marchdown

What is the point of this exercise?

Did you get trackpad, wireless, sound and suspend-and-resume to work under Linux? I've tried a couple of times with mbp5,5 but couldn't get everything to run smoothly, and in the end the constant annoyance of unable to scroll or battery running dry in two hours flat wasn't worth it.

What's wrong with Code Complete? You might pick a couple of nits, but these things have to be explained somewhere, and Steve McConnell does a good job there.

Well, it's not exactly an unforseen problem. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

That's true, but Andrew Ng's name is enough of a hint to make ML unambiguous for many people.

The whole quagmire is bigger than just flushing Cache. Apple prohibits developers to store stuff that can be regenerated or re-downloaded. So, arguably, you can't just switch to using Documents for downloadable data.

For the vast majority of developers of iOS apps the specifics of how their data is stored and backed up do not matter. If they were not forced by Apple to adopt this set of constraints they would make decisions on a whim, it would lead to less freedom for user, because where there is uniformity, there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage.

Circumventing design decicions is hard. Learning the specifics of particular design is hard practically in the same way. Hacking in an intentionally prohibitive environment is not much different from hacking in an overtly permissive environment — there's a pile of poorly undocumented design decisions which you have to grock before you get anywhere in this system.

So the actual difference it political. I won't argue that preventing little Joe to write the coolest Doom clone ever by requiring all software to be cryptographically signed before running it on a particular game console is somehow more evil than forcing him to spend years learning the ropes and working late hours in QA.

But I believe that imposing certain constrains on people willing to build on your platform is a good thing, because the resulting uniformity gives the platform more leverage. Whethere the constraints are technical or political /in origin/ is irrelevant.

Easy solution is to use a non-default browser, such as iCab.

The dedicated app you've got is somewhat clunky, but it could be made a lot cooler if it was purposed not to "access DDG", but use DDG to "make research easier" or "look up that term". That would entail caching some of the results, maybe formatting a-la Readability, sorting them, bookmarking (with the help of a third-party service, e.g. Pinboard.in).

I have the app on the first home screen on all of my devices, but I don't use it all that often, because it is slow, because there's not much I can do with the results, and because it's totally useless without a solid uplink. Ideally, I would prefer it to keep the results of old searches and allow me to open them in other apps or review them later from another device, cf. nahodki.yandex.ru & google.com/history.

> Unfortunately, there isn't an easy solution for iOS that I know of without jailbreaking.

Is there really an easy solution with jailbreaking?

I cringe to think that they had to have written this in advance.

Know any good explanation and comparison of find-in-project features in emacs?

Free update for those who bought Fusion 3 after the release of Lion! [1]. No word on pricing for old clients as of yet.

[1]: https://twitter.com/#!/VMwareFusion/status/11410952248165990...

I don't get scribd. It's annoying to get a link to their site with various limitations and cludges screwed on top of otherwise perfectly readable document.

Since this is YC company, don't you happen to now if there is some not-trivially-googleable place where I can read about their agenda or fundraising pitch?

Good work!

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.

What is the preferred way to report bugs?

I've just stumbled upon two:

1. when mouse cursor approaches top edge of the screen, preview stretches vertically so that it's still square, but pixels are twice as tall as they are thick. That's on an mbp5,5 running 10.7.1.

2. Cmd+Shift+p uses physical location of p key disregarding programmatically set keyboard layout. I've only noticed because I'm using Colemak.

It was great while it lasted.

ditto with colemak (http://colemak.com)

This is incredibly helpful even if incomplete. Finally somebody took time to write a decent exposure. Now, if only there were something like that about keyboard (geometry, modifiers, layouts, media keys, dead keys, compositing, input methods, capture priorities) and sound.

Can you elaborate on the "openly weakened stuff" part?

I don't know much about security, but I am vaguely aware that there were some efforts by various governments to control, regulate, weaponize and even outlaw crypto, but I don't know where these effort have left us. Are there any crypto systems with acknowledged backdoors? Are there any which are not only widely considered to be secure, but are known to have actually prevented three-letter agencies from getting their way?

The theorem itself is fairly trivial, the article's goal is helping to build intuitions guided by the theorem. That's why it is so long.

Excuse my ignorance, but what has happened over the last few weeks? I didn't have an uplink and it's not like there's a reliable archive of important news stories.

Care to elaborate on your setup? Which VM platform do you use? Doesn't it take up too much resources when idle?

Skype is a huge company, there may have been some politics involves.

I confirm that it's possible to receive video on the original iPad. It's not perfect, but bottleneck here is probably camera or WiFi connection.

Why won't someone expose them?

What I would like to know is how compressible (transcribed) human genome is.

The whole boxes-and-glue model reminds of TeX. Sure, constraint-based layout models are nothing new, but here we've got some specific similarities: line-based processing, optional arguments (H|V) in front, and especially priorities. Assigning priorities to different constraints is what allows TeX to degrade gracefully... before manifesting myriads of hard-to-trace bugs.

I have recently tried (yet again) to make some bootable USB keys on a mac. Turns out you have to convert iso to UDxx:

    $ hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o bootable.img bootable.iso && dd if=bootable.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=1m # Check the disk number with diskutil list!

If it still won't boot, rEFIt (or Boot Camp, naturally) help with BIOS emulation.

> I've always thought there was room for Interactive Fiction in the modern world, it's just a matter of how/when (I hope!).

There is room for interactive fiction. The community of interactive fiction writers didn't grow quite as quick as the community of professional and hobbyist video game developers, but they're among us. You may have heard of Andrew Plotkin and his runaway Kickstarter deal: http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/15/technology/kickstart_plotkin.... If you haven't played his games, do yourself a favor and take a look, there's a javascript interpreter, so you don't even need to download anything: http://eblong.com/zarf/if.html. Dreamhold is the easiest to get into; Shade and Dual Transform are both single-room games, but each provides wonderfully peculiar game mechanics.

If you want go get a perspective on the present state of interactive fiction, http://brasslantern.org/ is a hub of sorts, you can find game files and reviews there. There are annual competitions. If you use iOS, there's a port of Frotz interpreter.

Isn't YubiKey a fail-closed mechanism? Are you okay with trading a little extra protection from voyers with the possibility of losing access to the portion of your personal data that you deemed important enough to encrypt and vital enough still keep around as opposed to wiping it clean?

I don't remember reading anything specific by Wiener, so that might have been from one of his talks or /Cybernetics/ or something, as for Wittgenstein, I'd look in the blue book. If it's important I can try and track down the references later. The point was, inscrutability of Principia is largely a myth. Sure, it is both nigh-unreadable and nobody actually uses the logical language developed therein, but it can be understood, it's simply not useful enough to compensate for verbosity. For a modern-day example, look at Coq. It is painfully verbose even after many iterations of refactoring.