testbro's comments

I'd analogise it to an open book in a public space. The information is there for you to see when you walk up to it, and you have to interact with it (turning the page) to see the other information. On being caught turning the pages on the book, you get yelled at and imprisoned, despite your contention that it's the book owner's fault for not making sure turning pages was prevented.

Do you think your experiences are typical? I get that MS does have some good offerings but at the same time I think the average consumer's perception isn't as good as it could be.

> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.

I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1

Adjusting that for inflation, it's worth approximately 70% of that (based on 43% cumulative inflation 1998-2013).

In the UK universities' research output are assessed by HEFCE using the "Research Excellence Framework" (which replaced the Research Assessment Exercise) [1]. Sadly, it suffers the same problem of being another metric [2]. It's a time sink for academics and it fosters a cutthroat atmosphere in the run-up. I heard some unconfirmed rumours that academics not submitting case studies to the REF will have their contracts re-assessed.

I think this exposes the bigger problem of metrics in general. It's hard to determine how much impact research has, particularly in the short term. I'd be interested to see what the outcome of the REF is, but I remain sceptical and apathetic towards it, as does everyone else I've spoken to.

[1] : http://www.ref.ac.uk/

[2] : I get the impression it does anyway - I'm not involved in it this round.

I believe the concern was that it ran on GPUs (mining on CPUs hasn't been cost-effective for quite some time). Since GPUs are rarely run constantly and don't see loads like mining produces during typical use, their owners might have overclocked them under those assumptions. With those assumptions violated, I wouldn't be surprised to see cards fail prematurely.

I'd wager that there are a lot of in-house re-implementations of GPL software because the license isn't permissive enough. I think the fact that good non-GPL alternatives exist supports my hypothesis; given the choice between GPL and reinvent the wheel, it's feasible for someone to take the latter path.

I'm not sure I can really make an appropriate generalisation of the broad attitude towards it. I can, however, cherry pick Diane Abbot's views because she's often called upon for soundbites and political debates. As a consequence, my comment is a subset of reality.

In this case the fears stem from the perception that children viewing porn and sexualised content is damaging. In Diane Abbot's case [1] the concern is that sexualised environments might construct inaccurate attitudes towards women/sex in children.

I suppose that falls in the first and final scenarios you gave.

[1] : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21878027

To address your first point: the way the state religion works is a few bishops have seats in the House of Lords. That means they have the power to kick back legislation, but nothing else. That doesn't exclude the influence the Church of England can exercise indirectly through lobbying/high profile members issuing statements of course.

The advisor's statement is correct: this filtering does not depend on legislature. The proposal was to compel ISPs to filter porn by default. If all the ISPs sign up there's no need to create laws to force it. I don't get the impression that this legislation is religiously motivated beyond the puritanical underpinnings of the British public; it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone.

Isn't that sidestepping the morality of hacking foreign civilian infrastructure? I appreciate that national security is important, but should a nation state be permitted to break into whatever it wants without consequence?

The readme mentions that the issue is reproducible in OSX and Windows which further supports your theory.

Aren't all 2a,2b,2c all applicable to other machines though?

> HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes.

I think this reasoning is fairly sound and possibly hints that HN may be less unfriendly than the comments alone make out.

Anonymity tends to make criticism easier to lob around. I'm in academia and even super-critical reviews tend to be prefaced by apologetic "good points" before the submission gets eviscerated; even then a good reviewer will give constructive feedback. I wonder if we could borrow this approach to commenting to improve the atmosphere?

Matt Might's illustrated guide to the PhD sort of shows this quite succinctly [1]. I don't think there are any memorable PhD theses that significantly changed anything, save for Shannon's. World-changing researchers do exist, but I think they are created after they obtain their PhD, rather than before; it's unreasonable in my eyes to expect anyone to make such significant contributions in the infancy of their research careers.

[1] : http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

As an alternative RStudio [1] offers a decent GUI on top of R, which can load data via SQL. It doesn't give you WYSIWYG editing of data, but you can manipulate data frames as if they were SQL with the sqldf package [2]. The learning curve is very steep though so it's not a perfect alternative.

[1] : http://www.rstudio.com/

[2] : https://code.google.com/p/sqldf/

I think Xbox compatibility was achieved using an emulator; Wikipedia seems to suggest this is the case [1].

It seems like this would be an ideal opportunity for the QuickTransit [2] stuff Apple used in Rosetta to see some more use, assuming IBM would be willing to license it (and MS sees it as a worthwhile endeavour).

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games_compatible_w... [2] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit

I suppose neither are ideal, really. With an invite only model you run the risk of biasing your feedback. The advantage of a random rollout would be the marketing sleight of hand: "gradual rollout" might be more defensible than "by invitation".

Gmail and Google Groups have both had random rollouts for changes, with optional rollbacks. That seems more fitting (to me at least).

Google has been using A/B testing for quite some time I think; they even do it with Chrome nowadays. Wouldn't that work to manage load?

Given that all a 3D printer will produce is plastic (ignoring SLS as it's much further away on the radar), the number of shots is limited before it fails. That's in addition to the requirement to buy ammunition first. Something from Home Depot probably poses a greater threat and would be equally undetectable.

I can't imagine anyone opting to buy a printer, calibrate it and print a terrible gun when they could just buy a hammer (or improvise a firearm out of a piece of pipe).

A similar tool exists for Java, although it doesn't rely on symbolic execution (but IIRC it is able to use it for integer constraints) but evolutionary test data generation [1]. There's a plugin for Eclipse too.

[1] : http://www.evosuite.org

This behaviour was common in the last Facebook Hacker Cup too. Most of the announcements of rounds starting included discussion of (and in some cases links to) solutions.

I guess it's part and parcel - I think Facebook did take action against obvious plagiarisers. If not, the later rounds will weed out the cheaters in any case.