dandrews's comments

One misfeature of most "lithium ion" cells is that their cathodes produce oxygen under high temperatures. One very good reason for Segway (e.g.) to use lithium-iron-phosphate cells - they're far less likely to burn, though their power density suffers over conventional cells.

I occasionally receive spam via MC, which I then forward to MC's abuse desk along with a polite note. Every time they have responded quickly and effectively. (Don't forget to tell them that their efforts are appreciated - they do a hard job, and they like attaboys.)

It's why I don't blacklist MC; in my experience they are trustworthy, and bulk mail does have limited, legitimate use.

Hierarchical and network DBMSs can scream, but you have to have a competent DBA curate the so-called "physical" relationships (indexes, record and index pointers, child record locality, block sizes, buffers, what-have-you) that support the logical views defined by the application schema. In either IMS or IDMS (where I have some experience) this can be a lot of work, done right. Measure, tweak, repeat. Those older DBMSs can be finicky, but properly monitored are great performers.

Conversely, a lazy DBA can cost you a lot of money. And lazy DBAs can be hard to identify - their domain is rather arcane after all.

Wonder if you could build a competitive search engine with $1b?

It was pretty much taken as gospel everywhere at the time that NO compiler could match the speed and size of a well crafted assembly language routine. Back then there were some noble attempts at building optimizing compilers, and probably the more notable one was IBM's ambitious ForTran H. But that's 50-year-old tech now, kids.

Remember also that memory was at a terrific premium. I don't have any specific knowledge about the AGC, but there's an interesting story I read once about a memory shortage in another project - Intel's 8080.

(If you'll permit me an OT digression...)

As the story goes, the program space was so tight in the original microcode for the Intel 8080 microprocessor there wasn't room to spare for a one-byte constant in the code! The architects decided that the AAM and AAD instructions in the 8080 set should have a required operand - 0x0A or 10 - so that the instruction could refer to itself and know that you were operating in base 10!

A side effect of this is that the Intel processors could actually execute AAM and AAD instructions in number bases besides 10; Intel had never formally acknowledged that the instructions do this, and so in the NEC V20 or V30 chips - which were supposed to be Intel compatible - you couldn't change the AAM or AAD operand - it had to be 0x0A.

I became severely anemic after a few months and the e/r did an MRI, looking for internal bleeding. They found the tumor then.

My GP had x-rayed me, looking for a cardiac anomaly - he suspected an aortic aneurism. What he should've done is order some soft tissue radiology instead. Having your GP consider a CT or MRI is my advice.

Hope in your case it's all for naught. Best to check though.

Not chumming for sympathy here, but I've mentioned before on HN that my own pancreatic cancer first manifested itself as a vague feeling of unease at the sternum, and persistent nighttime acid reflux. No other symptoms. My GP didn't recognize it for what it was, and treated the reflux symptom.

It would sure be spiffy if mining queries could identify early symptoms, working backwards if you will, rather than be used to find cancer patients by working forward from symptoms already identified by the medical establishment.

My 2012 Moto X has a trained keyword (and in fact a dedicated low-power specialized processor to listen for it - one of the things I like about that phone). No "OK Google" for me; it's "Listen please", in Russian. Never tripped by mistake.

Rather than an "anonymous feature", how about a "please moderate this post" flag? A post that requests moderation would not be eligible for upvotes or downvotes, or would even appear until it passed moderation.

Of course, that means added work for the mods, or a new class of moderators altogether.

Heh. I also ported Forgy's VPS5 to David Betz's XLISP around that same time, posting it to BiX (anyone remember BiX?). Ran a handful of guess-the-animal toys on it then turned my attention elsewhere.

As you say: fun times!

Contrast with Bill Gosper's quote from Levy's Hackers: "Data is just a dumb kind of programmihg."

Thanks for your gentle correction. (I was thinking of Gray code, as taught to me during my Wonder Years. You're right as rain of course.)

Something I was unaware of: single bit (correctable) read errors are not immediately repaired in NAND. Subsequent in-error reads are repeatedly processed by ECC on the fly, while the media rewrite is scheduled for sometime later.

This inflates the observed correctable error rate to some extent.

You may be mistaken: there's at least one shareholder that wishes Apple all the best. ;-)

Because (at least on my Moto X 2012, Android v5.1 Lollipop) rebooting can take upwards of ten minutes. Some OTA updates apparently trigger an 80-some-odd module "optimizing" run, which I presume is ART doing its AOT thing. If you're in a hurry to use your phone this can be maddening.

My daughter would disagree with you in re: thinness. The newer thin iPhones are easier to pocket - women's fashion being more form fitting than men's. It's a trade-off that she and presumably lots of other people are willing to make.

That sounds like the version told in Levy's Hackers. Maybe someone in HN-land can verify that; I can't find my copy.

"This guide is just a starting point for thinking about how to name things."

That's a novel way to introduce an "industry standard".

I'll easily second this recommendation. 30 years ago I was struck by Tom West's quote from Kidder's book: "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well".

Parent is probably taking the CNN article at face value.