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…
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…
> 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…
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…
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
> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me…
Privacy advocates are not a subset of libertarians. Libertarians may be privacy advocates, but there are many privacy advocates that are not libertarians. Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because…
Even before I looked up your profile information, I knew that you were over 35, because "weenie" hasn't really been a popular pejorative in a long time. You were around in the Usenet days (or at least are old enough to…
The NSA stopped caring about your privacy after 9/11 — just read about the demise of project ThinThread [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
Besides the fact that most commercial monitors have pitiful ppi, the fact that monitor manufacturers are selling mostly widescreen monitors with a poverty of vertical room drives me crazy. It's hard to read a pdf of a…
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…
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…
> 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…
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…
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
> A big early decision was what language SMP should be written in. Macsyma was written in LISP, and lots of people said LISP was the only possibility. But a young physics graduate student named Rob Pike convinced me…
Privacy advocates are not a subset of libertarians. Libertarians may be privacy advocates, but there are many privacy advocates that are not libertarians. Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because…
Even before I looked up your profile information, I knew that you were over 35, because "weenie" hasn't really been a popular pejorative in a long time. You were around in the Usenet days (or at least are old enough to…
The NSA stopped caring about your privacy after 9/11 — just read about the demise of project ThinThread [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
Besides the fact that most commercial monitors have pitiful ppi, the fact that monitor manufacturers are selling mostly widescreen monitors with a poverty of vertical room drives me crazy. It's hard to read a pdf of a…