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epe

487 karma · joined October 7, 2007

http://www.ubermac.net/ http://twitter.com/eentzel [ my public key: https://keybase.io/eentzel; my proof: https://keybase.io/eentzel/sigs/JANKqR2wwf1qpsWnqqZrH2O0g4M_a4_An5e1kwaQ79E ]
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epe··on The Problem of Publication-Pollution Denialism
Sadly this isn't entirely new news:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_fra... http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

epe··on If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC
I find this: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2014/11/25/hermitage-testing-the... a more informative read on essentially the same topic.
epe··on Discovering Two Screens Aren’t Better Than One
Seems like classic Hawthorne effect...
epe··on Upverter Gets Your Circuits Laid
I'd assumed it was a reference to jwz's "how will this software get my users laid":

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit...

epe··on Dotfiles.github.com - A guide to dotfiles on GitHub
I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do:

    git init .
    git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git
    git checkout -t origin master
epe··on The byte order fallacy
Go has a great solution for this in the binary package:

http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/binary/#Read

I've been working on some code to parse the shapefile format, which specifies some fields in big-endian and some in little (I have no idea why), but the binary package has made it really easy to deal with.

epe··on Swagger: A simple, open standard for describing REST APIs with JSON
I'll just leave this here in case anyone still cares...

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...

epe··on How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent
Apparently it's managed to destroy even the minimal level of talent needed to construct a readable PNG.
epe··on Web Technologies Need an Owner
Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.
epe··on How to increase signups by 50% using “popup forms”
I think the snake-oil nature of (much of) SEO stems from the fact that it's difficult or impossible to measure in an accurate, unambiguous way. Since A/B testing includes measurement by its very nature, I suspect it will be more resistant to snake oil.
epe··on Ask HN: How do you determine "hot" or "popular" user-generated items?
The clearest explanation I've ever seen of this method is here:

http://www.evanmiller.org/rank-hotness-with-newtons-law-of-c...

epe··on Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics?
Wouldn't simply excluding any http request whose user agent contains "googlebot" from the displayed count make it dramatically more accurate without needing a switch to JS-based analytics?
epe··on Ask HN: Review my webapp - www.myeventbot.com
This is my November Startup Sprint[0] project, inspired by a StackExchange question[1] from this HN thread[2]. The idea is that the app creates a unique email address for you, and any emails of the form "Lunch with Bill Tuesday at 12:30" that you send to that address will be added to your Google Calendar. I'd love to hear what HN thinks of it. Much thanks to HN user riskish for his design help.

[0] http://hn.21times.org/

[1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/7139/add-an-event...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1861283

epe··on NetFlix: America's Most Underestimated Company
It appears to be down at the moment, but there's a site called Wrong Tomorrow (http://wrongtomorrow.com/) that seems to me like a good start in this direction. Here's the blog post announcing it:

http://www.idlewords.com/2009/04/wrong_tomorrow.htm

epe··on [dead]
Even better review of an earlier book of Friedman's by the same reviewer: http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html
epe··on PIE: Add CSS3 border-radius and multiple backgrounds to IE 6-8
I don't believe it's any Javascript overhead for non-IE browsers. It's just a single line of CSS:

behavior: url(path/to/PIE.htc);

that non-IE browsers will simply ignore.

epe··on Any resources for code challenges or riddles?
http://projecteuler.net/
epe··on The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
There is certainly a case to be made that the U.S. school system was designed to make "drones or conformists":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

Or for a more detailed argument:

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm

epe··on AmEx: "We discourage the use of special characters because..."
Care to share the name of the bank?
epe··on Ask HN: Review my startup: Parking Ticket Reminder/Payer
On http://www.sticket.net/request/ if I type "denver, co" in the first field and hit tab, the field gets blanked out. Safari 4 on OSX 10.5.
epe··on Poll: Are HN users interested in sports analytics?
You might be interested in this article that made it to HN about a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392

I found it fascinating even though my interest in the NBA is lukewarm at best.

epe··on Is Adrian Peterson a Liability? A running back's fumble rate distribution
Good question -- I am. I created a poll here to see if other are as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1101191
epe··on Beautiful Failure
There's no idea that a single class might have two versions and that some bits of the program depend on the old version and some on the new. Why not? Why isn't live, running code versioned and transactioned so that we can release a patch of a few classes into a running server without taking it down? It should be possible for the old code to handle all of the existing requests and then get garbage collected when it has no further dependencies.

Isn't this also something that Smalltalk can do?

epe··on How to say nothing in 500 words
The second half reminds me of one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing advice, Orwell's Politics and the English Language:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

epe··on How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus
> Consider the exorbitant cost of the LHC, which is one of the single greatest achievements of human engineering and physics.

And also two orders of magnitude less expensive than proposed global warming solutions:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-09/defense-lhc http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05...

epe··on Freakonomics: Touring Gangland
http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/horizontal_1.htm
epe··on Why the mainstream media is dying
Can you elaborate? Pool.com appears to some sort of domain name broker at the moment. While it may not be the most reputable business ever, it seems like it's a cut or two above scamming people into subscribing to some $10/month horoscope service under false pretenses.
epe··on Jaml: Haml in Javascript
Why "cls" instead of "className"?
epe··on Vi in JavaScript, in your browser
A lot of them do "just work", and the rest can be made to. See http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.... for the full story, or create a ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file that contains something like:

  {
      "~d" = "deleteWordForward:";
      "~f" = "moveWordForward:";
      "~b" = "moveWordBackward:";
  }
The "~" means "Meta"; all this does is set up M-d, M-f, M-b to work like they do in Emacs.
epe··on Google fights to keep four executives out of prison over video clip
$$$
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