bh42222

May you live in interesting times.

Wow, with NoScript on I see only a blank page with a bunch of NoScript links.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/12/short.sleepers.daylight...

I am not sure how you can get better at something which is most likely genetic.

I work full time and have a not terrible commute, and if I want to eat healthy and get a bit of exercise and spend just a tiny amount of time with friends and family... well, it's hard to get the hours of sleep I genetically need to function 100%.

Now, I can go for a very long time sleeping no more than 6 hours a night, but I can feel it slowly killing me.

6 hours has always been enough for me.

Yep, that's at least one genetic advantage you have on most of us.

Hellish if you imagine yourself as one of the animals.

I like the bizarro social context expression. It's a great way to describe how I work with female programmers and both my project managers are female and nothing like the described behavior would ever be tolerated for a second, and yet each female programmer I know has such horror stories.

I guess the best advice is when you find yourself in a situation like that, get the hell out. But even I as a top notch experienced white male coder can't change jobs at the drop of a hat.

Still, why would you want someone as a manager who would keep his own wife's car locked up at work because she failed to be properly respectful?Still, why would you want someone as a manager who would keep his own wife's car locked up at work because she failed to be properly respectful?

What in the hell kind of place are you working at!?

Because being young does not mean you have to be immature, and sexism should have nothing do with either immaturity and youth.

I don't know about you, but I deal with jerks all of the damn time. But luckily no more or less than all of my peers. This would be very different if I was a woman.

And we wouldn't reduce male interaction by 50%, we would increase female participation by hundreds of percents.

That way if someone is being a jerk, many people can all confirm he's being a jerk.

job interviews in which she was shown pictures of her interviewer's bare ass;

Holly horror story!

Sadly I am not surprised to hear this, because I've heard many similar stories. And yet out of the very large number of male friends in the industry I have, including myself, none of us have ever or would ever do anything like that. The paradox here is answered by the fact that a tiny share of creeps will always be found in any sufficiently large set of humans. And the larger the set, the bigger the number of creeps.

Thus I think the only way to guarantee this kind of thing becomes part of the past is to radically increase the share of women in the industry.

Now, that doesn't prevent creeps from being creepy, but it does guarantee that the small number that they must be, can never be creepy to a large number of women.

This is kind of depressing as it basically assumes we can never completely get rid of creeps. But does anyone believe 100% proper behavior, from 100% of the people, 100% of the time is possible?

I can't seem to find a study which showed that while only %3 of men ever make such comments, women involved in our community experience this a steady stream of subtle harassment. And the sad fact is that this is due to the lopsided share of men to women.

If we had a 50/50 split some women would never hear such comments, some would hear then extremely rarely, while the percentage of men making them would stay the same.

And can we ever hope to get 100% of any large group anywhere, to never make occasionally offensive remarks? The crux here really is that this type of offensive remarks have only one target - women, and that combined with the lop-sided sex ratio results in harassment.

No, the plot of Inception really is very complicated, unless you're a computer programmer

Personal anecdote: My friend who is in marketing and is not at all a geek also thinks if you have half a brain the plot is obvious. She has no special math training beyond an MBA, and has done absolutely zero programming in her life.

Why are there no birds even close to the weight of adult human males? Why do birds have a huge keel-like breastbone on which equally huge and powerful flight muscles attach? If energy required to take of scales geometrically with weight, how much force would an adult human need to generate to take flight and which muscles, attached where on the human skeleton, would be used for this?

Absolutely fake. If this is not obvious to you, learn more physics.

Should I give up everything to be a bus driver, a photographer, and move to a quiet town, leave the city and all of my skills and knowledge?

Nah, just take a really long vacation. Like a year or two.

What do you think of the approach to TV censorship in Europe, where fantasy violence is blurred, but nudity and sex are not?

Offices, real offices for each developer are best. However, open-plan is still better than cubicles. Cubicles share all the problems of open-plans + you stare at the walls of your cubicle.

I'd love to have an office but I prefer open plans over cubicles.

I don't think you should be down-voted. I find your thinking process fascinating.

It's just how the US is.

I was watching a very violent move, late at night, on a cable channel. All kinds of violence - no problem.

Suddenly an inured woman is being given first aid, in the process one nipple falls out of her shirt briefly - GIANT blur.

The root causes for this pro-violence/anti-sex culture could be interesting for sociology researches.

My understanding is that hydrocarbon using fuel cells run hot, really, really HOT. Which is why they are regularly used in race cars, but not in many other places.

The answer to the question Baker posed lay in a set of mathematical rules called an algorithm.

I never cease to be amazed just how low the math level is in our culture. And how acceptable it is to be publicly that math ignorant.

It was difficult, for example, to change the algorithm, which worked best in a single-threaded environment, into one that could take advantage of multi-core processors.

Aha, so the parallelized it!

"We have been able to reduce X-ray doses to previously unthinkable levels," said Professor Johan de Mey, head of the radiology department of University Hospital in Brussels, Belgium. That is opening up the benefits of CT scans to a wider variety of patients.

Great!

The terrible way in which this article explains what was done, is doubly ironic considering how it is an article about math and programming literally saving lives.

nations with higher atheism are the ones with the least problems

It should be plain to see that development came first, then more atheism. This should be very obvious in Europe's history.

I think you're confusing a symptom of chaos and brutal existence with the root cause of it.

On the Anglophone Internet for sure, dominated as it is by the US and UK. But what ever Scandinavian or Dutch written parts of the Internet there might be, small as they are, should be refreshingly free of Victorian baggage.

We try to do the same thing for C++, Java, and Python, but it doesn't work as well because the process is manual.

Use http://astyle.sourceforge.net and add it to your build process and/or commit or push/pull hooks of your source control.

(I am surprised I have to give this tip to anyone on HN!)

If you are an experienced C/C++ hacker, this article will hurt your brain.

It's an article oriented to relating to non-programmers what it is like to learn to program

I am not sure that is true. I think it is one very non-technical person's experience with self-thought Ruby. And as such it is very much what you'd expect, hard and full of frustration.

Beyond that it's a pleasant read, right until the end where she actually tracks down _why and prints that information!

Journalistic duty my ass. Journalistic duty would be hounding the administration over the whole "due process is not judicial process" when it comes to killing Americans.

Stalking some guy because he was Internet famous for a while is not it.

Well the US military involvement does mean it gets some of the lowest priced oil. What's the price of a gallon of gasoline up to in Europe now, $9 or something? I think most of the time it is something like triple what the US pays.

And yet that has not crippled the European economies when it comes to trade with the US. European cars are more gasoline efficient, and Europeans live closer together (although this may largely also be due to historic reason long predating the automobile).

And I think the fear that oil might be radically more expensive for everyone, unless someone ensures it keeps flowing, is unfounded. If oil is valuable - people will look to sell it.

Didn't certain groups in Iraq partly fund themselves by exporting oil in pickup trucks? That's what I mean. Even if an oil exporting area turns to complete and utter chaos, strong men will arise and they will look to get rich by selling oil. And how long could the oil exporting states maintain their quality of life without massive oil exports?

I think you'd have to actively fight to prevent oil from trading rather than the other way around.

But it is also true that Europe might look radically different if the US had not pushed for democracy in the west.

That's what's really so depressing about the US and the rest of the world slowly sliding towards more and more authoritarianism. Who will be guiding beacon of freedom in the coming centuries? Switzerland is not big enough to strong arm anyone into being more democratic.

It is true the OECD countries are currently bending the developing world over backwards. But this does not mean that the OECD needs that kind of advantage. We might not be as rich without it, but we would still be quite rich.

Also there's very little military projection from the Scandinavian countries for example.

And I am not sure how the overseas friend helps? If you look at median (not average) GDP per capita, the US is actually less wealthy than many European countries. Plus, in terms of trade with Europe, the US is as much a competitor and exporter as it is an importer.

So I'd say Western European or Scandinavian style prosperity is definitely possible without UK style ex-colonialism, or US style inequality and military projectionism.

I hope we can wipe poverty off the earth soon.

Most of the industrialized world can be said to have done that.

Western Europe, Japan, probably Canada too. It is easy* and requires only low levels of corruption, good law and order, combined with mostly free markets. Wealth in terms of natural resources is NOT a requirement, Switzerland is resource wise very poor. (Unless you count scenic views of the Alps as a resource.)

*When I say easy, I mean possible and requires only changes in human behavior - so super hard in fact.

I don't have a phone in my pocket because I hate carrying it. But I do have a wristwatch. If modern smart-phones, and all the things they do, can be turned into wristwatches - great! Then I will have one.