mekazu

I find if I'm struggling to come up with a word it's because I've lost the conversational flow of the sentence I'm writing, or of the point I'm trying to make. If I try to describe it out loud to an imaginary or, ideally, a real person, I'm usually then able to convey what I was trying to say, though usually by restructuring the form of the argument, rather than by conveniently finding the right word.

Often complex thoughts come to me not as fully constructed sentences. I might forget how I intended to finish a sentence by the time I'm three words in, lost in a forest of opportunities for converting the faint cognitive signal to an established element of prose.

I find I am better able to articulate a problem after I've explained it to a number of people on different occasions. The first person I explain it to won't have the foggiest what I'm talking about, probably because I'm constantly grasping for words, but to the fifth person the problem will seem trivial.

If your log level is at INFO it doesn't matter if you log errors, warnings or fatal: They'll be printed the same way as info, and they give you somewhere to start grepping.

You shouldn't always trust even 'trusted' scripts due to the potential for various types of man in the middle attacks. True, though, that with all things being equal some scripts are more trustworthy than others, but if you're on a compromised network then you can't trust any.

I'd usually use 'perl -n -e' if I needed something like this. Not suggesting that perl is a better alternative but it's a reason why I'd never need to use that tool.

Here's the corresponding perl program using the same data and output as on the transformy home page:

  pbpaste | perl -p -e 's/(\d+), (\w+) (\w+), (\w+), (\w+)/@{[uc($3)]}, jersey number $1/'

To use that (pbpaste I think is a mac only feature) first copy / paste that into your terminal, then copy the list, then hit enter in the terminal.

I don't know of anyone who drinks because they think it's healthy.

I know a loss adjuster who has many years experience with insurance claims who would have exactly the expertise needed to find the right people in all the areas you describe. Largely his skills are used to benefit the insurance company (that he works for) but they could just as easily apply in the customer's favor. I'd recommend targeting prospective employees with that kind of experience.

Considering that the definition of the word "believe" is tied to concepts such as acceptance and opinion the answer is relative to number of non-critical thinkers out there.

Ask instead "how many US citizens KNOW the earth is less than 10,000 years old?" and the answer will be a smaller number.

May 14, 2012? Am I in the future now?

The qwerty keyboard was designed to prevent the jamming of metallic parts of a typewriter. Surely it's time to put this metaphor behind us? People have migrated easily from typewriters to computer keyboards, and from pianos to synthesizers (depending on the synthesizer) but neither metaphor works effectively for a touch screen. A touch screen is unable to provide the necessary physical feedback to let the instrument 'flow'. Even using the finger as a cursor doesn't work anywhere near as well as a mouse or a stylus when editing text.

Touch devices require a breakthrough in text input if they are ever to become useful for creative output of large chunks of text. We all learned to SMS using a 12 button mobile phone pad in the '90s, people have spent months and years learning vim and emacs (despite their lack of intuitivity, consistency and metaphor), why can't we get away from qwerty keyboards today?

I don't have any suggestions, but people must be coming up with better non-qwerty ideas all the time. Where are they?

I wonder how many people like myself read this and thought "hey, good point, I already knew it but this reaffirms that I am wasting valuable time that I should be using to seize the day" and then went looking for something else on hacker news to fill the void. Disclaimer: I am on my lunch break.

It works fine for me. Could be a graphics card issue?

You paint a pretty bleak picture. Does anybody have any examples of USA radio that is intelligent, artist focused, youth oriented, community driven, ad free, subscription free, streaming on-line, etc? There are plenty to choose from on tunein.com but I'm looking for highlights. Sorry if this is heading too far from the topic.

What do you think killed it? How do people find good music without having to filter through all the rubbish? Does the industry rely on advertising to sell bad music? Are "Top 40" artists built by record companies and sold on TV and/or the internet? Does good music travel through word of mouth by people in-the-know? iTunes is pretty and all but I can't picture people paying to download without having heard the music somewhere else before.

Lots of generalising to do here to answer these questions I guess but I figure there's opportunity out there for someone who can make something of the answers.

Is radio dead in the USA? In Australia I think the radio culture is quite vibrant. Personally I download music from time to time that sits on my phone but I listen to the radio 99% of the time because it introduces and plays the best music anyway. The radio stations that I listen to are govt funded[1] so they don't have any ads and have a community focus of getting people to go see live concerts and listen to good music.

We also have commercial radio stations that play disposable child-like pop music (combined with horrible ads and drone-like presenters) that is well suited to 13 year old girls but still becomes popular with the masses. So there is something for everyone.

I don't support SOPA (not that it counts in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter) but I think that artists should get some money from somewhere for their efforts. People listen to the radio free but they still have the option of buying the album. Downloading the album free makes that option redundant.

In Australia people typically pay $40 - $70 a month for their internet which - if they use the allocated capacity - they are using to pirate music, movies and TV without ads. I'd prefer to see part of that money going to an artist fund rather than the ISPs and broadband resellers.

[1] triplej.net.au and www.abc.net.au/classic/

I should have set a timer on this one but I think it took 10 mins. This is what I ended up with in javascript - notice that it can print the whole triangle as a by-product of the implementation, but also because I have a (bad) habit of doing more than just what was required. Most of the implementation (testing) issues I suffered were due to lack of js knowledge (where is clone?) but the original skeleton of code that I wrote just thinking about the problem didn't need to change. I wouldn't have got it exactly right without a debugger though.

   function printPascal(x, triangle) {
      var row = [];
      while (x) {
         var next = clone(row);
         next.push(1);
         for (var i = 0; i < row.length - 1; i++)
            next[i + 1] = row[i] + row[i + 1];
         row = next;
         x--;
         if (triangle)
            print(whitespace(x) + row);
      }
      if (!triangle)
         print(row);
   }

   function clone(list) {
      var clone = [];
      for (i in list)
         clone.push(list[i]);
      return clone;
   }

   function whitespace(x) {
      var white = " ";
      while (x) {
         white += " ";
         x--;
      }
      return white;
   }

   printPascal(10);

Ignoring the whitespace and clone functions, is there a much simpler way of doing this?

There is no more security in DELETE than there is in GET. Using DELETE over GET would only decrease accidental changes.

Is it possible in javascript to make a customisable auto-complete for the address bar? Similar to the way browsers use auto-complete based on your history, this would use auto-complete based on the site's hierarchy. It's different to this site because the input events (user controls) are not triggered when typing in the address bar.

For example, a user wanting to find the elephants page on this web site would be typing http://coolstuff.com/things/elep (and it would suggest) hants by having hants appear after elep as selected text.

Or is there a good reason why address bar events are not part of the dom?

Which for smaller cities is most people

I expected to see information about that ingredient when I clicked on the ingredient - such as what it is, where to buy, how long it could be stored for etc. If this is where people come to learn about tea they surely need to learn about the ingredients.