There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance.
On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x height your mouse was is. You could then click to tell the OS that you wanted to wanted to reflow the page using that x height as a reference point. If you pointed your mouse at the horizontal scroll bar, a vertical line appeared, and you could scroll left to right. This is sort of like pressing Control-l on Emacs. Instead scrolling and getting the desired result by trial and error, you could tell the OS exactly what you wanted to do. It was very useful for scrolling within pictures.
Unless you have a real emergency and need assistance, it's best to avoid the police whenever possible, even if you've done nothing wrong. Local police forces have many officers that are poorly trained and believe that they have plenary power or act as if they do in any situation. Of course, this isn't true about all local police officers, but if you don't know which officers are the good ones, you should just avoid all police whenever possible. Even large "local" police departments have very negative reputations in America; especially the NYPD, LAPD and Chicago PD.
I think that that stories on HN about FBI abuses of power are popular because people expect more from the FBI. It's comforting to think that there is a highly trained law enforcement group that can intercede when a local department is incompetent or inadequate, and the realization that the FBI can be just as bad or even worse than local law enforcement is disheartening.
The growing size of cities and the creation of suburbs (especially those which do not support walking) have caused the beat-cop to become somewhat deprecated--in my home city right now there is a shortage of officers and dwindling pensions for the ones that are still on board.
So, instead of having Officer Bob the friendly cop who patrols your street, you have nameless squadcars driving seemingly at random--much like the beetles of Bradbury's literature. You have cops that are never seen, and when they are seen they typically are bad news.
This, taken in combination with the horrific perversion of justice that can occur in our adversarial system, causes a very definite sense of the "other". We have trouble feeling bad for these cops, because in a way they do not blend in with their community in a meaningful fashion. We do not help them, we do not like them, and they generally seem to return the favor.
Worse, we see an increasing attempt to bolster the average power of the cop with tools grossly out of proportion to their intended function in society: note that the two officers in this video appeared to be carrying submachineguns. What. The. Fuck.
With police seen as distinct from our communities and friends and families, and with government increasingly aloof in regulations and faceless bureaucracy, I very much fear for the next decade of the American experiment.
The police were originally on scene for an armed robbery. Since the where there because of someone with a gun it makes sense that they officers would be well armed themselves.
Probably good advice in general, but when you post a comment like this (or upvote it) on a story about police abuse, it comes off like blaming the victim. The man in this video did nothing wrong and now his dog is dead.
*edit: I should note that he was performing a valuable civic service by documenting the actions of the officers (as were the people in the car recording this video). We wouldn't be able to have these discussions without people brave enough to record our public servants' (mis)behavior.
We do have a very serious problem. We have a paramilitary force patrolling our streets, largely fighting a fictional "war on drugs" and locking up whole swaths of our population. The poor-ish, brown-ish swath.
It depends on what you're optimizing for. If for your personal safety, short term comfort, or the rapid erosion of basic constitutional rights... yep, it's best to avoid whenever possible.
I was about to post a similar comment. Your advice is very good, and hasn't yet been heard by enough people to have the knee-jerk "victim blaming" response attached to it.
Edit: Oops, poster above did in fact throw down the victim blaming card. Indeed, the man did nothing wrong, but he could have a live dog right now by simply avoiding the police.
I think many of us would like our police to be more like Andy Griffith. We pay their salaries and elect their bosses so I don't see why we couldn't have this kind of police force if we put in the time and effort to reform them.
When I was in high school I looked into making a micro-power plant using the Seebeck effect for the Intel Science Talent Search. I thought about using liquid sodium as a heat sink, which is what some heliostats use. Solar power towers use the captured energy to power turbines, but this isn't very efficient, so I thought I would add thermoelectric generators to capture some of the energy that is lost as heat.
I ended up not doing this because the Seebeck effect isn't really a useful power-plant (in the broad sense of the word) when you have a small temperature gradient because it is really inefficient, although it is useful for thermometers and other low power items, and for some exotic things like Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, which is what powers Voyager and other long distance spacecraft. It becomes worth using when you have a large, consistent energy source, which is usually geothermal energy. But the small temperature difference between the human body and the flashlight and the low efficiency of thermocouples means that this project won't seriously compete with battery powered flashlights. However, it is a cool idea and could have some niche uses.
Yup, Seebeck is incredibly inefficient, as for RTG's in space I think they would rather use a Rankine cycle but that would be prohibitively too heavy to launch.
Good on your for using peltiers back in HS. In HS I made a sweet exoskeleton using peltiers for active cooling while outside in the summer heat.
Yep, I was going to try to use that (peltier) in conjunction with a small array of solar panels to cool my car because summer afternoons can get incredibly hot - outside temperature reaches 45C, so I'm reasonably sure the car's interior would reach 55-60 easy. Alas! running some back of the envelope calculations (before jumping into the whole thing) I quickly discovered that I'm better off trying to find an efficient and tiny compressor, and large secondary battery to charge off the solar panels.
This problem still remains unsolved and no, remote start is not an option. I'm trying to craft something that is completely independent of the gas in the tank and preferably self sufficient.
> Yep, I was going to try to use that (peltier) in conjunction with a small array of solar panels to cool my car because summer afternoons can get incredibly hot
A simple reflective car cover would do far more than all of that tech.
Smetimes it is really easy to over-engineer solutions to problems. I am reminded (and I am guilty) of this frequently.
I got that as a gift, and I have to unfortunately state that it's a negative. It does not help. Actually it helps even worse than cracking the windows down a little.
I do realize that the problem needs to be approached two fold - expelling hot air outside to reach ambient + cooling air that's being taken in some manner.
In full sun a car can easily have 1+kw of heat gain. Combating that with AC takes a lot of energy especially when you consider how long a car may be sitting out in the sun. But, cutting down on heat gain either by parking in the shade or having reflective shades can get you to close to air temperature fairly easily. However, combining would make things a lot easer.
So, if your willing to go all out and spend a few thousand on modding your car. Automatic shades for every window, a fair sized solar array on the roof and an independent AC system designed for continuous operation.
Interestingly there have actually been a few nuclear reactors in space. Used primarily for radar satellites iirc that need power that RTGs and solar panels cannot provide.
Tuesday's Shelby County v. Holder decision, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, was a power grab by the court majority that strayed wildly from precedent. From SCOTUS blog:
"Regarding deference, not that long ago, the Justices believed Congress held something close to plenary power when it crafted remedies addressing racial discrimination in voting. In case after case, the Justices made clear that they would not second-guess congressional judgments on the subject. Even as the Justices began looking more rigorously at particular types of congressional remedial action elsewhere, they repeatedly distinguished the invalidated laws from the VRA and celebrated provisions like preclearance as paradigmatic examples of permissible congressional action...
"The decision significantly diminishes Congress’s ability to craft future remedies for racial discrimination in voting and beyond. Indeed, after today, an administrative agency acting within the sphere of its expertise enjoys more discretion than does Congress when acting in the realm in which its power was once viewed to be at its apogee.
"At oral argument last winter, Justice Kagan bristled at the notion that the Court, rather than Congress, was the proper institution to decide when remedial action in this realm was needed. Justice Scalia was nevertheless convinced that “[t]his is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.” Today’s decision makes clear that a majority of the Court shares this view. Earl Warren would have been astounded. William Rehnquist, too."
"The formula that was struck down identified jurisdictions subject to preclearance as those with a history of a voting test or device and less than 50 percent voter registration or turnout as of 1964, 1968 or 1972."
The decision hinged upon this very narrow point. Congress' decision to require preclearance was not declared unconstitutional on its own. The problem was that the formula for deciding who required preclearance is a static rule that does not allow for the evaluation of any events after 1972. Therefore, regardless of how much a state or other jurisdiction changes, they could not change their status under this law. If they were originally on the preclearance list, never had another voting anomaly, elected minorities to every position in the state, and had 100% minority turnout, for decades on end, they would remain on the preclearance list, because of what happened 40 years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts even wrote in his opinion that congress is free to make new legislation that has the same consequences. But it must rely on current data to evaluate jurisdictions.
> The problem was that the formula for deciding who required preclearance is a static rule that does not allow for the evaluation of any events after 1972. Therefore, regardless of how much a state or other jurisdiction changes, they could not change their status under this law. If they were originally on the preclearance list, never had another voting anomaly, elected minorities to every position in the state, and had 100% minority turnout, for decades on end, they would remain on the preclearance list, because of what happened 40 years ago.
That's simply not true. You can seek exemption from section 5. It's called "bailing out". A county or state on the preclearance list that has not been discriminatory for 10 years (see [1] for criteria) may sue to be exempt from Section 5. Many counties have done this successfully; the state of New Hampshire successfully bailed out as recently as this March.
States or counties that were found to be discriminatory could also be "bailed in." Arkansas and New Mexico, LA County in California, as well as several other counties were bailed in.
In other words, the Voting Rights Act was built with a mechanism to self-destruct when it was no longer necessary. Congress overwhelmingly approved an extension of the VRA in 2006 after extensive research and testimony. If a state or county was still covered in 2013, then it had a problem with discrimination within the past ten years, which is the minority thought the opinion that "things have changed" was foolish.
The problem for me with this is that SCOTUS is defining "current," and additionally defining it in a nebulous way.
If they were originally on the preclearance list, never had another voting anomaly, elected minorities to every position in the state, and had 100% minority turnout, for decades on end, they could introduce a bill in Congress to end preclearance in their specific case. Of course, the current data from those jurisdictions is probably nearly as dismal as it was in 1972, so this wouldn't happen. Instead, the requirement for preclearance has been removed by dictate, with no evidence that the situation has significantly changed.
> Most Silicon Valley startups don't need top talent. They're marketing experiments with a small bit of technology and a lot of painful support work (due to massive, accumulating technical debt) that can only be done out of VC-istan dues-paying as young people take on pager duty for the job they think will get them investor connections in 6 months so they can do their own gigs (ha!)
The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough". The result is that you get things like Google Calendar. What's wrong with Google Calendar? John McCarthy put it best:
"Now of course Emacs is merely and editor but nevertheless is does permit significant user modifications and the modern operating systems do not. Let me give an example: one thing that I have done is to add a feature where you can put in a file, the name of another file and even also a location in that file. And then with a single key press it will search forward till it finds its file name and go to that filename in place. And I use it for putting references to email messages in my calendar file. That's just one of the uses of it and I asked about the new Google calendar file. Can you put a reference to email messages in there? And the answer is not only can't the user do it, but even the implementers can't do it, but to me anyway it's very useful. When I receive email about a meeting or a seminar, or something like that, to be able to put a link to the email itself into the calendar file and Emacs permitted me to do that myself, without my even having to become a real expert in the inners of it, and I think this will be important. "
The same thing is true about lots of Google (your favorite company) jobs. For many positions, they don't need brilliant people hacking Lisp, but rather they need competent Java or C++ programmers to make sure that their code base is "good enough".
Yeah. It seems that most of the large technology employers want to hire the best people to do middling work, ignoring the unhappiness that ensues when people are over-leveled for what they're asked to do.
Closed-allocation needs to die in a fire, in other words.
NKS contains a mention of the proof that Rule 110 is Turing Complete. This is genuinely interesting, but it doesn't change its field in a significant way.
Of course, Wolfram didn't come up with the proof himself. That was done by Matthew Cook while he was working for Wolfram Research. Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.
According to Wolfram, Cook's job was to prove Rule 110 was universal. Cook didn't "discover" it as an independent action.
In a very direct sense, this was a software development task, where the program that was being written was precisely a universal program (through several layers of emulation, of course; rule 110 -> 'particle computer' -> cyclic tag system -> Turing machine). It's an impressive program, but also quite mechanical. More details: http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-681#previous
Here's the timeline as far as I've been able to determine, mostly from sources inside the company:
0. Wolfram tasked Cook with finding a proof that 110 was universal.
1. With encouragement and help, Cook finished the proof many years before the book was ready.
2. Cook tried to publish the program/proof at some complexity conference.
3. Wolfram asked him not to, because it was against the terms of his contract.
4. Cook agreed not to, but then did it anyway.
5. Wolfram threatened legal action to prevent the proof being published.
This kind of thing is clearly a breakdown of the relationship between Cook and Wolfram. Is there a good guy and a bad guy? Maybe, maybe not. But if we see this proof as a program, I'm sure many people would agree that publishing code one was paid to write, without permission, is kind of a no-no.
To my mind, this doesn't so much paint Wolfram as a lawsuit-happy egomaniac as it does expose some of the contradictions of a running a private company as a commercial venture and as a vehicle for one's own research.
edit: I work for Wolfram, as probably some HN users already know and as I mention elsewhere on this thread. But when I heard about the whole Cook thing a couple of years ago, I asked around about what happened to make sure I wasn't working for a company that was unethical. The above is what I was able to determine.
> Stephen Wolfram obtained a court order preventing Cook from presenting his result before NKS was published, because he claimed that publishing this result violated an NDA Cook signed.
BTW, this provided insight into question exactly what was Wolfram's results and what was taken from his colleagues/employees.
It very much confused me when I first read about the court order: Did he really not have enough of his own results in NKS that he needed to hide the fact that the results were not originally his? And merely by asking the question, the answer seems obvious.
If you live in the United States, once you have enough information, you can use the IRS's whistleblower program to report him. You can get up to 30% of the penalty and tax money that the IRS collects if you wait until the idiotic budget sequestration is lifted.
Just make sure that you have solid information, because:
"The IRS is looking for solid information, not an “educated guess” or unsupported speculation. We are also looking for a significant Federal tax issue - this is not a program for resolving personal problems or disputes about a business relationship."
Although the U.S Supreme Court consists of men and women, whites, blacks, and Latinos, Catholics and Jews, it is also very non-diverse. All nine of the U.S Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale law school (Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard to Columbia).
This means that what were probably the most formative years in the justices' legal careers were all spent at the same institutions.
It's a bit of stretch to say that highly intelligent 22-25 year olds were brainwashed by their law schools. They had their lives' formative years before they showed up at law school.
Sotomayor has commented quite a bit in that regard.
The design is inconsistent. If you only use color to signify buttons, making top and bottom banners with the same solid color as buttons is confusing, especially when several buttons are embedded in the top or bottom banner.
> The F-35 requires more than 8 million lines of code, compared with about 2 million for the F-16 and less than 1 million for other fourth-generation fighter aircraft
The F-35 is programmed in C++, while the other aircraft are programmed in Ada, which is one of the reasons that there is so much more code. When you have to code, test, and maintain 8 million lines of C++ in an environment where a single bug can be deadly, you should expect delays.
The choice of using C++ to write a system that is designed to never crash and the obvious ignorance of the "mythical man month" does not give a good impression of Lockheed's management.
For anyone who's unfamiliar with the term "Mythical Man Month," it's the title of a book which argues, amongst other things, that assigning more engineers to a late software project will make it even later.
The book can argue more convincingly and thoroughly than I can, but briefly: When new engineers join a project, they have to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with it, so they're not productive for a while. They take time away from the project's original engineers by asking a lot of questions, which actually means progress slows down.
Further, more people means more complexity to manage. There will be more miscommunication, more instances of engineers' work conflicting with other engineers' work, more differences in coding style, etc.. With more than 200 people on a project, I can only imagine the nightmares.
I'm not familiar with the F-35 codebase. But I have a hard time imagining it could benefit from 200+ people working on it simultaneously.
I'm also skeptical about this idea of 24/7 shiftwork. Will each person will have their own little piece of the codebase that nobody else touches? If so, then why have a nightshift? Why not just have everyone work in the day, since it's all in parallel anyway? If not, how in the world can you have engineer A coding a given module on the dayshift, who then hands it off to engineer B on the nightshift? Software is not like laying bricks. You can't just come on the next shift and pick up where the last person left off. You lose all the context they had in their heads while coding, which is absolutely essential.
Frequently aerospace companies will have a limited number of licenses for various pieces of software. C++ as a language obviously doesn't have this limitation, but a limited number of licenses for various custom test suites and third party software (e.g. Matlab) is frequently a bottleneck. If this is a bottleneck, it makes sense to have these licenses in use 24/7.
Purchasing more licenses is always an option, but usually not a quick one.
Maybe it's really obvious, I mean it should be, but Lockheed clearly isn't much of a software company.
Office space and third party software licenses mandating a 24 hour work cycle for the most expensive defense project of all time?! Maybe it should not be surprising. Their peers seem to just appropriate rights and constitutional interpretation to meet their needs, can't these guys just appropriate more matlab or whatever compiler it is licenses? Just seems like it is being treated like a manufacturing problem.
This same class of folks who are making these decisions are all contracting for NSA and have access to your data to keep us all safe...
Good point. It does make me wonder though: Does the time and money cost of purchasing more licenses outweigh the effect on employee morale resulting from night shifts?
> I'm also skeptical about this idea of 24/7 shiftwork. Will each person will have their own little piece of the codebase that nobody else touches? If so, then why have a nightshift? Why not just have everyone work in the day, since it's all in parallel anyway?
Because that way you can fit more people in the same facility? Otherwise, it will be unused for 8 hours each day (being optimistic).
Why not? It's not like they can just go down to the local HackerNinjaRockStar DojoSpace and rent some Ikea standing desks. At Apple, for instance, there are sealed buildings and security requirements that impose a cost on expansion above espresso machines and foosball tables -- and they're not required to meet DoD legal standards.
This is probably true. Still, it seems like a red flag to me that on a project like the F-35, which presumably has adequate funding for office space and other such things, their only solution for providing offices for their own employees is night shifts.
There's a very good reason not to have engineers work nights. While some are undoubtedly night owls, many (most?) will have lives and families which will suffer from night shifts. That accelerates burnout and increases resentment--both of which are usually running high in a troubled project anyway.
The F-35 has multiple variants, one of which is a STOVL (Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing) aircraft with a vertical flight system. The amount of code necessary to deal with that is likely a large part of the difference in LOC, not to mention the more complicated systems for weapons, radar, communications, etc...
In other words, the fact that it is written in C++ tells you little more than the fact that it is written in C++ and not Ada, but that alone will tell you that they probably expanded their pool of potential programmers by a large margin.
Considering the number of job postings I've seen where they want N+ years of experience, I'd say it's easier to find that in C++ than Ada if they do that.
Oh, they crash. Software on currently fielded jets crash all the time, pilots call them "software anomalies."
Systems are designed to fail softly and reboot quickly (~1 minute) and sometimes do so automatically without physically crashing the jet. Sometimes the pilot won't even notice.
Sorry, bad grammar. I meant that sometimes they reboot automatically. The systems are designed to always reboot without physically crashing the jet, but sometimes the pilot has to command the reboot themselves.
> Systems are designed to fail softly and reboot quickly (~1 minute) and sometimes do so automatically without physically crashing the jet. Sometimes the pilot won't even notice.
If that's the case, why not use something like Erlang?
I think the difference in LOC count is likely due to the much more complicated avionics in the F-35 than the technology stack, as compared with older aircraft.
I'm pretty sure no self-respecting engineer would ever attempt to design such a thing (although many might be deluded into thinking that e.g. advanced type systems might help achieve that goal).
> choice of using C++
Almost certainly not a good indicator.. much of those LOC are likely integrations from other projects. Who is to say the alternative didn't involve rewriting some more sensitive, costly-to-produce code in Ada?
This website has some information about serious bugs. There are a variety of languages being used, by different industries, with either expensive war machines or expensive civil aeroplanes full of passengers or impossible to service space-craft.
On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x height your mouse was is. You could then click to tell the OS that you wanted to wanted to reflow the page using that x height as a reference point. If you pointed your mouse at the horizontal scroll bar, a vertical line appeared, and you could scroll left to right. This is sort of like pressing Control-l on Emacs. Instead scrolling and getting the desired result by trial and error, you could tell the OS exactly what you wanted to do. It was very useful for scrolling within pictures.
You can see a video of this here [1] at 46:50.
[1] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932