gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

Your system isn't one of these 58 supported platforms? [0]

[0] netbsd.org/ports

12 lat temudiscuss

I believe you. :)

I have no experience with balloons at all, but even a plowed field feels like a sidewalk to me when I run into it at the same speed under canopy. I leave a sizable mark, and I have seen friends break femurs, pelvises, etc at the end of a similar descent.

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

What do the Loon components look like up close? Here's a gallery showing the solar panels, avionics bay with covers open, and some staffers.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/go...

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

Dropping at 2000 feet per minute is not quite free fall, but it's a long way from a drifting dandelion seed. I wonder if the balloon payload left a crater.

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

In the 90s, I would sometimes trip over ethernet cables that had been strung between server racks, across an aisle.

Will this be the decade where I get to experience being struck by falling routers and switches, far from any data center?

(EDIT: Simply remarking on novelty of problem and upward growth of network. No criticism of any firm implied or intended.)

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

Yes. Western civilization became estranged from scientific inquiry itself for many long centuries.

If not for the patient and curious scribes of medieval Islam, many significant works from Ancient Greece and Rome would have been lost forever.

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

French networking / disk throughput terminology ...

    Mo: un méga-octet, un million d'octets
  Mo/s: méga-octet par seconde

meaning "Megabyte per second". OVH is based in Montréal, Québec. [or not, actually]

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

One happy benefit of being able to read Russian is being able to use Yandex as a second or third point of view when researching a topic primarily through Internet search.

There also seems to be variation between Wikipedia articles in different languages that I would not ascribe to incompleteness. Does generally-accepted cultural "truth" about a topic or incident really differ so much?

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

"The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread."

A truly delightful name for such a dreadful place.

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

We forget so soon. Labor movements within recent memory were fought at great cost to secure the possibility of shorter working hours. People were killed at factory gates trying to get labor laws enacted, in part to reduce employer demands for long working hours.

One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not in the long-term best interests of any participant or the society.

An imbalance in society might show up as (under|un)employment in groups outside the core demographic -- in this case, anyone who is non-20-something, non-male, or non-white, who is not "crushing it" at work after nine on weeknights.

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

A careto is a costumed thief character from an ancient pagan ritual in Portugal.

"Caretos are masked young men dressed in suits made of yellow, red, black, blue and green fringe wool quilts, wearing brass, leather or wooden masks and rattles in their belts. ... They appear in groups from every corner of the village running and shouting excitedly, frightening the people and “robbing” all the wineries." [0]

The trojan referred to in this story is known by another name. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careto

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_(malware)

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

What if the tip names the wrong park, and the officers detain a similar person, and decide to plant incriminating evidence?

gregholmberg

12 lat temudiscuss

Parallel construction allows intelligence agencies to make criminal allegations that might turn out to be less than factually accurate, while facing no review and no repercussions.

The concept of allowing evidence from secret sources should offend anyone who believes in a just society.

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

On a whim, I asked yandex.com: 'k-d tree'.

Nine results were about the space-partitioning data structure. Also, there is a tree-trimming service on Long Island called K&D Tree Masters.

Surprisingly, pleasantly -- all ten items are useful to me.

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

SB 1168 would amend FISA (1978) to require that the Attorney General provide specific, individual details when requesting a ruling from the FISC, and report back semi-annually on how effective the authorized actions were.

Naturally, it is doomed.

  [pdf] http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Restore%20Our%20Privacy%20Act.pdf

edit:

Here is the entire text of the Patriot Act.

  [pdf] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ56.pdf
        http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:H.R.3162.ENR:

The ACLU has a detailed discussion of perceived flaws in Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

        http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security-technology-and-liberty/reform-patriot-act-section-215

FISA 1978 makes many additions to section 50, US Code that might conflict with the 4th Amendment.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act#Provisions

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

Yes, much finer optical resolution is possible if you use multiple instruments separated by a controlled interval.

In radioastronomy, there are arrays of dishes that use this technique. There are good pictures in the Wikipedia article. [0]

One military implementation was a connected three-satellite constellation, built by the US Navy for scanning the surface of the world's oceans. [1]

But those tools work in (relatively) long wavelengths.

I have never heard of free-flight multi-aperature interferometry that works in optical or near-optical wavelengths.

.

[0] "Very-long-baseline interferometry" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

[0] "How VLBI Works" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

[1] "White Cloud | PARCAE | NOSS" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_Syste...

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

I have a similarly mixed opinion about the City.

I used to love to go to the Roxie Theater in the Mission, where they showed movies you might never encounter otherwise. During a retrospective for some anniversary of a Friedkin film, the great director himself just came walking up the sidewalk right through his speechless fans.

On the other hand, I have been stuck in traffic on Mission near 17th while the SFPD put down rows of little yellow numbered plastic cones across three lanes of traffic -- one for each shell casing.

Is there any public transit facility less welcoming than the urine-drenched BART station slash homeless zoo at 16th? Yes, actually. Just pop down to 24th, if you dare.

Heroin dealers used to turn little alleys off of 26th into open-air markets in the wee hours. Maybe they still do.

I just can't bring myself to visit the Mission anymore.

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

Time Magazine science writer Maia Szalavitz interprets ...

[0] "Your Drive to Compete May Come Down to Dopamine" http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/02/your-drive-to-compete-...

[1] "Amphetamine Spurs Slackers to Work and Workers to Slack — at Least For Rats" http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/29/amphetamine-spurs-slac...

.

... some research by Michael T. Treadway and nine others.

[2] "Dopaminergic Mechanisms of Individual Differences in Human Effort-Based Decision-Making" http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/18/6170.full

> " ... We found that individual differences in [dopamine] function in the left striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex were correlated with a willingness to expend greater effort for larger rewards, particularly when probability of reward receipt was low. ... "

You could argue that this mechanism is a neurochemical amplifier of entrepreneurial behavior.

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

> ... At this point, it started seeming somewhat impractical to go and patch rails and all these other gems that I use, so I decided to investigate the amount of effort that would be required to actually solve the problem in MRI. ...

I admire James. Wading into the interpreter takes balls.

gregholmberg

13 lat temudiscuss

Why Lua?

I have been running Node.js and Lua at fairly large scale on EC2 recently.

I like the V8/Lua/Luajit platforms just fine. Each has some nice strengths.

With Lua, I see significantly less memory use, and moderately increased performance.

As long as RAM is the expensive bottleneck for hosted servers, it looks like I will be able to get better performance (in operations per dollar) by using a smaller runtime.

Why not client-side rendering?

Accessibility? Cross-platform uniformity? (better answer from 'capnrefsmmat: render once, then cache massively)

gregholmberg

Submissions

Employee ID badge monitors you at work – except in bathroom

Collaborative Problem Solving by Humans Using a Brain-To-Brain Interface

Google Loon balloon crashes near Yakima

Obama throws the NSA under the bus

secure.netflix.com uses SSLv2, vulnerable to BEAST attack

Google shows China the white flag of surrender

Path's Loudest Investor (Arrington) says "Delete The User Data"

EC2 Mandatory Scheduled Reboot Instructions Are Confusing

Terracotta acquired by Software AG, maker of ADABAS

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