bOR_ | 12 years ago | on: Lavaboom: Secure email for everyone
bOR_'s comments
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: Rich Hickey: Reducers - A Library And Model For Collection Processing
Because many programmers are not in the website business. I'm a scientist, working with long-term simulation models. My problem is trying to find a good model representation of the data that I observe. I keep my eyes open towards probabilistic relational programming languages (such as http://www.openbugs.info ), but so far I haven't found a way to apply it to my work.
Lisp is useful to me (more useful than ruby or C was), predominantly because I can work with emacs/swank/slime and change and query my program while I'm observing its output.
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: Rich Hickey: Reducers - A Library And Model For Collection Processing
He's a big data consultant, and all he has is a hammer :-).
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: Kroes Throws in Towel on ACTA
Isn't it actually the reverse?: don't the EU actions actually stop the previous practice of Telco's to subsidize the calling behavior of the majority by adding additional fees to a smaller group that heavily uses roaming?
I'm not sure what the free-market theory on that is (it is an interesting topic though) - making a smaller group of customers pay (and have limited alternatives but to pay) to be more competitive in other parts of your market.
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: Kroes Throws in Towel on ACTA
I understand the the telco's are very competitive, but for some reason, free market competition appeared to fail to have an effect on prices like texting or data roaming. Oddly enough, you roam through various network using the internet, and there free market seems to have worked between fiber providers into keeping the prices low and efficiency high.
It seems that Kroes only launched the inquiry into telco's as part of her commision on competition. The price regulations came after her time there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg...)
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: Kroes Throws in Towel on ACTA
She's great (or at least the dutch think she is), and did a good job as well when she was commissioner on competition, handing out some big fines to business cartels. see
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a854010e-dd84-11db-8d42-000b5df106...
I think we first were a bit disappointed that she was no longer keeping businesses on the straight and narrow, when she moved from competition to the digital agenda: it seemed like she was rearranged to a position where she would be less dangerous. In retrospect, that impression might have been wrong, and she might have just decided that keeping the digital world from being corrupted (by roaming fees, broadband prices, copyright agreements) was a more important thing to go after now than business cartels :-).
bOR_ | 14 years ago | on: C2: Clojure(Script) data visualization
Wish there were a bit more instructions on how to get it running using lein2 / project.clj. Maybe that happens this weekend :-). I am a bit at a loss how to start the webserver used by c2 (and if its even included) from within emacs/slime/swank.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Google Chrome Hacked?
So, can google put a patch in Chrome that whenever it runs at VUPEN, everything VUPEN has on that computer is shipped over to Google? :-).
Google has/had the 'do no evil' in their philosophy, and disabling a scheme that misuses their software for cyber-warfare sounds like a good thing.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Visualizing Directed Edges in Graphs: Don't Use Arrows
They test a few different schemes, but it is sort of embarrassing that in their final summary graph (figure 9), they use the arrowheads again to indicate which representation performs best.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Where can I get large datasets open to the public?
http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/index
For sentimental value: HIV sequence data (and other data) from 1980 till now. Did my thesis on these ;-).
In general, there is an enormous amount of gene sequence data around, not just HIV.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/
Whole genome sequences of eukaryotes (including humans): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/leuks.cgi
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Mark Zuckerberg Named TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year
In my perception the wikileaks of iraq / afghanistan / cablegate got far more tv-news exposure throughout the year than facebook did. It is true that wikileaks itself became only an issue until nov/dec, but its leaks before that had high news value.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Generating Matter and Antimatter from Nothing
Its tricky to answer, as I am limited to browsing wikipedia pages on these topics and no more knowledgeable than you are on the topic :-). One obvious alternative to your line of thinking is that the matter+anti-matter that is created in a vacuum is not 'normal' (using your position on normal matter), and has no mass.
One of the wikipedia pages seems to support that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles "As such, virtual particles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are detectable only as forces but not particles."
It seems to have something to do with normally existing only for a very short time, and affecting the universe only on a very short range that these virtual particles get away with appearing to not having a mass from the point of view of the rest of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Generating Matter and Antimatter from Nothing
I am not a physicist either, but your concept of vacuum does need updating.
The idea of matter and antimatter particles popping up out of vacuum has been around for some time, and appears to be the driving force behind black hole evaporation (hawking radiation) . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
According to wiki, there's a few other natural processes where we can detect particles forming and disappearing again in vacuum, but my understanding of these processes is nihil :-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluctuations#Virtual_par...
Anyway, to me the article is exciting.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Lisp developer walks away with Google AI contest
The point the guy himself makes is that lisp allows him to be a great programmer.
Of course the program could be rewritten into qbasic. It is getting your ideas and thoughts into a form that is not a compromise to the language which matters.
bOR_ | 15 years ago | on: Facebook's Announcement – it's email. [live]
trying to understand the stream. Facebook emails' biggest feature is similar to gmails priority inbox?
bOR_ | 16 years ago | on: Mercurial (hg) with Dropbox
Dropbox works for me where bitbucket doesn't (jay to corporate firewall).
bOR_ | 16 years ago | on: Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
Start educating your social circle then, they are part of the electorate. At least, that is my view. I don't like things being unmovable :).
bOR_ | 16 years ago | on: Censorship flamewar
I think the Chinese government only arbitrarily declares that as they own the internet connections in their country, they can decide what information is allowed to flow through them, and they decide such which is in their best interest.
That's still a tad short from declaring ownership of other people's minds.
Sidetracking: Say you are Bose, and use commercials and tech-speak extensively to convince people that your speakers sound heavenly. Is that trying to control people's minds? Brand building, especially when it is more than just making people aware of your product, is a form of mind control.
bOR_ | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: I made $24k over the last month. Now what?
The end is when you die :). Money doesn't travel over that well.
But as long as you're having fun finding ways to make more money, there's really not that much wrong with playing the money game. Just don't care too much about money :).
bOR_ | 16 years ago | on: Parapsychology: the control group for science
Many times, apparently (see recent articles). There's just no explanation except fraud or misformed experiments that fits well with our current scientific understanding of the world, and those shouldn't be invoked just to keep your comfortable world-image :).
page 1
"Do we know the exact locations of our servers, and, if so, do we have physical access to our servers?"
"We do not know the exact locations of our servers.We do not have physical access to our servers."
"Rest assured that we do have something in place that will destroy our hard disks in a matter of minutes and turn them into little more than coasters."
Those two answers seem contradictory.