantly more than just the fuel.

yes, but the cost of using your car for a drive from home to work is basically the cost of car fuel. As opposed to the cost of a full car + fuel because you decide to blow your car up once you get to destination, like we now do for rockets.

The thing is, having a comment in a tricky bit of code, and knowing that the comment may be confusing because some jackass (maybe myself six months ago ?) changed the code but missed the comment is IMHO still better than having no information whatsoever.

>Comments are for the weak,

Care to elaborate on this ? Commenting code is bad ? Or did I miss the irony ?

>Or do they have to channel the power into heaters each evening?

AFAIK, No. The battery generates 2kw of heat in addition to the electricity, so I dont think the rover even has any heaters.

    What time of the day do you usually have each activity? 
		Morning 	Afternoon 	Night 	Disperse throughout the day
    [...]
    Lunch
    [...]

Um... is that a trick question, or is there a part of the world where lunchtime doesn't separate the morning from the afternoon ?

> Something like a 2 year protection would give companies significant advantage, yet still allow smaller players to use the stuff in time.

Don't they take something like 2-3 years to only review the application and grant the patent at the moment ?

> In other words, they did the exact opposite of what the SOPA experience told them they should do.

No, from a strategic point of view, they did exactly what the SOPA experience told them they should do. Which is that if a generous contributor wants a possibly controversial bill passed, it has to be done as quickly and as quietly as possible. Or at least quickly enough to leave no time for an opposition movement to gather some serious momentum.

> Why wOuld I feel the need to inspect a book before buying it?

To make sure the pages will not start falling out before you're done reading it ? I had that happen to me several times with cheap paperbacks litterally falling apart before I was even through the first quarter of the book

To be fair I dont think this one needs a tldr...

>being as unreliable as human memory,

That's actually considered to be a feature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia

I was under the impression that this used a similar principle to the one that keeps hard drive heads in place. So some reasonable amount of vibration should not be an issue. On the other hand, assuming a reliability similiar to hard drives, failures will happen. and in worst case, will send a weighty heatsink spinning at 2krpm flying inside your computer case. Given how collision-unfriendly that baby looks, its not something i would want to happen inside my desktop box.

>This is just a way to create a slightly more complex password, if it's stored as a fast hash (like md5) then it's still going to be very easy to crack.

It's not about storage, it is about how to get people to use different passwords. Arguably, the passwords are not very different, but what matters is that they are no longer identic

Its still good advice to people who use the same password on all their accounts. 'just prefix the password with the first three letters of the hostname' will make sure they're slightly better protected in case of a password leak.

They may consider torturing you first.

"Oh come on, my grandma/dog/goldfish would write better code!!!"

This would be a totally acceptable jab among guys, yet saying this to a female coworker would immediately be misinterpreted as "woman are bad at coding" promptly followed by the full wrath of the HR gender equality team.

> What does a student learn from this? They're learning the tool, not the process of solving the problem.

They will learn the process if the tool is only used behind the scenes to validate their answer

I agree that matching the variety of possible assignements by some generic method is very difficult, though in my humble opinion, we already have a lot of the tools required. There is a ton of improvements to do(lots and lots of usability), but the base is there - and a project of such a scale would not be unheard of.

> Its hard to communicate a fraction to a computer

> "Explain whether 4/3 or 3/4 is closer to 1, and how you know."

You just did that. Twice. Square root ? "(3/4)^(1/2)" or maybe "sqrt(3/4)". There's no complexity in parsing that. I do agree it is not as natural as on paper but maybe tablets will find a way to improve that. Thats what innovation is here for after all.

>"Explain whether 4/3 or 3/4 is closer to 1, and how you know."

I am not familiar with the domain, but dont we have some automatic theorem-proving tools? Validating the answer to such a question would look like a perfect use case to me.[edit : clarified]

> [the description example]

Im not sure about this one. On the one hand i used to have a project in college about reconstructing a picture from an incomplete description - and its hard. On the other hand we are expecting a perfect description. Hence it would be pretty much isomorphic to the code of a program used to draw the picture. Matching the two images is also doable. Pseudocode would actually be the best way to transmit this image .

I've done so too. It seems that they will not be able to get around the Gnome3 crap in their ubuntu-based edition. They're trying to get out of the mess with their Cinnamon project. I'll see how it goes, but i'm afraid I'll have to ditch gnome altogether and go for XFCE (in Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) for example, they say its a rolling distro too, so it looks even more like a good idea).

This is really cool, but im not sure - how is it supposed to be used in games? Reality cant possibly be a better playground than specifically tailored VR.

I always saw AR as a convenient way to provide additional data on surroundings. Point out landmarks using a HUD in a car. A nice way to present information on a product (like an artificial "the company making this product supports SOPA" sticker :) ).

But I am really at a loss as to how this would be used in games. Virtual Pets maybe? but whats the fun of having to look at it through a 4 inch screen ? Hell, even his dancing foxes (or whatever they are) dont fit in tht ipad screen. The user sees the space right next to the ipad window, where they should be. And there's nothing there. Thats a huge immersion killer to me. Its not the same as with VR, as VR doesnt have to pretend the illusion is actually right behind the screen window. AR with full goggles ought to make up for that - but the hardware isnt nearly there yet.

This is technologically very impressive - but what can we really make of it?

>However, if my other half comes home and starts having a phone conversation–at a significantly lower volume in another room–the muffled voice really distracts me.

I find hearing a muffled conversation is actually worse than hearing a plain conversation. My pet theory is that either way, the brain has to commit some resources to parse the voice into actual concepts, but if the conversation is muffled it has to do even more work to 'clean the signal'. Using resources that are taken from your concentration ability.

You can consciously try to ignore the voice as much as you want, your subconscious still have to parse it. At least i've never been able to avoid it. I think that thats why white noise or music does not affect concentration nearly as much as a conversation of the same Db-level.

Great read. The linked article[1] on the Dunbar number is also very interesting, in case anyone missed it.

[1]www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

I think we need some sort of captcha system that keeps not only spammers, but also the kind of people he refers to out.

The one Quantum Random Bit Generator had set up comes to mind[1].

[1] http://random.irb.hr/signup.php . seems to be down atm, see http://web.archive.org/web/20110304151851/http://random.irb....

I used to use a lot of zsh at work, and one thing that drove me nuts was overzealous wildcard expansion.

  >scp server2:~/folder/* .

zsh: no matches found: server2:~/folder/*

nothing in current work dir matches 'server2:~/folder/ * ', so zsh helpfully yells at me. yeah I know use single quotes to avoid expansion, and backslash should work too. It makes total sense because * is a reserved character, but still, bash got it. surely Zsh could've too ?

It probably got fixed since then, but this raw frustration is my most vivid memory from zsh usage.

>An "appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service" are easy to replicate.

For any bigco the size of paypal to replicate it, they would first need to realise they are doing it wrong. Which requires a relatively large critical mass of people in the management chain to accept that they've been doing it wrong. That will never happen. And then there's the technical issues of going from wrong way to right way without interrupting service. That likely requires a lot of very skilled people, many of whom probably left for greener pastures when they first saw the "wrong way" sign.

Those juggernauts just cannot turn on a dime.

Nice list, A few nitpicks :

  + *Coffeine* Gaaaah. An IT guy misspelling Caffeine. 
  + *twits* This one is actualy funny. A "twit" is a moron. A "tweet" is a twitter message.
            The "No twits" thing definitely helps concentration, but did you mean "tweet" ?

I would also add a part about cutting out hardware/tool-related frustration. Nothing kicks me out of the flow like the system freezing, having to hunt for free disk space on the test server, etc.

Don't get me wrong. It is possible, the community website provides an accurate walkthrough[1] of how to do so and it looks totally scriptable. Mint just doesnt seem to have the "fire and forget" option ubuntu has. Their justification is that there is a risk of data loss/system corruption (see section E1 in link) :

> The only advantage Ubuntu offers is that it makes the process trivial and fully automated. Though, considering the risks and the way it upgrades your system, this should be considered dangerous.

[1]http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

I "sidegraded" to mint 11 right after the dubiously-named "upgrade" to 11.10 which broke the ubuntu 'classic' desktop. Mint had a normal interface and behaved as one would expect. Given how close the base was to ubuntu, the transition went smoothly. And I like green better than whatever undefined color ubuntu is anyway.

I recently upgraded to mint 12 and they are picking up a bit of the gnome3 suckiness - but it feels like they are really being unwillingly dragged into it and are fighting tooth an nail to keep it at bay. It is a bit worse than mint 11, but still a lot better than ubuntu 11.10. Maybe I should give that MATE thing a shot.

The only thing I kinda miss from ubuntu is the inplace upgrade process. Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.

I am feeling that Ubuntu is pushing realy HARD to get into tablet space - throwing-users-under-the-bus-if-need-be kind of hard. I can see the advantage of a Unity interface there, but come on, i had to manually tweak the laptop with powertop to even get close to the battery life I was getting with windows. This will never work for an average-joe-grade tablet.

I know, I know It is free, if i dont like it, I can switch to something else. Guess what? I did. According to distrowatch i'm not the only one. It is a real pity to see a good distro go down like that.