aiscott

From my personal experience with prescribed narcotics for things like wisdom tooth extraction, kidney stones, etc., is that they don't do much in terms of pain management.

That is interesting about marijuana being anti-inflammatory...I did not know that.

"To date, the NSU researchers have received about $1.7 million in grants for their dental stem cell research."

They should have done a kickstarter.

How much did facebook pay for instagram again?

"I'm my own app's #1 user."

That is always a good sign.

There is no point to doing this. It's a waste of cycles. People believe what they want to believe, and will only change their mind when they want to.

Your own point, that the ones that bug you are the "willfully blind" ones... do you expect to be able to change someone's mind when they are very intentional about not doing so?

What has worked well for me in dealing with this is to just recognize that we're all at different stages of life, and maybe someday these "willfully blind" will gain perspective and see the broader truth.

The best thing is not to try to force them to see reason, but to demonstrate reason yourself and recognize that at any given point only some people are ready to see reason.

Others may be ready in the future, but they simply aren't now.

As I recall, google wasn't happy with people using the term as a verb for search.

Also, I assumed the name was a play on the children's game: Duck Duck Goose.

I said this in another reply, but I'll reiterate here. It's not the lack of Objective-C that is the big deal here. Afterall you are still interfacing with cocoa, and are stuck with a lot of the verbosity in doing that.

The real key to this is the REPL and interactivity between coding and the running app. Being able to edit bits of functionality and structure in the running app, and immediately see the results is AWESOME!

For me, the REPL is the key that makes this interesting. I don't really know much ruby, but I would consider picking it up again just for the interactivity you get with a REPL tied to the app running in the simulator.

This is a step in the right direction, a step toward getting immediate and interactive results when you code.

The piece that I find a tiny bit lacking is disconnect between what you futz with in the REPL and what is your source. By that I mean, all the manual tinkering in the REPL isn't saved anywhere, you have to copy and paste.

Emacs rectifies this sort of thing a little with swank and slime. Maybe there will be a mode for RubyMotion.

I was glad to see this popup on hacker news again. I'm a backer now. Personally, I do see this as more of a purchase than an investment.

I'd see it as a donation over an investment as well. To each their own.

However Apple doesn't put users before dollars in the case of the kindle app and the recent dropbox debacle, regarding the whole in app purchase crap.

This is very neat! Have you considered putting the photographs under a license such as one of the Creative Commons licenses?

Money doesn't sit still unless it is truly hard cash and stuffed under a mattress. When companies sit on huge piles of cash, what that really means is they have invested huge piles of cash.

That means they gave that money to someone else, and perhaps they are hiring, or perhaps they in turn invested it again.

Very nice! I doubt my old MacBook pro can tolerate much more in minecraft, sad to say.

So what is it like trying to debug something you've written in clojurescript? Regardless of the backend target language, it seems so disconnected. Is there a REPL for clojurescript?

EDIT: answered my own question about the repl: https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/wiki/The-REPL-and-E...

I have a kindle, iphone 4, and ipad 1. I like reading on all of them, but I mostly read on my phone.

This is mainly because I read in bed at night, and having a light on for the kindle would bothers my wife trying to get to sleep.

I rarely read with the ipad just because of size and weight. And to a lesser extent the non-retina screen.

Some people are really bothered by reading a backlit screen, but it doesn't bother me. I use the black background with white text and turn down the brightness and it works pretty good.

Bruce Schneier's discussion on this particular episode: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/amazing_round...

Teetering must be the marketing term they chose... the phenomenon in play has been known as metastability for as long as I've been a digital designer.

And generally speaking, it's something you want to avoid in your designs, not only because of the unpredictability of the final output (whether it resolves to a 1 or 0), but also because of the uncertainty in how long it will take to resolve.

But it seems perfect for generating randomness. Neat idea. The real trick here is that it's only theoretically unpredictable. In real life, due to "imperfections" in fabrication, the inverters will be biased to resolve one way more frequently. So you might end up with a 60/40 split, for example.

I see they do address this in the article, and have added some "conditioning" to eliminate the bias... I bet it's described in a patent somewhere.

I really wish people would quit writing "whilst."

I think having a massive fan base really just helps to speed up the launch of something, and it doesn't determine success in the slightly longer term.

With a new and great product, you have an exponential growth curve. People find it, think it is great and tell their friends and so on.

The only difference with having a fan base built up already is you get to start further along the curve.

It's still the same curve though. And how great the product is determines the shape of the curve, not the fan base.

In my opinion anyway, for whatever that may be worth.

"Some people may consider: [example A] uglier than: [example B]."

Do people really think that? I ask in all seriousness. I am a hardware developer by profession and don't often dive very deep in software, though I love exploring software space.

I find example A to be very clear and readable. I like to look at things in bite sized chunks.

I also like to create things in bite sized chunks. In hardware design, specifically digital chip design, I will know what my overall problem is to solve (aka the requirements), but I don't always have a clear view of what pieces I need to get there.

In the cases where I'm not sure about the smaller pieces, I'll write the larger overall structure and when I get to a spot where I'll need a block of smaller functionality, I'll just make up a function name on the spot and pretend it's already written and does the right thing.

Then I take a second pass, implementing those smaller blocks, and keep going down. I guess that's a typical top-down approach? I don't know, but it is what I do.

But I also do bottom up. Even without knowing all the steps between, I'll often have some idea that there are some basic building blocks I'm going to need, and I'll implement those.

So I iterate with some steps top-down, others bottom-up, until I meet in the middle.

All that is a long winded way for me to say that your example A fits both approaches for me. I can start with the overall structure and implement "main" first, or know what my basis will need and start with "is_prime" first.

Whereas example B seems like an all at once approach that is both more difficult to write and read. At least, that is how it seems to me.

edit: wording

The current pricing structure is discouraging backers, in my opinion. You tell us that when it's released it will most likely be pay-what-you-want, but if we pay early and support the project we are pushed into $50. I can guarantee you that if you do pay-what-you-want, your average isn't going to be $50.

I don't know what percentage of backers are the kind that do it merely to "support" a project, but I would guess it's not more than 10-15% of all backers for a given project.

The rest want some value for their money beyond feeling good about backing. You state you chose $50 for a license because that is what you think it is worth. I think you'll find out that what you think people will pay you for something and what they are willing to pay differs by a factor of 2-3.

So most of the people that want what you are going to make, even a little, probably don't want to spend more than $20 or $25. The difference between that and $50 is made up from goodwill, but that's really asking a lot of people.

I would recommend making some more tiers between $5 and $50, where everything above $20 gets a license. This way you capture the people that just want the product, and give others the ability to show their goodwill as well.

This isn't the kind of project that really needs swag. Nobody really wants a t-shirt. If you do something like promise to list backers (and their associated tiers) in the "credits" of the app, that would probably be great for most people.

edit: typos, and wording

It warms my heart to see so many get excited about "bare metal" low level implementation.

It's an interesting idea; I look forward to seeing how it turns out in the longer term.

I'm sure this would never be sanctioned but I think it would be great if people could temporarily patch these damn things on their own rather than waiting for the government to get around to it.

Oh yeah? Well as soon as Steve Jobs popped out of his mom, he cried out iPhone!

So there.

I think this is pretty neat in retrospect, but it seems to me it didn't do Atari much good.

Makes me wonder if all these "Vision of the Future" videos that companies put out now are equally as pointless.

I agree with you about the movie studios, but I think Abrash overstated his point a little.

There is certainly value in taking someone else's idea and making it better. "Everything is a remix" and all that.

Perhaps not as much value as the original idea, but it isn't non-existent. Google certainly didn't invent search, but they did do it better (for a while).

"Never rub another man's rhubarb."

Note that it does not appear to have an e-ink display. They called it e-paper which doesn't necessarily mean the same thing.

The display appears to be this one: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-memory-lcd.html or something like it.

It's transflective so you can read it outside, and inside you can use a backlight (which they list on the tech specs). It's very low power, so you can leave it on all the time. Those two things combined are why they call it e-paper.

Personally I think it is a bit confusing on their part, but I understand them wanting to get across that it's always on and visible outside. However, it does get confused with e-ink.

It does not appear to be e-ink, and they do not claim to be e-ink... The kickstarter mentions a backlight, which makes me think it is not e-ink.

I can't say for sure, but the display appears to be this one: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-memory-lcd.html or something like it.

It's an always on display with ultra low power consumption for static displays, so I think that is what they basis of the e-paper name. Seems a little dubious to me, but the watch still is very neat.

Something about what you have written doesn't sit right with me.

If Macmillan decided not to use the iBookStore and sell their ebooks on their own to the customer (the reader of the book), and all the other publishers saw that and thought, "Hey, that's a good idea", that would lead to the destruction of what you have called the publisher-retailer market.

Is it anti-competitive to choose not to participate in a market? It doesn't seem that way to me.

If I produce a product, am I not free to choose (or create) a market to sell this product? And can I not withdraw from that market whenever I see fit?

Thank you for the link to Bransford's blog.

You quoted from his post:

"Publishers then turned around and imposed that agency deal on Amazon, which is the subject of the DOJ investigation. The end result: There really is more competition in the e-book world, but prices are higher than they likely would be if Amazon and others were able to discount as they saw fit."

How can something be anti-competitive if it increased competition? Whether prices went up or down is irrelevant. The whole point of anti-trust law is to make sure that the market has competition. Not to make sure that prices are low.

It seems to me that the real issue is that nobody has figured out the right way to deal with digital goods where supply is effectively unconstrained. We have constructed laws to create artificial scarcity of digital goods. If the government wants to lower the price of digital goods, what they should do is find a way to relax the regulations that artificially constrain the supply.