Viewing profile — rumbler

Thing is, you would know if someone broke into your house with a rock through the window. Breaking into your computer, or breaking the encryption of your data on some server, can b…

Enough with the "Kansai people don't eat natto" thing, that's just not true. I lived in Kansai for years, and there were like a dozen brands of natto on supermarket shelves, everyw…

I had pop tarts when I was 6 years old and went on a trip to the USA with my family. It was horribly sweet and not at all delicious. On the other hand, peanut butter was an enjoyab…

I enjoyed reading about breakfast while eating mine. I had pumpkin soup and toast. In my opinion, soup is highly underrated as breakfast food (in the Western world at least).

> - Wrist GPS while driving Please don't look at a screen while driving. You might end up killing people.

Came here to say this. The "pure" version of each digit should come in the middle, rather than at the beginning, of its interval.

If Amazon were to make a driverless car, I'd worry. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp

I got my kid a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 when he was 5 years old. I bought it used for less than $200 and installed Linux Mint on it. The small keyboard of the CF-18 is perfect for…

If you ask old people, they will tell you the same story, but about IBM. Every generation has its great, innovative tech company turned evil mastermind story. It seems to be hard t…

With all due respect to John Carmack and Michael Abrash, this reminds me of a song by Tom Lehrer: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department…

Thank you! I did not know about SBCL, or Paul Khuong, before. This is the most interesting thing I've read this week. This kind of article is why I come to Hacker News.

That inverse square root algorithm is a neat trick, but it did not revolutionize anything. In addition to several algorithms already mentioned, I feel that suffix trees and suffix …

Also very important to note: being strict works only when the teacher is actually competent. I've had high school teachers whose understanding of math was basically the textbook + …

I routinely carry microSD cards filled with 16GB of random numbers.

Ted Chiang's short story collection, "Stories of your life and others", contains some of the best writing I've read in my life.

Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in …

Same here. I went from an Apple IIe to a Macintosh SE. It was a nice computer for typing high school papers on (yay PageMaker 1.0), and the GUI of System 5 was beautiful on the lit…

Steve Wozniak's original Apple II Integer Basic had 16-bit signed integers, but no built-in floating point support. Applesoft (licensed from Micosoft) had 16-bit integer variables …

> you can't really expect them to shut down Well, before a few weeks ago, I couldn't really expect my government to spy on all its citizens, use secret courts to bully companies in…

What depresses me is, I see how this information could be used in many kinds of amazing ways, but since I cannot control who gets it and what they will do with it, I refuse to use …

In Japan, some restaurants (not the fancy ones, but family-friendly places) have a button on the table just for that. Push it, and a few seconds later a waitress appears, just like…

Read Dijkstra, read Dijkstra. He is the master of us all.

What I want is a keyboard with two big keys below the space bar, each half the width of the space bar, that I could map to Escape (the left one) and 3rdLevelShift (the right one). …

That's certainly a good way for Snowden to see where his friends and his enemies are, and at the same time expose to the world how much leverage the US has with many countries.

Heh. You should see the looks I get with my Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 (running Arch Linux and i3wm). People must think I'm entering nuclear launch codes every time I use vim in pub…