Viewing profile — michael_dorfman

Or, channeling Ken Thompson: Unless the tentacles extend to the compiler you use to compile the compiler you use to compile the free software. (Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)

> Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit The Sanskrit alphabet is very elegant indeed, but Sanskrit doesn't have …

I worked in an IT department of about 20, of which two employees had each been hit twice .

It's a reference to a famous quote by Sweden's trade minister in 1999, who said "Norway is the last Soviet State"

If a headline is phrased as a question, the answer is always "no." If the answer were "yes", they wouldn't have phrased it as a question.

But his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (the one that gave the world the Turing Machine) has a bug in it. In fact, it has two. The fi…

See the FAQ ( http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html )

And, actually, last week was the 1144th anniversary of the printing of the oldest book for which we have a precise date: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/05/dayintech_0511/

Someone has to explain to me exactly what we should have done differently here. I'll give it a shot. What you should have done, in my opinion, is just provide a link alongside a on…

Yes, but Bill Evans did the arrangements on Kind of Blue ; he is also rumoured to have composed several of the songs (although they are credited to Miles.)

No; Bill Evans and Gil Evans are two different people (and both collaborated with Miles.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Evans

Wow, you sure did this wrong. A post like this is going to be aggressively ignored, I imagine. If, on the other hand, you had written a solid blog post about what you've done, and …

Just glancing over at my bookshelf, how about Tanenbaum's OSDI and Knuth's MMIXware?

> But if a person accepts the Church Turing Thesis, then the human brain is not doing any computation that can't be modeled by a Turing Machine. In fact, the brain is at least a Tu…

> Again and again, this topic keeps coming up and the surprising truth is: paper is the answer. Don't discount it. Paper is good, but clay tablets FTW.

I know of someone (here in Norway) trying to build up a business doing precisely this (filming things, such as snowboard and ski events) via a remote-controlled helicopter. It soun…

Have you spoken to a physical therapist? There's quite a bit of space on the spectrum between "trying things on your own" and "surgery".

Actually, this article is about 5 Graph DBMS's. If you are (like me) more interested in looking for Graph Databases to consider, it looks like Knuth's "Stanford GraphBase" is still…

The mythmaking around the early history of computing is fascinating (and maddening) to watch. In the rush to create compelling narratives around a few selected heroes, the complexi…

Looks like you've been hellbanned. If I had to guess, I'd say it was because of too many submissions getting flagged.

That's a wonderful offer, Patrick. Your generosity (with your time and knowledge) is, as always, inspiring.