ezy

Too bad Newsblur is pretty badly designed. I mean, there's a lot of bling, but it's completely confusing and sometimes ugly. Magic icons everywhere, wierd fonts -- two different dropdowns on each entry for god's sake. It looks like it was designed by someone who used their IDE as a template for the UI.

As an example of far too clever UI: Just try and change your password -- it's bizarre that it has no confirmation at all (I have no idea what my password is now). Not something I want to rely on, or deal with, or pay for.

Not that this isn't unexpected... web devs have always been very attached to their bling. That Feedly requires a plugin is... very odd. I don't expect it to last (either the plugin or feedly itself.. choose one), but maybe people are more credulous than I give them credit for.

Newsblur needs to simplify, simplify, simplify... but I suspect it's too late for that.

I'm switching to an rss to email digest script (modified rss2email). It's probably less bling than I want, but at least that minimizes the unnecessary crap, and works on mobile. It also has the benefit of limiting my tendency to refresh the feed lists every hour looking for procrastination sources. :-)

I find it amusing that people will leap to defend the new shiny geek toy -- even if practically no one here can afford it. IMO, Telsa is sinking under it's own PR weight, and Elon knows it. The logs don't contradict the reporting in any significant way. The gist is that, even for a non-"sports" car, the Tesla is... lackluster compared to the non-electric alternatives.

Now, whether the reporter is too dumb to own a non-hybrid electric car may be an issue, but most drivers don't know how a transmission works, or even how to change the oil -- so I don't think a failure to understand charge cycles & regenerative braking is all that damning.

Switzerland has no requirement that political donations be reported, unlike the us. US states have referendums all the time.

I don't want to argue for lobbying, which can get pretty sickening at times, but I suspect other major democracies just aren't as blatant. How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?

This very much depends on what the threads are doing. Like some others have mentioned, threads are sometimes an abstraction of context and sometimes a CPU. THere is no pat answer -- unless you're doing only one kind of thing -- if you're all IO bound or all CPU bound, the answer is obvious, otherwise...

I worked on a platform that could have 200+ threads running through it, but in areas of the code where it mattered, only NCPU+epsilon threads were allowed to do intense CPU-bound work. Doing this, as you might expect, improves performance substantially when the system is loaded, while at the same time allowing one to use threads as an abstraction of context in the non-CPU bound areas of the code.

What?

I fail to see what is "non-average" about wanting to restore a machine from a Time Machine backup after a hard drive failure. Time machine is the only backup solution an average user will ever use, and is supposed to be a backup solution, not a placebo. As indicated in the article, it doesn't actually work for the the most (or second most) common case.

Rob Pike is most decidedly average in this case, he is most interested in working on his projects, not understanding the trivialities of maintaining the Apple Macintosh. Just like most people who have work to do that doesn't really revolve around shuffling boot disks around.

The "experts" (that, those who read macrumors regularly), will, of course, have not trusted time machine and will have a carbon copy cloner backup they can clone onto the new drive. They're ok. Meanwhile, the "average" folk who trust that an Apple provided backup solution... I dunno, backs things up... will be screwed.

Is windows worse? Maybe, but you know what -- as shitty as their incremental backup to a series of .zip files is -- at least it takes a complete image of the boot drive by default as part of the backup.

Witless uninstall #1 (perfect for those crappy tarfiles that exact everything into the current directory)

    tar -tf tarfile.tar | xargs rm

Witless uninstall #2. Find a file that you changed just before "make install" into the wrong spot (usually config.log is a good candidate).

    find /bogus/installdir -newer config.log  | xargs rm

Yes, this is totally unsafe. But it's an abuse... so, there you go

Most bloggers and commenters would be improved by taking the last item to heart:

  10. If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

I prefer the builtin vim facilities. I use two features already built into vim. (1) "*" and "**" (ugh stars are italics markers in this editor, how do you escape them?) works in tab completion for both :ts & :e and (2) the --file-tags argument to exhuberant ctags. Oh and one more, :ts supports regexes.

    :ts *Something*xml<tab> (or /Something.*xml<tab>)  

will do what you expect. As will

    :e **/somewhere/*myfile*.

That said, I'm going to check ctrlp out to see if I'm missing something good. :-)

I don't think this type of argument carries much weight. Just because one can get used to something, doesn't really make it a clear choice.

All of these environments are good choices for many reasons. However, they aren't without major flaws.

Smalltalk environments do tend to be a bear when following the code around window after window, emacs keychords are not very human friendly or composable and can give you RSI, and lisp parentheses are mainly for the convenience of the language parser, not for the programmer (contrary to the famous quote).

The live evaluation is nice, but seems a little limited. If I have:

  (defn my-add [a b]
    (+ a b))
  (my-add 3 45)
  (my-add 1 2)

Only the "1 2" version is followed into "my-add". Is there anyway to force it to look at "3 45" other than commenting out "1 2"?

I greatly prefer the idea of showing the value propagation explicitly as you click on things. For example, using lines and arrows to show that this came from there and that came from here.

Does this really make that much difference? I kind of view the hjkl vs arrow keys like I view the standard debate about motion commands vs. the mouse.

Lots of people say they are faster using motion commands, and I know I use search motions 85% of the time. But if I want to go somewhere that's visible on the screen, the mouse is almost always quicker. And I've used vi and derivatives for 20+ years now (although obviously they initially didn't have mouse support :-)).

Similar for hjkl, especially if you use single cell motion mixed with whole page motion (Fn-arrow on a macbook), I just don't see hjkl + ^D^U being quicker. It seems more like something that might be useful every once in a while, but not terribly useful 100% or even 50% of the time.

EDIT: And the book says this:

"type the number of characters or lines you want the cursor to move, followed by h, j, k, or l. This technique cannot be used with the arrow keys: left, right, up, and down."

Which is not correct.

Booting into windows (or linux). The Mac version is... incomplete.

This was my opinion only, based on my experiences and experiences of people I know. You can tell this by the way I use "enlightenment" in a very loose way when it is obviously impossible (as far as I know) to measure (I don't believe the state even exists, other than as a form of self deception or mental illness, to put a not so fine point on it).

Also by the fact that I am a random blowhard on the internet. :-)

You may disagree about my recommendation to stay away. Fine. However, do not pull this rhetorical trick on me. That is, require me to have a set of numbers to even state my opinion on a matter that, frankly, has no numbers, and could be argued either way by those so invested. Say what you mean... would you rather I use "seems to me to be" rather than "is"?

You see, as you may have noticed, there isn't a whole lot of information on the benefits of LSD. Just a lot of anecdotes and poorly designed research experiments. There are very well documented cases of the dangers. Whether that's due to bad genetics, bad dosing or impure samples, I don't know, but again, I think it's rather a dumb thing to risk your brain for.

Eh.

It deserves more study -- the idea of using much more reasonable doses as a form of anti-depressant is interesting.

However, it's probably not magic, just in the same way MJ oil is probably not a cure for cancer. They, of course, don't list the many other discoveries made by scientists not on LSD. The "studies" really aren't terribly disciplined... I grant you because of its illegal status, but...

Given my personal experience with LSD devotees, I'm extremely skeptical of the benefits. The general trend is more towards extreme narcissism than enlightenment, and I would advise people to stay away from the stuff.

Oh look, AndroidTV.

Prediction: Sidelined by the AppleTV in 6 months.

EDIT: More detail: What do you think will happen when Apple comes out with an SDK for AppleTV, folks? I suppose the only thing missing is the controller. :-)

This person needs to try outlook. You see, there's a little flag you can click on next to the email with a task priority. And a todo bar/list which shows them in priority order. Not only has it existed before, but it really doesn't help that much. You still need to apply yourself to use it correctly. This doesn't change that.

Sigh... but then I knew I was in for wheel re-invention as soon as I saw the "modern creative workflow" sales bullshit. Perhaps there's something to be gained by making it prettier than outlook, I dunno. I feel like Alan Kay -- read about your history folks. If you're going to "re-invent email" you might want to, I don't know -- try out many different existing email clients?

Sorry, you're right, it's 4" I was thinking of. At any rate, the point was that the phone display is going to increase in size.

Given that the iphone is quite portable and a 4.5" model is all but assured, I'm not sure I see the point of having a 7" tablet. The issue with the 10" is that it's not quite as portable as some people would like -- but the 7" seems to fragment the product line a little too much given that you already have the ipod touch.

On the other hand, the one way I could see this working is if they reshuffle categories such that the lower resolution iPads and the iPod touch fade away to be replaced by the 7" wifi model. That would make some sense.

EDIT: Ooops, 4", not 4.5"

As you might guess, they are not claiming this.

They basically are using a new (in the context of speech rec) technique that seems to improve accuracy by 16% relative on their test data (and using their code :-)). It's a really great result, but it doesn't change the basic nature of a state of the art speech recognizer at all -- you still need to train and adapt it -- and it still needs lots and lots of data.

This approach still uses HMMs, it's just that the observation probabilities are now coming from a DNN (neural network) instead of a GMM (gaussian mixture model). "Senones" are not new, HTK can use various context dependent phoneme models, and the HMM states (typically 3) within each context dependent phoneme essentially boil down to what they call a "senone" here. Interestingly, they use GMM's to bootstrap the DNN training -- which I suppose you could avoid once you have a reasonable DNN laying around.

The main difference here is hooking DNN output to an HMM decoder, replacing GMMs, and possibly even more important the training process they use to get the DNN fairly efficiently. That's the biggest thing -- GMMs, at least the last time I've looked, can be trained and adapted much quicker than a DNN.

I think he's referring to the regulatory control Valve exerts over the virtual world.

This. I think it's also worth noting that for a pro laptop, price is not a major issue, if you're trying to treat your laptop like a BYOB, you're doing it wrong. So:

(a) The RAM capacity is limited by the chipset anyway, and on "pro" machines, most people max out the RAM when they purchase or directly after. It's just that now you can't cheat and buy the RAM elsewhere to avoid an apple price premium.

(b) The SSD is replaceable, it's just not a standard connector. Obviously, 3rd party replacements will show up with a slightly higher cost than a bog standard SATA drive. I view this like the replacement of FW with tbolt, who cares?

(c) (Stock) RAM seldom goes bad before other components, and if it does, you treat it like the other components. They can unplug the SSD from your MBP and plug it into an identical one, swap complete. So we're not talking weeks for a replacement here -- just go to an Apple store. If you're not near an Apple store, you're probably not near a vendor of replacement RAM or SSD drives either.

One issue though: You had better keep that SSD backed up! 'cause if the machine goes south, you have no way of accessing your data unless someone comes out with a apple propretary card egd to sata adapter.

This seems to be influenced by tumblr, which also uses j/k. Tumblr is, of course, influenced penultimately by vi, which is ultimately influenced by ANSI control codes LF and VT :-)

I think the robo-car is the self cleaning kitchen of the 2010's. When your ML algorithm makes an error, it won't just be a drop in some abstract accuracy measurement -- someone will die. This is a hell of a lot of liability to take on. Google's self-driving car is a promo stunt. You would need a lot of infrastructure for it to be safe -- and with that infrastructure will come loss of the "freedom" you describe -- e.g. It'll be a kind of train.

Not like you have that freedom now. Yeah, maybe in some rural area compared to hoofing it for 30 miles :-), but we're not talking about that -- you'll still use cars there. It's not true in suburbia. That's why we have malls and big box stores with huge parking lots built next to highways. You are unnaturally constrained to the highways and roads that have been built -- the freedom is illusory.

Speed. Well, you're attempting to compare Caltrain to the alternatives. In no way does Caltrain compare to Metro north or NJTransit -- the reason people choose to drive is not because cars are intrinsically faster in those areas, but because the mass transit in the bay area sucks. It's like saying in 1997 that "people have chosen rationally" not to use a phone as a web browser. Yes, they have, very rationally in fact, but it says nothing about the intrinsic ability of a phone-like device to be a web browser.

Efficiency is a red herring. Even the post you linked to is inconclusive in that regard. If you step out of the box and consider that the same improvements to cars could be made to buses or trains, then apply the economy of scale a massive investment in transit would mean -- it comes out a little differently. In the same post, there is a comparison to transit in other countries -- the comparison gets a little weak at that point.

Even as I share your distaste for (parts of) the libertarian ethos, I think you're largly blind to your own ideological faults. To wit, poor people are not stupid, and using "man-kind" in a sentence is not an attack on woman-kind.

I don't buy this idea that we have to educate the poor about their options like they are primitive tribes (note the code appearing here). "They" are perfectly intelligent and aware of their options in aggregate... just give them more options and more of a safety net. Or better yet, ask them what they need...

Likewise, I doubly don't buy the idea that every use of a word containing "man" is a form of patriarchal oppression. The same as I dont view sports analogies as oppressing those who dont play, dont watch and dont like sports.

Ok, I'll be "that guy". Why not just use tmux or screen? Is character delay a real issue in 2012? Seems like it's more of a proof of concept of their syncing algorithm rather than something super useful.

EDIT: Fair enough, I stand corrected. :-)

One thing that seems to be missed here is that text formats tend to be self documenting. That is, if I'm handed a blob of text vs a blob of binary, I am quite a bit more likely to be able to hack the text than the binary. This is usually couched in terms of being able to process the text form using standard tools, but it goes way, way beyond that. It matters most in the situation outlined above -- when third parties need to get at the format without having to rely on some provided tool.

Most protocols and file formats are not documented sufficiently. Encoding data in binary (unnecessarily) is unfriendly because there is a huge difference between "ACK" and 0x06 when you're a third party looking at the data with no reference. Sure, you can probably figure it out given enough time, trail and error. Or perhaps beg the developer for specs, but it's not particularly efficient. Most developers don't have time or the inclination to publish a public spec for all binary formats used in their product.

You can make illegible text formats, of course, but I'd argue that then you're simply making a binary format that's confined to the range of 7-bit ASCII. Similarly, when the goal is to obfuscate (e.g. algorithm IP), binary formats work well to dissuade casual investigations.

I remember OS/9 fondly. It was my first introduction to a "real" operating system (e.g. not just BASIC and a program loader). Oh, and preemptive multitasking! Whoa... :-)

Not yet.

My wife is not an advanced user of computers by any stretch of the imagination, but I would never buy an iPad for her.

She has a DSLR and 60k photos in iPhoto (~320G). iPads will eventually store this much in 3 years, but you will want it backed up somewhere (and in 3 years the "cloud" still won't be doing this much (personal) data at a reasonable personal cost compared to a physical device). And she will not be tolerant of doing edits or looking at photos on a 10" screen.

Not to mention that once you increase the screen size, portability goes out the window -- you will have a monitor. And guess what? Touch input doesn't really work ergonomically on a 24" monitor.

There are solutions, Airplay will obviously be involved, as will BT input devices. But it's not quite ready for prime-time yet.