There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance. On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x…
When I was in high school I looked into making a micro-power plant using the Seebeck effect for the Intel Science Talent Search. I thought about using liquid sodium as a heat sink, which is what some heliostats use.…
> The problem was that the formula for deciding who required preclearance is a static rule that does not allow for the evaluation of any events after 1972. Therefore, regardless of how much a state or other jurisdiction…
Tuesday's Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, was a power grab by the court majority that strayed wildly from precedent. From SCOTUS blog: "Regarding deference, not that…
> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done…
NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is genuinely interesting, but it doesn't change its field in a significant way. Of course, Wolfram didn't come up with the proof himself. That…
Although the U.S Supreme Court consists of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, it is also very non-diverse. All nine of the U.S Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale law…
The design is inconsistent. If you only use color to signify buttons, making top and bottom banners with the same solid color as buttons is confusing, especially when several buttons are embedded in the top or bottom…
> The F-35 requires more than 8 million lines of code, compared with about 2 million for the F-16 and less than 1 million for other fourth-generation fighter aircraft The F-35 is programmed in C++, while the other…
Amazon's information is incorrect. According to WorldCat and Google Books, the book is 513 pages, not 650. Also, its copyright date should be 1980, not 1979.
It looks like even Reuters engages in link baiting now. This is a non-story. In the original Guardian article, Snowden says that the FBI was at his house asking questions before the release, but only because they were…
droopyEyelids was correct in saying that I was talking about software innovation from a CS standpoint, so I didn't respond to the first reply to my comment. After reading your comment, I realized that I should make it…
There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the…
> I've been saying this for a while but I think what is happening, and what many developers haven't noticed yet, is that we have exhausted the utility of software for software's sake... > Software was interesting on its…
I'm surprised that many of the little tweaks that Apple has added weren't available sooner. For example, on iOS 5 you could adjust the screen brightness via the double-click home menu on the bottom on the iPad, but not…
>Let's face it; look to the Samsung vs. Apple case to see how it is the laymen making billion dollar calls. The damages were reduced to $600 million after the judge ruled that the jury's used an "impermissible legal…
The court's opinion is classified. The DOJ is trying to block a FOIA suit filed by the EFF to release the opinion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
BenSchaechter, you've been hellbanned for at least 506 days, probably because of your submissions. Normally I don't tell people that they've been hellbanned, but since this is your post that has been linked to I thought…
Section 215, known as the "business records" portion of The PATRIOT Act allows "FBI agents to obtain any "tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," a broad term that includes dumps…
The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any…
I don't think than Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagan made contributions as important as: Galois — 20; Markov — 25; Abel — 26; Ramsey — 26; Ramanujan — 32; Riemann — 39; Turing — 41; Von Neumann — 53, etc. But…
> Yes, even logged in. I think the idea that you're any safer because you clicked the log out button is incompatible with understanding how the web works. If you don't share an internet connection with anyone else, or…
Nate Silver doesn't forecast House races because there isn't enough good polling data. He does predict Senate races; he was 31 for 33 in 2012. He predicted that Republicans would win in North Dakota (a 92% probability)…
This article was written in 2005. I've read Friedman's columns since, and they haven't gotten any better. Look at this [1] piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about Friedman's ramblings two years ago about a…
Here is the HN discussion about the BBC link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495
There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance. On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x…
When I was in high school I looked into making a micro-power plant using the Seebeck effect for the Intel Science Talent Search. I thought about using liquid sodium as a heat sink, which is what some heliostats use.…
> The problem was that the formula for deciding who required preclearance is a static rule that does not allow for the evaluation of any events after 1972. Therefore, regardless of how much a state or other jurisdiction…
Tuesday's Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, was a power grab by the court majority that strayed wildly from precedent. From SCOTUS blog: "Regarding deference, not that…
> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done…
NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is genuinely interesting, but it doesn't change its field in a significant way. Of course, Wolfram didn't come up with the proof himself. That…
Although the U.S Supreme Court consists of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, it is also very non-diverse. All nine of the U.S Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale law…
The design is inconsistent. If you only use color to signify buttons, making top and bottom banners with the same solid color as buttons is confusing, especially when several buttons are embedded in the top or bottom…
> The F-35 requires more than 8 million lines of code, compared with about 2 million for the F-16 and less than 1 million for other fourth-generation fighter aircraft The F-35 is programmed in C++, while the other…
Amazon's information is incorrect. According to WorldCat and Google Books, the book is 513 pages, not 650. Also, its copyright date should be 1980, not 1979.
It looks like even Reuters engages in link baiting now. This is a non-story. In the original Guardian article, Snowden says that the FBI was at his house asking questions before the release, but only because they were…
droopyEyelids was correct in saying that I was talking about software innovation from a CS standpoint, so I didn't respond to the first reply to my comment. After reading your comment, I realized that I should make it…
There are some theories that fall into a third category of "unlikely, hard to prove, probably false but intensely fascinating." A good example is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the…
> I've been saying this for a while but I think what is happening, and what many developers haven't noticed yet, is that we have exhausted the utility of software for software's sake... > Software was interesting on its…
I'm surprised that many of the little tweaks that Apple has added weren't available sooner. For example, on iOS 5 you could adjust the screen brightness via the double-click home menu on the bottom on the iPad, but not…
>Let's face it; look to the Samsung vs. Apple case to see how it is the laymen making billion dollar calls. The damages were reduced to $600 million after the judge ruled that the jury's used an "impermissible legal…
The court's opinion is classified. The DOJ is trying to block a FOIA suit filed by the EFF to release the opinion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
BenSchaechter, you've been hellbanned for at least 506 days, probably because of your submissions. Normally I don't tell people that they've been hellbanned, but since this is your post that has been linked to I thought…
Section 215, known as the "business records" portion of The PATRIOT Act allows "FBI agents to obtain any "tangible thing," including "books, records, papers, documents, and other items," a broad term that includes dumps…
The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any…
I don't think than Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagan made contributions as important as: Galois — 20; Markov — 25; Abel — 26; Ramsey — 26; Ramanujan — 32; Riemann — 39; Turing — 41; Von Neumann — 53, etc. But…
> Yes, even logged in. I think the idea that you're any safer because you clicked the log out button is incompatible with understanding how the web works. If you don't share an internet connection with anyone else, or…
Nate Silver doesn't forecast House races because there isn't enough good polling data. He does predict Senate races; he was 31 for 33 in 2012. He predicted that Republicans would win in North Dakota (a 92% probability)…
This article was written in 2005. I've read Friedman's columns since, and they haven't gotten any better. Look at this [1] piece in the Columbia Journalism Review about Friedman's ramblings two years ago about a…
Here is the HN discussion about the BBC link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150495