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ahn's comments

ahn | 15 years ago | on: First Chrome OS netbook expected this month

>Netbooks just seem like a solution needing a problem to me. My kids have a netbook that I bought them for Christmas last year

So then the problem is what useless gadget to get your kids for Christmas.

ahn | 15 years ago | on: Divisibility by 7

You can generate rules like these for arbitrary integers/primes(much easier than trying to remember them in my opinion). Take 41.

Example: 1476 is divisible by 41? 147 - 4 * 6 = 123. 12 - 4 * 3 = 0. Yes.

Example: 3321 is divisible by 41? 332 - 4 * 1 = 328. 32 - 4 * 8 = 0. Yes

What's the rule? Take the last digit off, multiply by 4 and subtract.

How to find the rules is left as an exercise.

ahn | 15 years ago | on: Learning to write a compiler

>I get the impression that most people who recommend the Dragon book haven't read it.

These days you can usually tell that they haven't read it if they refer to it as "the Dragon book" and don't say anything about the edition. The same thing goes for "Knuth", "the Appel book", etc.

ahn | 15 years ago | on: WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel.

In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.

ahn | 15 years ago | on: What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D

Do you get the oil by sucking on an actual cod liver?

Note that regular unrefined cod liver oil is very high in vitamin A, so you can kill yourself by drinking enough of it(see hypervitaminosis A). Vitamin A pills contain trivial amounts though(to stop people from killing themselves I am told), so the cod liver oil is a nice way to go if you feel that you need to supplement for some reason. And of course you also get the D, some nice fatty acids, and maybe a little mercury too.

ahn | 16 years ago | on: List of Hacker Spaces Around the World

Based on my experience I think that's easily explained by population density, amount of space available per capita, etc. If anything I see hackeresque spirit as more pronounced in rural areas. They aren't forced by necessity into a shared space like those in the city though, and maybe they don't consider the benefits of a shared space being that important.

The Europe situation seems more interesting. Look at the numbers(per capita) for The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and then France. The first three have many hacker spaces per capita. France is much lower. I'd expect that(from past experience), but don't have any good ideas about why it is.

ahn | 16 years ago | on: GNU Emacs 23.2 released

They are using digital signatures(Chong Yidong's). The following files are both available from the same places as the tarballs:

emacs-23.2.tar.gz.sig emacs-23.2.tar.bz2.sig

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