rumbler's comments

Thing is, you would know if someone broke into your house with a rock through the window. Breaking into your computer, or breaking the encryption of your data on some server, can be done without nobody noticing for years.

Securing your data is a completely different problem, and a much more difficult one, than securing your house.

Enough with the "Kansai people don't eat natto" thing, that's just not true. I lived in Kansai for years, and there were like a dozen brands of natto on supermarket shelves, everywhere. Big beans, small beans, with sauce and mustard, with just mustard, with added kombu taste, treated with "stink-less" process, you name them. My neighborhood sushi place had natto-maki prominently on the menu. If you order a traditional Japanese breakfast at an upscale restaurant in Osaka, it will most likely include natto.

Lots of Japanese like natto, lots of Japanese don't like natto. Go to France and you'll find the same thing is true of blue cheese.

Maybe natto is slightly more popular in Kanto. Maybe it wasn't common in Kansai 100 years ago and that's how the myth started. But let's stop staying Kansai people don't usually eat natto, when it's plain to see that's not the case.

I had pop tarts when I was 6 years old and went on a trip to the USA with my family. It was horribly sweet and not at all delicious. On the other hand, peanut butter was an enjoyable discovery.

I enjoyed reading about breakfast while eating mine. I had pumpkin soup and toast. In my opinion, soup is highly underrated as breakfast food (in the Western world at least).

> - Wrist GPS while driving

Please don't look at a screen while driving. You might end up killing people.

Came here to say this. The "pure" version of each digit should come in the middle, rather than at the beginning, of its interval.

If Amazon were to make a driverless car, I'd worry.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp

I got my kid a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 when he was 5 years old. I bought it used for less than $200 and installed Linux Mint on it.

The small keyboard of the CF-18 is perfect for little hands, the rugged construction means he probably won't break it whatever he tries, and Linux Mint just works, as usual.

He uses it mostly for watching movies, playing educational games (GCompris and such), looking at small things with a USB microscope I got from DealExtreme, taking to Grandma on Skype, and recently, he has started making little Scratch programs. He's really proud to own a real computer.

Preschool children are not the target market of Panasonic Toughbooks, but they actually are a great fit.

If you ask old people, they will tell you the same story, but about IBM. Every generation has its great, innovative tech company turned evil mastermind story. It seems to be hard to avoid. I wonder who will be next.

With all due respect to John Carmack and Michael Abrash, this reminds me of a song by Tom Lehrer:

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun."

I'm sure Facebook will give Carmack, and now Abrash, all the tools they need to build their rockets. Where they will aim them is another story, and will be decided by others.

Thank you! I did not know about SBCL, or Paul Khuong, before. This is the most interesting thing I've read this week. This kind of article is why I come to Hacker News.

That inverse square root algorithm is a neat trick, but it did not revolutionize anything.

In addition to several algorithms already mentioned, I feel that suffix trees and suffix array algorithms should be there as well. They are making all kinds of approximate searches feasible in bioinformatics.

Also very important to note: being strict works only when the teacher is actually competent. I've had high school teachers whose understanding of math was basically the textbook + epsilon. They were strict in order to keep the class under control, but they did not inspire me to do my best at mathematics.

I routinely carry microSD cards filled with 16GB of random numbers.

Ted Chiang's short story collection, "Stories of your life and others", contains some of the best writing I've read in my life.

Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in the enhanced IIe ROM.

Same here. I went from an Apple IIe to a Macintosh SE. It was a nice computer for typing high school papers on (yay PageMaker 1.0), and the GUI of System 5 was beautiful on the little black-and-white screen. There was some hacking involving fonts, inits, and ResEdit, but despite despite getting a C compiler and a few books, I never was comfortable programming on it, and always felt like there was something missing.

Two years later I got a '386 clone, bought Turbo C and all the fun came back at once.

Steve Wozniak's original Apple II Integer Basic had 16-bit signed integers, but no built-in floating point support.

Applesoft (licensed from Micosoft) had 16-bit integer variables (such as A%) as well as floating point, but you are right that it converted them to and from real with every operation, which was slow. They were useful for saving memory (2 bytes instead of 5) and not much else.

There were BASIC extensions published in places like Nibble and Call-A.P.P.L.E. that added native integer math to Applesoft using the & command, so you could write things like "A% = B% &+ C%", and the operation was performed without conversion to real.

Let's also not forget SWEET-16, Woz's software emulation of a 16-bit kind-of-RISC processor on the 6502, that had 16-bit arithmetic. Reading the source code of SWEET-16 blew my young, impressionable mind.

> you can't really expect them to shut down

Well, before a few weeks ago, I couldn't really expect my government to spy on all its citizens, use secret courts to bully companies into giving them access to my data, share it with law enforcement for "parallel construction" (intelligence laundering) purposes, and lie to congress about what they were doing.

If you had told me a few decades ago that this would be the situation in the United States at the start of the 21st century, I would have laughed in your face and called you a crackpot, a lunatic, a conspiracy theorist. Absent something like losing World War III, there was no way the United States could become a totalitarian state in my lifetime.

Yet here we are.

What depresses me is, I see how this information could be used in many kinds of amazing ways, but since I cannot control who gets it and what they will do with it, I refuse to use it for fear that it will be used against me.

It is the tragedy of the modern connected world, one that Stallman and others saw coming years ago. And it will keep getting worse.