alainbryden

There's a question dedicated to this on Skeptics.SE:

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9578/do-police-o....

In some areas, this has been confirmed.

No photographing the server room?

http://goo.gl/maps/1n7jW

I can confirm this. I wiped all tiles and stepped ahead a hundred frames, but nothing new appeared. As soon as I hit 'play' though, within a dozen or so frames a few random tiles appeared in the vicinity and the area was soon teeming with life again.

I figured caching the results of common patterns appearing in blocks of 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, etc. pixels which are surrounded by all 'off' pixels, you can easily skip many repetitive calculations.

  ----    ----
  -oo- =\ -oo-
  -oo- =/ -oo-
  ----    ----

  -----    -----    -----
  --o--    -----    --o--
  --o-- =\ -ooo- =\ --o--
  --o-- =/ ----- =/ --o--
  -----    -----    -----

  ------    ------    ------
  -oo---    -oo---    -oo---
  -oo--- =\ -o---- =\ -oo---
  ---oo- =/ ----o- =/ ---oo-
  ---oo-    ---oo-    ---oo-
  ------    ------    ------

Since repeating patterns tend to turn up a lot on their own in CGoL they would end up cached, and large blocks of n cells could be computed in 1 move rather than requiring o(8n) time. That seems to be how Hashlife works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

There's a bunch more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google%27s_hoaxes_and_e...

Like "zerg rush", "kerning" and "keming", searching for bacon numbers, etc...

Looks like "ascii art" and "comic sans" are retired :(

It always appears like that because he's written it so that when the "Google" cells are active, they appear darker than normal active cells. Whether these cells get activated or not follow the normal rules of Conway's game of live. So yeah, it's organic, but with a little trickery, the "Google" stands out as the pixels in the area blink on and off.

You can confirm this by pausing the simulation and clicking on all the cells in the region to switch them to the 'active' state: http://imageshack.us/a/img138/2751/71405409.png

I've never done any mobile application development but I was considering building something for my nexus. This will likely come in handy.

Yeah that looks great.

The apparent cubic spline used to join data points on http://embed.ly/stats looks a little ridiculous, especially when the popularity of something takes off from 0 and your spline shows it first dipping to some negative number.

Maybe if you try using a quadratic spline? Mathematically it is almost just as trivial, so your performance should be unaffected, and in my experience it gets rid those embarrassing artifacts left by using cubic splines to join points representing exponential data.

For anyone having trouble seeing these, the trick is to sit fairly far back from your monitor, and cross your eyes enough that you see 4 duplicate images (each of the two images doubled up). You then lessen the amount your eyes are crossed (or bring yourself nearer to the screen) until the 2 inner images of the 4 are perfectly overlapped, such that you now see 3 duplicate images. If you can then bring your eyes to focus on the middle image, it will appear in 3D.

The exact image I linked to is of particular interest. Here you can see something in 3D that you couldn't possibly tell just looking at the originals - that you're actually looking off a cliff edge. The landscape seen past the horizon of the cliff edge is clearly much farther off when viewing the combined image.

Here's a copy in case the original site gets overloaded: http://imageshack.us/a/img829/3783/t6cftimgur.jpg

So while it might survive the heat death of the universe, there could be no way to measure it.

For Canadians: http://www.ctv.ca/ColbertReport/video.aspx?vp=123797&pub...

Go get a coffee for 5 minutes while all the commercials play out.

Am I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to ask for a 15% of annual salary recruitment fee? Why would any reasonable company agree to pay a website $15,000 just because they indexed their new 100k/year hiree's résume?. I think they're way over-valuing the service they provide. A smart recruiter who found someone they really wanted on Developer Auction would simply look them up elsewhere and make them an offer outside of the site.

The site is creative, sophisticated, well built, and could easily charge some sort of monthly service fee akin to a dating site, but the notion that companies would willingly toss 15% of a highly paid employee's salary out of pure laziness boggles me.

Yeah, just look at all the trouble they want you to go through on lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5887230/how-to-block-annoying-tech-rum.... Someone should definitely make something simpler. It could even look at trending topics on various sites that advertise trends to give you a quick list of things to spoilerfy.

Are you familiar with Timeshare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeshare)? It usually refers to property ownership, but can apply to pretty much anything. Most people consider the middlemen in timeshare situations to be scammers, so it would be tough to market.

On the same vein, someone could write software allowing individuals or organizations to set up a remote print-and-pickup service.

For example, every campus would hugely benefit from a service where students could just email a document to a specific address (smith.hall.printer@mycollege.com), have 5 cents a page automatically charged to their account, and pick up their assignment on their way to class to hand it in.

Students used to running around residence looking for someone with a printer, or sprinting to the library with a USB stick would be all over the service. Someone just needs to write a simple application that connects the dots and market it to campuses.

----

Reply From: smith.hall.printer@mycollege.com

Your document has been printed and 25 cents charged to your account.

Large chains like FedEx could implement this really efficiently since they already have offices all over the world. They can just print off at the nearest location to the target and minimize their expense. Getting a printed document hand delivered in an envelope can have a lot more impact over simply sending an email or fax.

Very crisp UI. I look forward to the ability to queue up songs and build playlists on the fly. If we sign in to our YouTube account, maybe you could access our own playlists and let us save new ones back. Another great idea would be allowing us to set a crossfade amount and start the next video as the previous one is finishing.

Burst out laughing when I clicked "Angry dev". Nice.

I've never received that prompt. If you read further down in that misleading article you linked to, you would see that they don't show the prompt to all their users:

> we're displaying this prompt when a user who has not enabled secure browsing (through the account settings option) manually changes their browser's address bar to https://, which does not fully protect their Facebook traffic.

I just had to go hunting through privacy and security settings for 5 minutes to figure out how to enable HTTPS.

So no, I would guess fewer than 0.1% of Facebook users have this enabled.

I agree. The OP is full of errors and typos.

I wonder if recent cries for the government to reform patent law is pressuring patent trolls to hurry up and try to cash out on increasingly obvious claims. All shell companies have to start doing it, because their 'colleagues' are ruining the patent troll market with their own ridiculous claims and essentially running each other into the ground.

Funny enough, the same two colours dominating movie posters lately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4279845. Teal and orange: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.ca/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hol...

> Leaky add-ons usually cause zombie compartments by holding references to DOM structures within a web page even after the page has been closed or navigated away from. This prevents Firefox from garbage-collecting the page’s compartment.

If an add-on relies on persistent references to closed pages by design (such as a form data history plugin), is there a way to adapt it to this new feature to not let Firefox sever it's references under the assumption that it's a memory leak?

I can confirm this. My scroll wheel is very easy to move one increment at a time, and repeatedly moving down one then up one increment results in text moving upwards about 4 lines per cycle. When testing on this site: http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/onmousewheel.shtml I can confirm that scrolling up and down provide a delta of 1200 and -1200 respectively, the way it's being handled on your app must not be even.

I like that you starting numbering at 0 - very apropos.

Great idea, and well presented. For those new-year's resolution type of folk, being in the habit of keeping track of your daily accomplishments goes a long way towards helping you fulfill your personal goals.

If you have success with this, I'm sure people would be excited to see updates that let one track units other than time and 'ones', such as calories and distance travelled.

A strange game... The only winning move is not to play.