imakesnowflakes

I am not sure I agree. Do you know what I do when I have trouble reading the text in a page. I increase font size. It is only a flick of your finger (ctrl+mouse wheel). So the point is if you have a big enough font size, white on black can be just fine.

Also, should we assume that the people have their vision uncorrected?

I think that black on white is just a fad, perpetuated by following conventions. Like glossy screens.

Fantastic!

>That's a pretty narrow interpretation of "does not have a processor". Keyboards and mice have processors. HDMI adapters have processors. Wireless transmitters and receivers have processors.

Damn. Is it really possible that you cannot infer what I meant by the "processor" from the context?

>Linking all those processors together requires - you guessed it, a processor.

Wrong. There is no "linking" required at the device. Each of these can communicate independently..

And the solution involving pi is adds unnecessary overheads and limitation, which will greatly degrade the usability of this device.

>Additionally, light on dark is horrible for readability.

I have a hard time understanding this. Staring at a bright background hurt my eyes after a while. White text on a black background feels much more comfortable to read. What am I missing?

It does not use a network. It uses direct RF link. Like wireless keyboards and mouses do. Imagine getting a wireless keyboard and mouse and a wireless hdmi adapter. You plug the transmitters of these wireless keyboard and mouse to your desktops usb. You attach the transmitter of wirless hdmi adapter to the hdmi port of your desktop.

Now you can take the display, keyboard and mouse to anywhere the range of the radios allows and work from there. Pack the items at the receiving end into a compact/cheap package and I think you ll have a great product.

>My guess is that this would cost at least 80% of a similar quality laptop that also includes "computer parts" and works as an actual computer.

80%? Without cpu, harddisk, memory, motherboard and without having to cramming all of this into a small space, without heat and power management circulatory to provide and manage power for all of these things? So in a laptop, you think these amount to only 20% of the cost?

> enough processing power to decode and display the video stream arriving over radio

How much processing power did your 20 year old television set have?

No. Nothing like them at all. Please read more carefully. What I suggest does not have a processor. It just relays input/output.

Is python3 meta programming features supported?

Yes. That is what I am talking about. It seems like there are already cheap devices that can do wireless HDMI streaming [1].

[1] http://www.amazon.in/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps...

If you already love programming then go learn electronics and hardware design.

> it's going to be dreadfully slow as compared to doing it locally.

We don't use networking. We use direct RF link.

>Plus, the laptop would lose 90% of its mobility advantage, as it would always have to be in the (network-) vicinity of a desktop.

This is not a replacement for laptop. But an extension of a desktop. Instead of having to sit directly infront of it, you can work from anywhere in the same building.

In the same way wireless keyboards and mouses work. You use a receiver/transmitter pair. It does not require any computational power. A receiver can be tuned to a particular transmitter. We might have to encrypt the display transmission. But it am sure it can be done using dedicated hardware.

Not sure. VNC is a program that runs on a computer. But we don't need a computer to simply relay input/output to a desktop. What I am suggesting is such a setup. We already have cheap wireless keyboards and mouse. We just need a lcd with a reciever/transmitter with sufficient bandwidth and bundle them together in a compact package, that act as a dumb terminal of sorts.

Yes. I know about those. I am a software developer.

Buying an ultrabook/laptop just for continence seem a bit overkill to me. Those are not exactly cheap. But that is not the point. The point is how much untapped potential is there in existing systems. I think we should be trying to extract as much value from the existing set up, before buying more redundant stuff. We already have wireless keyboards and mouse. We just need an Lcd with bundled transmitter/reciever with enough bandwidth. Making It is quite trivial compared to the convenience it will provide. It might even be able to support multiple users. Put one desktop in your basement, and the whole family can use these dumb wireless terminals.

A machine that detects the toxins/harmful chemicals in food materials....

Holy shit! You just read my mind!

> I would be missing out on would be keeping up to date..

Know what? May be it does not matter. May be it is a "learned necessity". For example, you don't need to have facebook to keep up to date with all the family members. You just need to call your mom back home and have a chat with her once in a while. Wouldn't you think that would be much healthy way to do this that steals very little of your time and attention?

It takes text/articles in markdown format [1] and converts it to html with some basic html tags, like headings, anchors and lists. Where these should occur can be declared using markdown syntax.

This html with simple html tags is injected into a bigger/complex html (which often contains the main styling/design) to form the final page of the site.

[1]https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Here is a simple html 5 app that I made, that lets you add watchers for HN and reddit threads as part of its functionality.

http://z-petal.com/ceasium/#/hackerNews

It runs in your browser itself, and stores all the data in browsers local storage.

This is a simple html5 angular.js app for freelance programmers. It can do basic client/project management, payment management with currency conversion, time tracking, has notifiers for reddit and hackernews that can watch for new comments and posts appearing in subreddits or a hacker news thread or even watch multiple message inboxes for reddit, provision for adding encrypted notes to projects. All the data is stored in browsers localstorage.

Wow. Great timing. This will pair nicely with an Html5 app I just posted

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506149

Also, I always used to wonder why something simple like this already exists. Well done!

Nice.

I used to watch a lot of movies and in my experience, when a subtitle is out of sync, it is very hard to manually sync it, because of different frame rates and missing sections. So even if you sync it at one point, it will quickly gets out of sync soon. What your tool does can be easily done in vlc player by j/h keys to tweak subtitle delays while playing the movie. But even that does not work. and it will get out of sync with in 5-10 minutes.

What I find the most frustrating is that even after downloading, unzipping and applying 4 or 5 subtitles, you might not find a perfect one. So what I did was to write a tool ([1], [2]) that downloads all the available subtitles for a movie and automatically selects a candidate subtitle from all of them and displays the time at which it appears in each of the downloaded subtitles. You can select the perfect subtitle by finding the time the candidate dialogue appear in the movie and matching it with the list printed out by the tool.

If a dialogue that appears, say 10 or 20 minutes into the movie, is already in perfect sync with a subtitle file, chances are that the rest of the dialogues will be in sync too. And it has worked greatly so far..

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hastily

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Titley

>The other is developing a complex query and running it again and again, while watching the result...

I created a small Python/Flask application with integrated Ace editor that run in tabs for this exact use case..

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pygmie

It has been a HUGE time saver for me. It also has a query history that is saved to browsers local storage. So no more lost queries due to a system/server crash.

>you can't select and execute SQL embedded in other source code files..

How is it possible anyway? Queries in source files almost always cannot be executed as such, because of placeholders/parameters. Or what am I missing?

Can I now refer to the same temporary table multiple times in a query?

1. Even pretty cheap desktops can be packed loads of memory, and can run a lot of virtual machines.

2. You can easily swap out/upgrade components.

3. If you are running the system nearly 24 hours a day, a desktop might cope much better than a mid range lap top (regarding life of the components). So use the laptop only while you are traveling or for a demo. When you are home, use the cheap but powerful desktop with loads of memory and easily replaceable components.

Cons are that Desktops consumes a lot more power and generate a lot of heat. and that might be good or bad depending on your climate.

I have thought about this. How do people who are at the heads of large corporations okays destruction and pollution of environment. Is it because they don't care about the world their kids will inhabit? Or they just don't understand the seriousness and view it that way.

If it is the former (which I really doubt), then longer lives can help. Or else, it will be just the same.

A more realistic answer might be publically funded companies are answerable to the masses (people who buy shares), and the masses only care about the quarterly reports. And again, longer lives will not help much here. Because you buy a share for you to make a profit out of it. Even if the public is fully aware of the environmental issues, I am not sure people will take that into consideration while buying shares.

Again, longer lives won't help us there.

> natural order of things is not Good, it's just the default.

Ok. But human beings are horribly short sighted. Something that may appear beneficial in the short term and on a small scale. but may turn out to be horrible in the long term and on a larger scale.

We have eliminated some diseases. But we have also created new, much horrible and powerful ones. We have discovered antibiotics, but that have also created disease causing agents that are resistant to them.

When ever we change something fundamental, that has resulted in the creation of much bigger evil. I think this is because we don't have capability to see the whole picture. We look at a small portion of it and think. "hey, we can make it better". But ends up messing up the bigger picture making it grotesque. So my point is, this is not an easy decision that should be made so lightly.

>because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things"

It is. That you don't like it doesn't make a difference.

>A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress.

I don't think so. That is just wishful thinking. Our current society cannot even produce leaders who are remotely capable of solving current problems. And a group of immortals, once in power, cannot be trusted to not try to remain in office indefinitely using the powers they already have. They can subtly influence society and people with their power so that they can continue in power without actually rigging the elections..