onikolas

The source of the sound is at 47°9′S 126°43′W.

Meh, it has a lot of fallacies and pitfalls.

Exciting project! Looks like it could lead to some real advances in human-computer interaction. Large working area(desk, walls or the whole floor) and automatically tracking and digitizing written notes and diagrams sounds very cool. Maybe this and voice recognition will be the future of HCI if someone manages to iron out the kinks and make it seamless.

But programming by putting A4 sheets side by side? I only see that being useful as an education tool.

Agreed. Moore's law doesn't happen on its own and Intel has been leading the way in fabrication technology.

As for ARM, I think their success has more to do with their business model (licensing instead of fabricating) than with their architecture.

I wonder if Moore's law was the real reason why all the RISC vendors failed while Intel succeeded.

Lets say IBM sells server hardware for 60K USD per machine versus Intel's 20k (I made the numbers up) and shows, through extensive benchmarking, that despite the higher initial cost, their machine's performance/dollar is better than Intel.

Then 2 years later Moore's law happens. Intel's new 20k offering now outperforms IBM's old machine on every metric. In hindsight, IBM didn't make sense financially.

With Moore's law slowing down, maybe now its the right time for IBM to make a move.

That's why even the good old 8 bits per channel images are encoded logarithmically. Enter the gamma curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

You are correct. Luminance is a real number not integer so the more bits the better (unless you go all they way down to photons!). So, more bits allow us to increase the dynamic range and also allow more values in that dynamic range.

The real benefit of HDR is in the "more values" part since, as the author notes, our displays have a very limited dynamic range anyway.

And how do you quantify "style, craft and personality" ?

I ask about quantification because I see it as the only way to reduce/eliminate bias.

Let me dial the paranoia up a little by calling your attention to this historic text:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomps...

A quote from the conclusions:

"In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler/ I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

Imagine: your presentations stored in plain text, in a human readable format that you can edit in your favorite editor, manipulate with a rich library of text editing tools and even version control. Powerpoint would be a silly proposition if that existed!

Funsies aside, Latex+beamer has a learning curve and so it is not suitable for the everyday user and thus Powerpoint has its market. But for the average HN reader it doesn't make sense. Take 20 minutes to learn Latex basics and thank me later.

I personally prefer to develop by writing small functions and pairing them with a small test. Hacking in a REPL environment, saving the result and calling it source code has not worked out well for me, I end up producing spaghetti :)

I do however find REPL to be invaluable when experimenting/doing research. When you don't even know what the end result is, or when exploring data, you need to iterate over many ideas as quickly as possible and REPL is the fastest way to do that.

I used to get those as well as a kid. The technique, nightmare-within-nightmare was a trope of 80s horror movies and that's where we got it (incepted?) I believe :)

On the movie, I think the really interesting part was not the recursive dreaming but rather how our ideas- that we think are novel - are not actually ours. After watching it, me and my wife started observing it on each other. Me or she would come up with something and the other would point out some conversation in the recent past that seeded it. Fun and a bit scary.

So place your programs in a directory structure that makes sense and use symlinks to maintain compatibility. Simple and elegant.

But... how do I go about actually installing those programs? Web search and then git-clone / manual download? How are dependencies resolved? Admittedly I haven't read the documentation, just the overview.

On a related note, I feel like Arch struck a nice balance with pacman and AUR.

"The speed of light limit had been reached. Signals could not propagate across the surface of the chip fast enough to allow higher speeds."

Sorry, this is blatantly wrong. The 'wires are too long' problem was solved a couple of decades ago by adding pipeline stages.

Processors can easily get faster, today, by increasing the clock speed. Problem is, the generated heat fries them. Heat is a function of voltage and frequency. You can only lower voltage so much before switching states becomes unreliable. After that the only option is to lower frequency.

Fun trivia: Stan Ulam was on sick-leave and was playing solitaire. He came up with the Monte Carlo method while trying to calculate the probability of a successful solitaire game. The method was named after his uncle's favorite place to gamble.

When he got back from sick-leave, he immediately began applying it to his work: calculations leading to the fusion bomb.

I find that little background stories like this help students to get engaged with subject.

In my field (computer graphics) most conferences have put clauses allowing authors to host the submitted version of the paper in their websites. Far from ideal, but some compromises from the part of the publishers have been made.

Worth noting: Many authors will be happy to email you a copy of their paper. People understand that not everyone's library can pay the hundreds of thousands needed for subscription fees. Research Gate has this functionality built in. Also, everyone likes to be cited :)

Being easy to circumvent is a big reason why these for profit journals still exist.

Explaining something is compressing information and then transmitting it. As we know, there are limits to how much we can losslessly compress information.

So, no, you cannot explain everything in simple terms. But you can find sweet spots when trading brevity for accuracy.

Bad analogy time: Its like flying. You don't have control but your are better off without it (unless you are a pilot of course).

Thankfully we still have journals and conference papers. Look for the ones with high impact factor and go from there. That's what I did when I was looking into creatine supplementation.

You can't even ask experts for their opinion since they are the ones selling the stuff!