aaw

This one's 250 understandable lines: https://github.com/marijnheule/microsat. You could probably get it to below 200 lines if you removed the restart logic and learned clause compaction, but it's actually a surprisingly competitive solver as is.

This looks interesting. I've only glanced at the docs, but it looks like this module system lets you define new commands but not necessarily new data structures (since you'd have to implement RDB/AOF serialization for those).

Are there plans for that? It's probably possible to do most of that with this module system but you'd have to serialize the data structure into a string and "type X" wouldn't return your custom data structure type.

Yeah, it's enough for me. It's my primary development machine by choice, and it's enough to do anything I need at a terminal (running emacs, developing and testing rails servers, docker builds, etc.) while keeping Chrome open with a few dozen apps including a few gmail and chat windows open.

After going through several Linux laptops over the past decade, including a couple of Thinkpads, I agree. My current Chromebook running Ubuntu is by far my favorite.

The whole setup comes in under $300: buy a certified refurbished Acer C720 from Acer with 4GB RAM and 16GB SSD (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00L87JC80) and, separately, a 128GB MyDigitalSSD (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EZ2E8NO). Replace the SSD and install this custom-made Ubuntu distro that includes all of the fixes for the C720: https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/12/. And that's it!

The best of all the conspiracy theories was http://pastebin.com/9catw4X7.

I really like the /classic front page view. Could we try a similar comment view as well, with votes only counted from users who've been here for at least a year?

The Android Market has a similar problem. There is such a large proportion of reviews that are complaints about failed downloads, scare tactics from competitors ("This app installs malware!"), and feature requests ("3 stars. I'll give you four stars once you implement feature X") that it makes me wonder if people with close to 5-star ratings are just buying ratings from farms of people somehow.

I get anywhere from 1%-3% clickthrough, depending on the app, with AdMob. Whether your ads blend in with your app and where you place your ads affects this rate. AdMob recommends that you place your ads at the end of a user action, as in, once they've played a few rounds of a game, present them with their score and an ad. I think that's exactly what Angry Birds does.

Pret A Manger (a sandwich chain) used to do something like this in NYC a few years back. Everything you bought would have an odd price like $7.13 or $10.32 so that once everything was rung up, your total was always a multiple of 25 cents. I loved the idea but I guess they found some problems with it because they eventually stopped doing it - it would be interesting to know why.

In addition, can anybody suggest something more along the lines of Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C# for the JVM/Java? CLR via C# covers a wide range of topics about how garbage collection, threading, appdomains, etc. work under the CLR using examples from C#, which I think would be more useful for learning what you need to know about Java and the JVM than your typical Java programming book.

I'd spend more time on the written docs, and I definitely wouldn't replace written docs with screencasts. Especially for how-to documentation, people want to skim first, then go back and follow the steps themselves, and the latter part is more difficult with a screencast.

As a side note, I only really watch screencasts for stuff that I'm already very interested in. Watching a video means plugging in/finding headphones if I'm in the office and making a commitment of a couple of minutes.

A well thought-out post and a good read, but both of the author's points about the limitations of relational databases are a little misleading.

The first, "Every single element in a relation (aka table) has to be exactly the same type" is true in many relational databases, but isn't necessary: SQLite, for example, is implemented with a nice form of dynamic typing where individual columns can take on multiple data types.

Second, "SQL isn't even Turing-complete" is sort of a folk theorem in computer science that isn't necessarily true anymore, especially with all of the proprietary SQL dialects in existence: the original standard, SQL92, is basically equivalent to relational algebra, which has the expressive power of first-order logic - it's so weak it can't even express concepts like graph reachability. But constructs like recursive queries have been added to the SQL standard since SQL92 which may make even standard SQL Turing Complete.

If he wants to teach his students that grades "poison our educational environment", why is the solution to give everyone an A+? He's just using grades as currency to buy his students' support for his experiment in anarchy. I wonder how many of them would have still participated in his class if he had announced on the first day that everyone would get a C, a D, or an F?

I used to work for a decent-sized international bank that used Excel for pretty much everything (any development projects were doomed if users couldn't pull the data they produced/exposed into Excel). So I can tell you some of the things I saw people need when working with Excel in a large organization:

1. Ability to push/pull a range from a company-wide database, based on a (name,date) key. When you pull based on a (name,date) key, you get the first range with that name that was published on or before the date you specified. A dev team at the bank implemented this and people really loved it.

2. Versioning, but more for reasons of space than for having a "blame" feature. People use the same spreadsheet daily/weekly to create a report, so they have to save copies of the reports daily/weekly in case they need to reproduce the calculations from a particular report even though the differences from report to report were just minor tweaks. It wasn't uncommon for me to see spreadsheets that were > 100 MB, copied and saved daily.

3. Better explaining of formulas - you can ask Excel what cells reference another cell and it'll draw a bunch of arrows for you, but it still takes a lot of concentration to figure out why you're getting the number 4 in a cell when its references are many cells deep, spread across several worksheets. It would be nice if there was a clear way of explaining a cell's formula without having to navigate from worksheet to worksheet and actually hand-trace the references. Even collecting all of the references in one place and drawing out a tree of formulas would be an improvement.