Whatever happened to that "startup house" in Kansas City? Much the same idea. Google PR made a big deal about how a 1GB network connection made it possible for a house in KC to do big-time development.

There are already a few places like this in the SF Bay Area. They're mostly sweatshops for producing appcrap. Now if the Willow Garage guy was doing robotics again, it might be interesting. But Willow Garage robotics tanked, and the people involved mostly went off to a "telepresence" startup which sells a Segway-like teleoperator with a camera and screen. It's controlled from an app, of course.

In Python you write "a?b:c" as "b if a else c". I think that is pretty obscure, and hard to read too.

Null-terminated strings were considered superior to using a length because they allowed strings to be > 255 bytes long (using 16 bits for the length would allow longer counted strings, but at that time with 4K of memory nobody in their right mind would suggest wasting a byte like that!).

Null-terminated strings also have the nice property that getting the "tail" is a very fast operation, since you just return a pointer to the middle. This meant that searches could return strings, rather than indexes. This then meant that every function that worked on text only needed one argument, a string, rather than two (a string and an index). The savings due to this were pretty significant.

The guy who made that mistake realized the next morning he'd made a serious design error. But by then, he writes, he already had three users. Really.

No, it's not, according to the USPTO. It passed their examination for similarity within classification. A key point is that Twitter did not have an image service at the time the Twitpic application was filed. So, under trademark rules, Twitter was in a different business. Twitter has filed an opposition, and the schedule for a trial before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was set.

Twitter was afraid that Twitpic might win.

Smolin is worth reading, even if you don't agree with him. One of his comments is "Smart people should not program". He wants physicists to push the programming work down to lower-level people.

His big problem with physics is mostly with string theory. String theory is an elegant mathematical description of how physics might work. It doesn't make any predictions that are experimentally testable, at least not without orders of magnitude more accelerator power than currently available. String theory may be just an amusing mathematical exercise. We don't know. Smolin's complaint is that string theory ate physics - for a while, you had to be a string theorist to have a career in theoretical physics.

I need to read more about this. At first glance, it's kind of like BitTorrent, but at a lower level in the protocol stack. Or like Universal Resource Identifiers (remember those?) at a higher level. The general idea seems to be to make cacheing easier at the expense of making everything else more complex.

I was talking about the pre-lambda stuff in std and boost, especially std::foreach.

C++11x did in fact fix a lot of this and I certainly use the new syntax.

This story is from the Epoch Times, the poltiical paper of the Falun Gong movement. Anything there that's not political is filler to make it look like a real newspaper. Probably not a good source for programming wisdom.

Been there, done that, 30 years ago.

Every Windows driver with WHDL certification has passed the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which is a proof of correctness checker. Passing means that the driver won't blow away the rest of the OS with a bad pointer, subscript error, or other fatal error. Since Microsoft started requring this in Windows 7, Windows OS crashes have been way down.

About 5% of verifications either require too much time or too much memory. Any formally undecidable program would hit one of those limits. If it's that hard to tell if a driver has a bug, they assume the driver has a bug.

So there. Solved problem in practice.

They mention Cadillac's self-driving car, recently demonstrated to lawmakers in Washington. Cadillac is confident enough now to let members of Congress ride in the thing as it drives from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon in traffic. That's impressive. There's video, but it's all chopped into short pieces for short attention span TV viewers. I'd like to see an uncut half hour of automatic driving in traffic.

I had forgotten about the gridded fins...you're right, that should provide substantial cross-range capability.

A big challenge for water landing will be wind during the descent of the rocket. If the wind is blowing 100 miles an hour for a minute as the rocket is falling, then it's going to be dragged a mile from the ballistic landing point. (When things move quickly through the air, the lift generated by wind is extremely high; bullets move with the wind.) I don't believe that the booster will have the capacity to fly horizontally too far, and it won't be firing at all for the bulk of the descent.

If the wind could be predicted accurately, it would be easy enough to steer the rocket to the right place -- or move the landing platform to the right place.

If you're landing back at the launch pad; there will have been a rocket that could have sampled the wind speed just a few minutes previously, so you could have very precise wind speed vs. altitude data.

The problem here is that the press reports are just rehashes of what the cops are putting out. Somebody should find this guy and interview him. He may be in hiding for reasons of his own.

His book is self-published on Amazon. It's been out since 2011, and you can read a sample there. This guy is not the next Steven King. A typical sentence: "As Zea approaches her partner she cannot restrain herself from hyperventilating as she peers at the black embossed letters on the translucent glass sign above the entrance to the central atrium".

Today, the Los Angeles Times quotes cops as saying "Everybody knew about the book in 2012", and that this is more about a four-page letter he recently sent to officials in Dorchester County, containing "complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime". There may be more clarity over the next few days, now that the story is getting attention.

In Israel, it's very hard to leave. There are extensive Government benefits for ultra-orthodox, including subsidized housing, pay for religious study, and unlimited draft deferments. This is on top of the heavy social pressure, the lack of marketable skills, and the language barrier (the ultra-orthodox in Israel speak Yiddish, not Hebrew.)