fish2000

That is it totally – I first ran After Dark on my family’s Mac LC II, maybe about 23 years ago.

I didn't recall the toast overlap! That is quite a bit cooler than my personal “flying toasters“ memory. Thanks for posting that clip.

Look: this is very impressive. And not to be a dick about it but – I have to point out that the original “flying toasters“ did not overlap; they were all on the same isometric-looking z-index, as it were. Instead of overlapping, a faster-moving toaster would slide straight down slowly behind a slow-moving toaster or toast ahead of it. Really I am sorry for even pointing this out but half the reason I clicked this link was to see how this specific object-detection aspect of “flying toasters“ might be done in CSS.

As I recall, they specifically implemented it in order to facilitate Outlook’s web interface – their collective regret may be tempered by the satisfaction they got from all those high-margin site license sales to which that feature contributed.

Uber’s go-to-market product incorporated a distributed brute-force attack against one of the Traveling Salesman’s cousin problems – they’re a tech for that reason alone.

Use the same business plan as everybody else these days – give the product away for free and sell the customer data up the river

Whichever it is, the drink named for this error sounds absolutely disgusting.

Close: https://github.com/migurski/Blit

Ha, I’ll just empathetically wince at them instead in passing.

I work in the same building as Boxee’s New York HQ, four floors down – now I know why I’ve been seeing such a marked uptick in the amount of Boxee employees out on the sidewalk chatting excitedly, in like the past two weeks… to my upstairs neighbors, I say congrats!

Crazy – my IMAP client (Apple Mail) has no problem until it tries to send via SMTP… when it chokes.

Also, no working gmail for all my accounts except my @gmail.com address – at least fail consistently, you Googlers. Blech!

One minor point: “Money ain't got no owners – only spenders” … see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbq-WgE6yo

But yeah, great reaction piece, +1 for excellent fulminations.

... also some (but not all) of Robert’s Rules of Order:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g

Ok, great! I've been spinning my wheels trying to create a flexible database architecture for image features – Where do I sign? Do you want to see my work-in-progress? But yeah, great! Do I get a check up front or like a stipend-style disbursement, and how often should we meet up?

An aside: Why did thenextweb's editorial designer choose the image of a guy peering darkly through what looks like a M-mount Micro-4/3rds lens adapter to occupy this article's prime page real-estate?

Assuming that the illustrations' intent was to convey the notion of scrutiny (like with a jewlers' loop or somesuch) – even if the reader buys this premise, is it the Nokia system supposed to be what is doing the peering, or some unseen black-hat?... or is it, like, an admonishment for the reader to remain observant and unblinking in watchful monocular vigilance, not allowing a single encrypted TCP packet to escape our panoptic awareness?

But it doesn't actually look like a loupe, so that's giving thenextweb's art direction a bit too much – maybe this image was meant for a review of that new EVF-equipped Leica M-system, and was used here in an innocent mix-up?

Look, I realize that the zeitgeist of “publication design“ is whatever a Google Image search turns up for an articles' keywords, but this is indicative of the cloud of editorial apathy that hangs over online publications and thwarts the evolution of a distinct visual language for the web.

Normally I try to keep my HN comments within the scope of the postings' explicit subject, but this particularly vexing example is worth the tangental note.

Allard WAS Courier. Saying it didn't cause his departure is like saying that the dealer hitting 21 doesn't cause you to go over: arguably true but besides the point. Allard bet big and lost -- a sad loss in my opinion but a losing bet regardless.

Right, it was a Personal Digital Assistant -- the emphasis was on handwriting recognition; much of the Newton's pop-culture legacy is how ceaseless the lampooning of this features' flaws were at the time (regarding which, I had a MessagePad 130 and it was all more or less true).

But so while it wasn't called a tablet and differed a bit from the near-Platonic contemporary tablet form, it's pretty close to a tablet in terms of UX, use-case, obvious apps...

I need standalone code to read and write PVRTC files, to and from a simple 1-dimensional uint8 image-buffer -- "standalone" in this case means "something tied to neither Objective-C nor an insanely gigantic C++ game-programming framework". I will bake you a pie if it happens!

SEEKING WORK -- Designer/Programmer: New York and all points remote.

I'm a designer (RISD MFA) and a programmer (started on the Apple //e) who has been working on the web since the first dotcom boom. I have a wide range of experience with myriad platforms, across the entire spectrum -- I've hand-tuned SQL queries, compressed the smallest PNGs, and kerned the most unkernable typefaces.

I'm keen on mobile, but I'm looking for engaging work irrespective of context.

Please see http://portfolio.objectsinspaceandtime.com/ for work samples, or http://github.com/fish2000 for samples of actively-maintained Python and JavaScript code.

Thank you for your consideration.

This is awesome. It's been a long time since I was blown away by an HTML hack but this blew me away. Yes!

+1 for Wesley and his personal zoomorphic hellscape.

I don't get the reference -- what was the infamously control-rod-centric post-mortem?

w/r/t horizontal -- I thought what Mr. Spolsky described was actually vertical adoption: where you and your putative organization use Trello throughout, from the execs to the trench programmers to the marketers to some segment of the public. isn't that vertical?

horizontal use, on the other hand, would be something like FogBugz: pitched to one or two organizational segments in the company silo and developed in a way that takes advantage of the knowledge gained by an in-depth understanding of those few segments.

maybe I just have my axes wrong; i'm not pedantic about it but that's what I always thought.

maybe I just have my axes

_would you still judge it only on its exchange rate?_

the idea is that the market will judge it on the features you enumerated (GUI/settling speed/volatility) and the exchange rate will reflect that, n'est ce pas?

Aha I had assumed that it was an error on the part of the quotee -- this was not the case then? Either way, no judgement on my part, I'm not pedantic about such things.

Whoops. I apologize for my characteristically American cultural buffoonery.

Blech. The reason I was enjoying Quora was its lack of explicit gameified geegaws -- versus StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent the whole StackExchange federation). SO has become less and less useful, if you've got a novel and/or slightly abstract or subjective query, because everyone is playing for points, including moderators. It leads to a Pavlovian house style, favoring novice questions with circumlocutious answers, with terse rebukes and heavy-handed moderation for everything else.

I appreciate SO's focus but only inasmuch as it produces something I can use. I still use it frequently as the majority of "duh, what module?" sort of questions have been answered there already.

Quora wadn't about that, though; I found the process of socially-networked collaborative question-answering to be as valuable as the answer... E.g. Answers that were 80% there would frequently contain clues to new relevant questions; if people are trying to "win" I m afraid that horizontal exploration of Quora's topics won't be as fun or accessible.

In fact I think it will be less fun in general, and the likely inference that less fun leads to less Quora use (and therefore less $)doesn't require rocket-science-grade reasoning.

I am sure enough people love this kind of game enough such that they'll stay afloat even if the Quora game is every bit as unpleasant as I might anticipate -- but in my personal expert opinion, that'd be weak.

One of the best things in this article is how the kid, in the quote wherein he describes his 11-year old experience, spells the prefix "pseudo" as "sudo" -- that one little blip of an error totally reinforces the autodidact angle of the piece way better than any explicitly expositive thing (provided the reader is also of the nerdy inclination).

What's nice about this is that the color palette he creates in the course of doing this looks as though it'd work well for a syntax-highlighting theme.

+1 innumerate