CoreDumpling

This week in 1945, an off-by-one error disrupts the surrender ceremony ending World War II: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/how-a-canadians-m...

Interesting to see where the zeros show up on the distance matrix (aside from the diagonal). The similarity between manti and shumai (siomay in the article) was quite a surprise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manti_(food)#/media/File:Ouzb%...

vs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shumai#/media/File:%E7%83%A7%E...

But that's also where I noticed both guotie and wonton were on the list, although guotie is basically a generic term for "potsticker." It's usually a fried jiaozi although sometimes a fried wonton is also called a guotie.

And then there is "zwei vierzig" or €2,40

Norway and Singapore tax the crap out of cars and are still doing fine.

Taiwan had a similar problem just a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y1C_Problem

Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore would very much like to disagree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Even the London tube does pretty well by this measure.

Japan, India, HK, UK, Australia, USA, Canada, Singapore

Tiny city-states are not known for being particularly recognizable unless you've been there.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-...

Can't we turn the tables on them if we know what's going on?

1) Take out life insurance policy.

2) Pay with credit card at McDonald's and the bar.

3) Get a bunch of speeding tickets.

4) Sell policy to a data mining firm that hopes I die soon.

5) Profit!

A lot of MUDs still use telnet. Even with MCCP (which has to be negotiated over telnet anyway), it's not uncommon for legacy clients to connect over raw telnet.

True story: I moved from southern California to Holland in no small part because of how amenable the country is to cycling.

People like to think that cycling is popular here naturally because the country is flat and densely populated. However, it's easy to forget that during the postwar boom years, a major shift toward cars happened and it took a concerted effort of willful resistance and politically non-expedient measures to bring back the bike paths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o). Clearly, 1897 was not the last chance the Dutch had to fix their transit system, and with the groundwork they've laid over the years, it now costs only €30 per person in funding annually! (http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/05/487-million-eur...)

Yet I see very little chance of this happening in California, not because cyclists lack a voice, but because we need to create more disincentives to driving. This obviously is a political no-go considering that motorists are by far the majority demographic. It's saddening, though, that there is so much willful ignorance (or apathy) with regard to how we've externalized the true cost of driving, whether it's in the form of:

- damage to the environment

- subsidy to cheap gas prices by the DoD budget (and body count) for controlling the world's oil flow

- casualties from motor vehicle accidents

- health problems resulting from sedentary lifestyles

- zoning rules that require abundant free parking to be available in communities.

We'd probably have to see gas hit $10/gallon and parking lots charge $50/day before Americans start to reconsider. (These prices are actually quite typical in European cities.)

Oddly enough, I think it's good that the Great Recession has caused a lot of Americans to reconsider their car expenses and choose to scale back their lifestyles in ways that are more healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly. I hope this trend (not the recession, of course) continues and if America can set an example of moving away from a car culture, it will do far more good around the world to discourage the growing middle class in China, India, and other developing countries from adopting the same wasteful practices.

In the meantime, though, I'll piggyback on the 40-year head start on bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands. If I sound bitter, it's my sore legs from yesterday's 70km ride talking ;)

Probably needs some adjustment or moderator intervention in the near term. I just tried a moment ago; you can still submit a pages.github.com URL and HN will mark the domain as github.com, but it will redirect to github.io when you follow the link.

A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything.

This was a study done by Seligman et al and is known as a psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.

Maybe not for multi-family condos, but the Dutch seem to have a great time with their shipping containers. This student housing complex is quite popular:

http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html

Granted, affordable housing is in short supply in the Netherlands, while there's plenty of shipping containers considering that Rotterdam is the biggest port in Europe.

In Chinese the fraction 355/113 has been known as the 密率 ("detailed ratio") and 22/7 as the 约率 ("approximate ratio"). It is documented in the Book of Sui, volume 16:

宋末，南徐州從事史祖沖之，更開密法，以圓徑一億為一丈，圓周盈數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒七忽，朒數三丈一尺四寸一分五厘九毫二秒六忽，正數在盈朒二限之間。密率，圓徑一百一十三，圓周三百五十五。約率，圓徑七，週二十二。 [1]

While it suggests that the value was calculated around the end of the Liu Song Dynasty (~479 CE) by Zu Chongzhi to have an upper bound of 3.1415927 and lower bound of 3.1415926, the 密法 method is not explained.

It has been thought that Zu may have used a "method of averaging days" to calculate an intermediate value between two prior known approximations of 22/7 and 157/50 [2]. Not a very satisfying result for anyone who wants to find something special in the numbers 355 and 113.

[1] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%9A%8B%E6%9B%B8/%E5%8D%B71...

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=QlbzjN_5pDoC&lpg=PA34&#...

... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that Hiro Protagonist used to great effect.

Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?

<shameless plug>

I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me

</shameless plug>

It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.

I welcome this move, despite the possibility of some fallout from the change. It'll be painful, but even as someone who once made a living writing ActionScript, I have to say that Flash is sufficiently annoying and insecure that it really needs to be phased out.

In the short term, this will probably cause some breakage in certain sites that try to use Flash "transparently" and "unobtrusively" for things like LSOs, drag-and-drop, clipboard access, or cross-domain XHR. These are already problematic with Flashblock installed though -- Pandora, for instance, refuses to load and there is nothing available to click-to-play since that particular Flash object is hidden.

Hopefully this will light a fire under those sites and get them to update to the appropriate HTML5 methods of doing these things (local storage, WebSockets, etc.), just like how Java applets that were used for such things have been largely phased out. Until then, however, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them simply inform you not to use Firefox to visit.

Story of my life, Ed. I am your poster boy who lives "cheap" and not "frugal" by choice. I clip coupons and browse slickdeals before committing to a purchase. I never buy anything at MSRP. I monitor airfare prices for weeks before booking a ticket.

This is a difficult problem to escape because it's one that I behaved myself into, and that it's self-reinforcing for a variety of reasons:

- When you're already on a fixed salary, the opportunity cost of spending time on being cheap is not obvious. You're not taking time away from that $500/hr side consulting gig that you don't have. Instead, you're at a situation where the marginal rate of return on clipping coupons (say, $10/hr) is significantly better than spending the next hour working on that iPhone app that is months from release and has no interested buyers (how long is it going to take to recoup the Apple developer fee?).

- Some people get a rush out of saving money, a feeling of "Ha! I beat the system." To them, saving money is a form of entertainment [1], and there's certainly far worse hobbies to have from a well-being perspective. Unfortunately, there are people who take this too far and end up as total misers or compulsive hoarders. I'm not a pathological case, but I've done things that would make some people cringe.

- Seeing people successfully live frugally can be a motivator to follow in their path. My parents are immigrants who worked hard and saved for 20 years before they were finally able to afford a house in an expensive neighborhood (and nearly paid for it all in cash). They drive Toyotas, shop at Costco, and cook at home. They are basically the epitome of the "millionaire next door" [2].

- There's also a moral justification for this. "Why do I have to keep up with my spendthrift neighbors? So what if I don't drive a Maserati or carry a Hermès bag? No thanks, I shall be comfortable in my own skin, since envy and greed are evil." This is now an identity statement [3], and while it's a good position to take from a financial perspective, it can be crippling in the way it makes some people closed-minded. Of course, this doesn't necessarily stop them from pontificating about retirement at 30.

I do still think that my years of being cheap are starting to pay off, mostly because I'm finally getting comfortable with the sort of "discretionary" expenses you mentioned in your post. The difference is that it probably took a much larger bank balance for me to consider them "affordable." I just flew across the continent purely on a whim to visit some friends that I hadn't seen in years, I no longer cringe at expensive bar tabs if they were time well spent with buddies, I can afford to make an impulse electronics purchase just to see what it's like, and I'm preparing for that self-funded sabbatical [4] to reboot my life.

Was it worth it? Well, it was really, really hard to re-orient myself this way, and it took much more sacrifice than necessary, but the good news is that aside from lost time, most of the rest hopefully can be recovered.

[1] http://www.budgetsaresexy.com/2009/08/saving-money-trumps-se...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

[4] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000076.html

Programmers beware! You need to be especially careful with converting geodetic lat/lon/alt coordinates to and from other systems, particularly with the Earth-centered, Earth-fixed system (basically a Cartesian x,y,z coordinate grid). Do it incorrectly, and you might find yourself buried under several meters of dirt ;)

All too often I've come across code that started out by assuming a spherical Earth (wrong!) or trying to compensate by multiplying by a factor to adjust for the oblation (still wrong!). Doing this calculation accurately is very much non-trivial and still a topic of active research in geodesy.

Fortunately, there's libraries to do the hard work for you:

http://earth-info.nga.mil/GandG/geotrans/

http://geographiclib.sourceforge.net/

It's understandable that several places don't have data (NaN), but I found it curious that Burma/Myanmar is missing from the map [1], much like the "Poland Sea" in a Microsoft Date/Time screen from yesteryear [2].

Did you create this map data or get it from somewhere else? Is this some kind of joke?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/m8Wce.png

[2] https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/10/27/8804...

<nitpick>

可口 (kě kǒu) does actually mean "delicious" -- you are thinking of 口渴 (kǒu kě) which means thirsty

</nitpick>

Admittedly, it is still a superior branding to Pepsi (百事可乐) which literally translates to "hundred events." Maybe this has something to do with how Pepsi has about 1/3 as much market share as Coca-Cola has in China [1].

[1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/07/29/coke-sees-chinas-mark...

I was actually surprised that A Deepness in the Sky didn't make it to the list when A Fire Upon the Deep did. Deepness had a lot of themes that satisfy hacker tastes (not just in terms of the technology but also the socio-political ramifications of it).

I had first heard of it when DanielBMarkham highly praised it (http://www.hn-books.com/Books/A-Deepness-In-The-Sky.htm, HN discussion here at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170579) and it's definitely one of the best sci-fi books I've read in years.

I'd guess that $995 was within the $1000 corporate credit limit, and $1495 was not.

Joel's article on pricing ought to be required reading, even if he offers no hard and fast answers: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

The interpreter we wrote in that actually wasn't written for Emacs, it was written for TECO. It was our text editor, and was an extremely ugly programming language, as ugly as could possibly be.

For proof, see the source code here: http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/mit_emacs_170_teco_1220/inde...

It is certainly heavily annotated for good reason.

It was a cruel twist of fate to claim the life of a visionary such as Huxley on the same day as JFK and C.S. Lewis. Much like Sergei Prokofiev, who had the misfortune of passing on the same day as Stalin, this event flew completely under the radar.

It's comforting to hear the back story to this, of the strength of the bond between Aldous and Laura. In a world that was steadily moving toward the dystopia he feared in Brave New World, at last he found the courage to face death and go peacefully.

What a pity his message is now so misunderstood (cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919530)!

Compare & contrast, Playboy Interview with Bill Gates (1994): http://www.playboy.com/articles/bill-gates-playboy-interview...

Of particular interest are the somewhat different take on the established giants like IBM, as well as this new "information highway" development.

While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

What's scary is how far the lazy rich kid will be able to go with this, with a promising career in management. I wouldn't want to work for someone like this, but it is easy to imagine him being very effective. (For all I know I could have worked under one of these before, and not even hated it.)

On the other hand, the value of the reviews on these sites goes down the older they get.

On Amazon it seems like the opposite is true. Because of their meta-review process, where users can flag reviews as helpful or not, it seems like old and classic reviews tend to float to the top, while recent ones have a significant hurdle to overcome before they make it to the front page. See for example here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262011530

(Admittedly, users can also be fickle and support other kinds of reviews for different reasons, cf. http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032...)

I think I share a similar sentiment. I was born in mainland China but moved to the US at an early age, and I'm a fluent Chinese speaker. But I found that I fit well with neither the Chinese student associations (mostly recent immigrants) nor the Chinese-American student associations (mostly ABCs, American-born Chinese).

Ultimately I rejected the groups that were based on ethnicity and instead participated in ones centered around an activity. Whether it was programming, board games, or quiz bowl, there was always a healthy multicultural mix of people. A shared heritage provides some basic level of camaraderie, which tends to be very consistent and reliable, but common interests certainly are better at holding one's attention.