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Negative; you should look up literate programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming). Basically you compile the lhs into a pdf before reading it ;-)

Besides yourself, who is good?

It's not that they are more protected; market economy simply works that way: MS/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc are competing for employers, the best way to get good ones is from good interns.

It's two different things:

- one, quantum computers can theoretically do factoring in polynomial time and therefore theoretically break schemes such as RSA (such schemes are proven secure provided that some computational problem is intractable -- in the quantum world the problem becomes tractable)

- two, you can theoretically use entanglement to achieve "perfect cryptography". The "perfectness" result is an absolute impossibility result in physics, and therefore no computer (classic or quantum) can break it. Details on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography

The article refers to number two, although in a rather non-technical manner.

Edit: clarifications.

What's wrong with every software ever written having a Wikipedia page if someone cares enough to make one?

He doesn't seem to motivate his post, but I think reading (more) (books) should not be a goal in itself...

At a luxurious 10 seconds a word, you would translate your 2000 words a day in approximately 5.5 hours. I think 10 seconds a word gives you enough time to translate one word, play one move of chess, and repeat. You could get really good at chess this way.

While I half agree with what you did, I think you're a step away from perfectness (see bellow) :)

I actually had the exact same problem and I was recently speaking to a friend from google and asked him to implement this as part of their search engine (i.e. just like the calculator, but for time zones) -- he didn't see the need for such a thing.

Here is my use case which doesn't work: conference deadlines. Please tell me what this:

Thursday, February 4, 2010, 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time (GMT −5:00)

translates to in my local time. Note that entering the date in your app does nothing, even if you split EST from the rest.

Remind me again why you think it is the safest way to travel?

It's disruptive all right; it fucking keeps bothering me about trying it right after i sign in to gmail. And it doesn't seem to take 'no' for an answer.

Interesting read. I hate however the amount of footnotes. I find the CS style (references at the end, almost not footnotes) much more readable.

In my experience, service in Paris is inferior to almost every other place i've been to. People simply can't be bothered to be helpful. They always have better things to do, like finishing the conversation with their spouse, texting the boyfriend, biting the nails, etc. That is, unless you're a good looking piece of ass, in which case you might get a nice i wanna do you smile.

The French do indeed expect you to address them in French (in my experience, the ones that speak good English will have no problem with English though; very few of these though). And they simply have a different mindset. The waiter doesn't give a shit about you since (s)he is paid the same thing. The sellers in stores don't give a shit about whether you buy or not -- they get paid the same. They endorse random strikes, etc.

You just have to learn to live with it. There are good things about Paris. And I have seen good service in France, with trained waiters; the trick is that the bill/person can run up to 100 euros in such places.

Non-realtime society games, learning foreign language kits (the kindle has audio output), a programming language (+ perhaps eulerprojet like contests). I was really excited about this one until I figured they haven't read RFC 5322 on email address validation since they can't validate mine: first.last+kindle@gmail.com.

The abstract of the article is that companies want to make money. Therefore, anything companies do is the result of them thinking it will help them make (more) money. Seems pretty basic to me.

This has been on the tip of my tongue for a long while, so I might as well go ahead and say it now. I am ready to acknowledge the power of technology as much as anyone hanging around here.

But I think that dismissing the computer/internet laws currently being passed by countries in the EU as being unenforceable, or being easily solvable by technology workarounds is a great fallacy and the most stupid thing in the world to do.

The cat and mouse play between technology workarounds and law cannot go on forever, because eventually you will run out of legal workarounds. This is similar to the cat and mouse play between the police and law breakers. Unless you are in bed with the police, you will eventually get caught.

I think that the only viable alternative is to oppose these laws and hope they don't pass.

Then on what type of computers does suspend-resume work properly?

I totally agree with the article. However I wonder what prompted PG to write it. Did one of their startups' apps get rejected recently?

' “Say an advertiser makes $0.10 every time someone clicks on their ad. Only 20% of people who visit the site click on their ad. How many people need to visit the site for the advertiser to make $20?” I froze. The problem sounded easy but I didn’t want to cause an awkward silence trying to solve it. '

The problem only sounded easy? Isn't this what you learn in 3rd grade? When you can't do this stuff you shouldn't be allowed near numbers.

Easily. It has already been passed as a law in France. And is under discussion in the entire EU. Therefore we conclude by analogy.

There is no way a bike costs that much. Unless they hide gold under the seat, that is. They must be counting other expenses, like salaries or repairs and dividing by the number of bikes.

And before feeling too sorry for the poor company that provides the service, note that it thus obtained a monopoly on advertisement in Paris, which is a big deal. They regularly have columns in the newspapers complaining about vandalism, and how it's destroying its business, but they never complain that they got too much advertising space ;-)

Also bike costs are shared with the city. I have not subscribed to the service, since I very often see bike stations which are:

1) either full of bikes (no way to dock yours) 2) or with no bikes ready to ride at all

which means it lacks one of the fundamental aspect you would need from such a service: reliability. Technically, they are supposed to be moving bikes from stations which are full to stations which are empty but I have the feeling this is less likely to happen.

That's why I prefer having my own bike, even if it may be a pain to find a good place to park it.

For some reason, parisians don't feel the same way I do about reliability. They still use public transport and use the bike (when available) to go to/from the closest metro station.

With all due respect to/admiration for Scala, I would not want it anywhere near safety critical systems, simply because there has not been a lot of code written in it.

There are essentially two ways we learn to trust stuff. Either (a) we have it (formally) proved (no one reasonable doubts 1 + 1 = 2) or (b) we rely on tons of everyday experience to note that it doesn't fail (we mostly trust our cars).

Scala has neither. I would not be surprised if the compiler contained serious bugs.

You seem to be rather arbitrary about what is a dubious metric. Why would you count issues instead of pages? I think that is a stupid metric. Obviously price/page isn't perfect, but is also obviously better/more relevant. You should also check http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf (PDF) this open letter of Knuth regarding publishing.

I do not understand why weighting would be of any good. Does the laptop ever leave your hands?

It seems to be a very classy withdrawal. I wonder how much the other candidates satisfy the two 'suggestions'.

Yes, F1 cars are designed to survive (or rather the driver to survive) even 300kph accidents. They are safer than 5* EURONCAP in this sense. Things to note are:

a) F1 drivers are very fit as opposed to regular people (so they can endure damage more easily)

b) you wouldn't want to drive an F1 on the street because of other safety issues

You could try Rhino:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Rhino_documentation

Steve Yegge suggests it's the next big language.

I think Linus is right in that there is a priori no reason to not accept the code. However, I think he'll change his mind once he actually sees it.

If any of you had actually looked at the code, you would have seen that it's crap. Even though they removed the weird Win32 coding conventions with lots of CAPS LOCK, UINT32 #define's and stuff, the functions are large and they are simply poorly written. If you look at "native" code, it is much more clean and written in an organized fashion. The MS code looks to be written in a haste, without properly thinking about the problem being solved (in this case, the writing of a driver).

That isn't to say that the code will not be useful, it could be rewritten to be obviously correct instead of it having no obvious bugs.

For those who skipped the details, its a bunch of drivers to make Linux work better under their hypervisor. I think this is a smart move from Microsoft, both in the short and in the long term. It scores points with the open source movement, it scores points with their clients who run Linux over Windows and in the long run they gain leverage over what their users really run (Windows, not Linux).

I am not contesting that what you say is technically possible, but that would be a bad move from Microsoft considering they are threatened non-stop with anti-monopoly suits.

Also, they don't need to change Windows, just the hypervisor. Though it would probably break other OSs too, not just Linux.