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glyphobet

195 karma · joined March 18, 2008

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glyphobet··on Let's Code About Bike Locks
There's an improved algorithm that finds a better lock, one that can do 1,410 words: https://blog.glyphobet.net/essay/2770
glyphobet··on The Pirate Bay is counting down
Yep, that was a joke. Should have had <sarcasm> tags around it.
glyphobet··on The Pirate Bay is counting down
It has to be an image, how else would they ensure that it shows up in Comic Sans in all browsers?
glyphobet··on Ask HN: Idea Sunday
https://lift.do/ does this
glyphobet··on Ask HN: Is it possible to start of as a programmer at almost 40?
Yes. A good team will recognize that your love for programming means you'll improve rapidly, especially in an environment with constructive feedback from tolerant team members. And if you have other professional experience you can bring to bear (knowing how to work in a team, process & planning, customer support) the find a team that needs someone with that experience as well as programming ability.

If you can't find anyone willing to hire you because of your lack of professional experience, find a team you like and offer to work for them for free for three months. If you show promise, and you get along with the team, they'll want to hire you when the three months are up. And if not, you'll get feedback on your skills and learn what kind of teams to look for in the future.

glyphobet··on Ask HN: What's the first thing you brew install
macports. :P
glyphobet··on Probably the worst URL scheme ever
It's Latin-1 encoded and then URL-encoded:

>>> import urllib

>>> print urllib.unquote('%1B%E7%F4%9D').decode('latin-1')

çô

glyphobet··on STL File Viewing
Only a matter of time before someone writes a service hook for automatic 3-D printing of a model after each push....

That or Thingiverse integration.

glyphobet··on USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?
Yes, the illustration is accurate.
glyphobet··on USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?
These guys share an office with me, so I saw the packages. They all contained one tote bag and were nowhere near a kilogram.
glyphobet··on USPS Discrimination Against Atheism?
These guys share an office with us, so I saw the packages. The Atheist tape is standard packing tape, there's no difference in quality of the tape.
glyphobet··on Show HN: My side project – Do I need a visa for...?
This is great. Some thoughts:

* It abbreviates "US" in "US Citizen" but not "United States". I would expect both "United States Citizen" and "US" (country) to work too. It uses "British Citizen" vs. "United Kingdom". Both "United Kingdom Citizen" and "Britain" should work too.

* Using ISO 3166 country codes in the URLs would make them shorter.

glyphobet··on Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz’ Prosecutor Reaches Goal
It is a shame that the petition to pardon Swartz has 1/10th of the signatures that the petition to fire Ortiz has. Let's advocate for a government that forgives (alleged) crimes as strongly as we advocate for a government that punishes people like Ortiz.

http://twitpic.com/bvjjvz https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/posthumously-pardo...

glyphobet··on Ask HN: What set your hair on fire in 2012?
The problems are in the core implementation of Jython, not in using Jython to solve problems. For example: http://bugs.jython.org/issue1634167
glyphobet··on Ask HN: What set your hair on fire in 2012?
Jython. It's an unfinished research project/toy/proof of concept that never should have been used in a production environment under any sort of load. Unfortunately my predecessors made the wrong choice and I inherited that technical debt.
glyphobet··on Poll: What's your favorite static site generator?
Commence shameless plug for my project, "fragments":

http://glyphobet.github.com/fragments/

It could be used as a static site generator, among other things. But it uses version-control style diffs and merges, instead of any structure or language, which has the advantage that there's no generation step, and you can just edit the files as pure HTML.

glyphobet··on Abstraction: The Rule Of Three
This is a bit too simplistic. The rule of three really should apply to similar patterns that emerge naturally in the course of implementation.

His example code consists of two four-line functions that share a common if-else control structure but call totally different functions. That's not copied-and-pasted code, and it's not enough similarity to warrant generalization even after three or four replications. (And it would be better modularized away completely using inheritance or delegation, instead of a state machine.)

When it comes to copying and pasting identical blocks of code that actually do something, even having two copies opens you up to copy-and-paste bugs. Waiting until you have a third copy is too late. Don't ever copy and paste.

glyphobet··on Time Spent Waiting for an Answer in StackOverflow (by language)
Here's the same query with Perl and Python added:

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/83730

Python comes in at 34, halfway between Java and Ruby, and Perl at 45, between Haskell and Scala.

glyphobet··on Lab-grown meat might be only 6 months away
If lab-grown meat qualifies as vegetarian, will that mean that lab-grown human meat won't count as cannibalism? Wacky.
glyphobet··on Did someone just patent the process of patent trolling? USPTO: 0080270152
Anyone have a working URL?
glyphobet··on Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph
The CleverCSS Python module has a very similar set of features: http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/
glyphobet··on Perl: Love it, or hate it, but don't ignore it
"Supposedly Perl Web searches are on the rise"

Fact check:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl&ctab=0&geo=all&#...

Perl has been losing ground, while Python and PHP gain ground, for almost ten years:

http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...

glyphobet··on [dead]
Total Eclipse of the Chart!
glyphobet··on Ignore your users’ needs. Call them stupid instead.
In your example you are deciding between delivering two different valuable improvements, which is fine. Bos' is deciding to do nothing just because the one solution presented to him might be hard. That's inexcusable.
glyphobet··on Ride the Snake: reddit keynote at PyCon 09
If anybody wants a CSS preprocessor like the C55 preprocessor mentioned in this video, check out http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/

It's pretty good.

glyphobet··on The OSX Focus-Follows-Mouse Debate
There's a third flavor of FFM: http://glyphobet.net/blog/essay/234
glyphobet··on GiveYC: One month of free advertising space
Spydentify: http://spydentify.com/ People love looking a pictures and trying to figure out what’s in them.

And it's not photo hosting (in fact, it's specifically configured to disallow photo hosting).

glyphobet··on Ruby's not ready
Ah... You're right. I thought value in xrange(10000) just checked the endpoints, but it appears to iterate. Someone should write a PEP. :)
glyphobet··on Ruby's not ready
Ok, that's fair enough. Who knows how well the conversion program will work. Still, for Python 3, there's a clear plan... and there's no clear plan for Ruby 2 (yet).
glyphobet··on Ruby's not ready
> Won't python dev's have the same problem with Python 3000?

Read that section. It outlines why Python won't have the same problem.