ringm's comments

I remember a guy sitting at the next desk to me spending a whole week trying to figure out why his Direct3D code crashes. He was blaming buggy ATI drivers. He figured it out when eventually a bit flip ended up in his _source code_.

This is not a unique feature of Japanese. You can do exactly the same in Russian using a dash (which translates to a short pause in speech): "я — гамбургер" (I — hamburger). In general "X — Y" means "X is Y" or another relationship between X and Y as indicated by preceding context.

Это удивительно.

1920x1200 does not equal high dpi. Think 1920x1200 on a 10" display. If your app runs on a high DPI screen, and the OS and your app has no support for this, all fonts and UI elements become tiny, which is unacceptable.

Windows XP had abysmal support for high DPI which usually resulted in broken UI layout. Vista introduced "DPI virtualization" requiring you to declare and provide explicit support for variable dpi in your application. Otherwise it is run at 96 DPI and raster scaling is applied. This prevents any UI layout issues but results in a a blurry image. I guess Apple uses the same approach: if your app has no explicit support, it runs under raster scaling.

They could give you a sufficiently long random salt and ask you to calculate the hash of the salt and block contents. This scheme seems to be secure.

I found this rather amusing comment on a Russian dental forum a while ago. Sorry for possible mistranslation, I am neither a dentist nor a native English speaker.

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I spent some time contemplating the future where this tech would be widely available. What this New Dentistry would be like? Pretty much the same thing we have with implants today. We will have all the same problems with crooked teeth. With lack of bone and gum tissue. Plus aesthetics, and decay of new teeth. Periodontal issues, calculus, etc, etc...

Growing new teeth won't be a real breakthrough.

Imagine a patient missing some teeth. He sees a... what's his name... an toothgrowologist for a consult.

"Hey Doc, what would you recommend?"

"We need to grow you 9 new upper teeth and 8 new lower teeth, correct malocclusion with braces, possibly add some veneers for aesthetics... This will add up to $30-$50K."

"$30K???"

"Might be up to $50K."

"Don't you have cheaper options?"

"Well, you could get implants..."

"Nuh-uh, I don't want implants, I want real teeth. Maybe you could grow me just a few, and put bridges on top?"

"Uh... uh.... Whatever you like..."

Here are some quotes from a future internet forum on dentistry:

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and apparently I didn't have enough bone and gum tissue, now the root is bare and I've got cervical decay... What do I do now?"

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it turned out a premolar instead of an incisor. He told me this happens sometimes, and now I have to get it devitalized, and cover it with a crown..."

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it points toward my cheek. Now I have to get braces. Can I make the toothgrowologist pay for the braces?"

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, it's just erupted and it is already decayed".

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and it is loose and bleeding".

"My toothgrowologist has grown me a tooth, and I've got foreign body sensation in my jaw. I think he's grown me someone else's tooth."

If you don't want to pay upfront for your TV or laptop, you just use a credit card. And what is even more important here, if you can pay upfront for your TV or laptop, you don't have to pay any interest. There's no reason whatsoever your network provider should provide you a mandatory loan for your phone with completely non-transparent conditions.

And in a few months they will all be replaced with goatse...

I have bound 'pushd -1' to PgUp.

    function directory_up { 
      pushd -1
      zle reset-prompt 
    }
    zle -N directory-up directory_up
    bindkey "\e[5~" directory-up

Ditto for "pushd +0" and PgDn.

It will be worse. This stuff can't be contained with simple tools like Flashblock. Unless you want to block all Javascript by default, which will probably break 99% websites in the near future.

One of the most important factors in popularity of a foreign work in Russia is a good translation which does not try to be too literal. Muraviev and Kistyakovsky did a great job with LOTR.

Another reason is that this translation was published in late 80s, when the Russian public was particularly receptive to anything spiritual and/or capable of carrying them away from the grim reality of a collapsing country.

It is not only about feeling personally cheated, it is about observing such a glaring inefficiency of the economy. Sennheiser expended a lot of effort to create a perfectly good product, and then our economy stimulates them to waste a part of this effort by crippling the product just to create... a kind of pay-what-you can scheme.

2000/XP was always extremely aggressive about allocating memory for cache. It would very often swap stuff out to increase available cache, which made the apps you did not use for just a few seconds completely unresponsive.

Their Firefox plugin has already been blocked: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/blocklist/

"Those North Koreans who have never crossed the border have no way to make sense of their tribulations"

Just today someone on some Russian blog wrote about typical North Korean perceptions of life abroad... It was along the lines of "Yes, we know they are bullshitting it. It's all propaganda. We're told Americans are all hungry and unemployed, but we know anyway! Life is good there, you can get plenty of rice for your ration stamps! No millet, no barley, everyone can get rice if they want. Not only in the capital, anywhere in the country. And the rations are big!"

I would not agree with you, and I think you can't compare programming and math in this regard. The "beliefs" they are talking about are rather trivial: strictly formal abstract logical statements which look very hard from intuitive point of view, but they are relatively easy to construct and relatively easy to disprove (provide a counterexample for). An attempt to base your work on one would instantly lead to an error in a proof, which will be found upon review.

On the other hand, programming is actually a branch of engineering, a much less formal discipline. TIMTOWTDI, and not just in Perl. Everything in programming is subjective. Results of programmer's work aren't simply "correct" or "erroneous". Basing your work on a "false belief" will just require spending more effort on it, or lead to a lower quality product.

You can imagine an objective false belief, but it would be some kind of triviality, like wrong understanding of initialization order for base classes in C++, or behavior of modulus operator for negative numbers. Nobody is discussing this kind of stuff with any grandeur.

edit: tl;dr: in math it may be hard to understand whether you're objectively wrong. In programming it is usually as trivial as a compile-time or runtime error, so programmers will usually discuss subjective issues.

Sure, this is quite obvious though I did not understand how they could balance out the increase, so I did not even mention this option.

The point about prostitutes was just a thought experiment, and it looks rather far from reality. The second thought experiment about Joan hooking up with Maxwell seems much more realistic, but I don't see why Maxwell wouldn't hook up with someone else the same day. Actually, the more promiscuous side usually takes the initiative, so I'd say it is quite likely that if not for Joan, some other poor girl would get AIDS anyway.

They're arguing for "increased sexual activity by conservatives" which obviously means they're arguing for increase in total number of sexual encounters over the entire population.

Yandex has been #1 in Russian speaking segment of the internet for the last 10 years or so. I use it almost every day. It looks like this expansion into English speaking market is just an experiment, and I'm not sure what they are trying to achieve. It doesn't look like they can compete with Google or Bing.

edit: btw, one of the interesting features Yandex provides and Google still doesn't is street view for Russian cities: http://maps.yandex.ru/-/CFfz7mA.

A reddit/HN-like voting system is inherently unstable, as some users just skim over top stories and upvote them, creating a positive feedback loop. If you have few submissions, this effect is weak. As the number of submissions, users and votes all grow linearly with respect to each other, the number of top stories and the number of stories an average user can read stay the same. This means the stream of new stories gets less and less readable, while top stories stay readable, which makes larger and larger percentage of users just skim over the top stories, and quality suffers. It would be interesting to create an accurate mathematical model of this behavior, maybe this would let us significantly improve stability.