rabidgnat

Some of the subreddits are very reasonable, actually! I have had good luck submitting articles to Proggit without external support. When my submissions slip through the cracks, I can usually find fault with my approach: either the timing or the title was awful.

There ARE bots that seemingly downmod everything in the 'New' queue, but Reddit's system is designed to keep nascent articles alive longer, so they don't have much overall effect.

The author is ignoring a very fundamental concept: Ideas are as cheap as the transmission medium

20 years ago, the two cheapest ways to mass-transmit ideas were television and newspapers. With the Television, advertising dollars allowed the user to buy the connection and get content for free. The newspaper model required the consumer to buy both the content AND the supply chain, but the costs were low enough and advantages large enough that newspapers prospered.

Now we have the Internet, and content follows the Television cost model. Ideas have little markup now - server costs, bandwidth, and time. And time isn't even worth that much! If you demand the user to pay you for your time, you're up against thousands of people screaming on their own soap boxes for free. Are you really offering something so special that someone couldn't get it on a site sponsored by advertising?

The future WILL be free because sites have already figured out how to monetize free with advertising money. If the dead-tree papers can't figure it out soon, they're going to find themselves with a big paywall and no eyeballs. For instance, it's very telling that Murdoch sites still show their 'paywall' content if you're referred by Google News

"BJJ works well in a cage and between two people. Keep in mind that's a very controlled environment."

I knew a cop in Philly who said it's saved his life countless times, and asserted it was more useful than Judo and Tang Soo Do. YMMV

I had a similar problem in the past. I did some soul-searching, and realized that the projects that I undertook were huge, and would take at least a month of work in order to "finish." During this time, it was completely unusable up until the very end. Not having anything to show for hard work was demotivational.

The solution for me was to partition my work into hilariously small pieces. When I start a project from scratch, my first few tasks are "create the directory hierarchy," "create a repository," "Hello World," and "create exception-throwing stubs for the basic functionality." The idea is to finish early and finish often. If you can't commit a working version every day or two, you may be working on chunks that are too large.

It'll even sound better to your boss! Instead of saying, "no, I am not done," you can say, "I finished X,Y,Z, and W, and I am having trouble with S and R."

If I had to guess, Eric Schmidt thinks he can't apologize. At this point, they've set a big precedent: they're willing to automatically network you based on information that you've given them. If they apologized, they'd have to neuter future roll-outs and remove this automatic user base, removing a major competitive advantage. How many other businesses have products that are popular enough to piggyback a social network? Not many. Google can, and they want to keep it that way.

The registry's implementation is bad, sure. However, a global key/value store is extremely useful. I changed the default background color in Windows from 'White' to 'Light Gray,' and it works for almost every application I use. Visual Studio, Explorer, even some webpages! For years, I turned the brightness of my monitor down, but that severely hinders readability of some color schemes.

How would global shared settings look without a registry? Like Unix configuration files. This is a step backwards, as there is no unified way to read Unix configurations. Some things are stored in environment variables, some things are stored in XML files, some things are represented as special files, and some things are stored in INI-style files. Something like window color would be handled by the display manager, but other configuration settings would need to be hunted down at runtime.

What's really better, "read system.window.background.default_color.[rgb] as ints," or "parse /etc/x/conf/x.conf as an .ini file, look for the variable background_color. It is stored in the format (r,g,b). If it is not present, the default is (255,255,255)."?

I'm sure that it's not great, having never heard of Fav4.org before today. I landed on the page and saw 4 buttons with links to pages that I visit regularly. "That's great, but I already have them bookmarked," I thought.

I closed the tab, but decided it wouldn't have been on HN if it was just 4 links. At that point I returned to the site and saw the "Settings" button in the bottom corner.

A landing page that hides the purpose of a webpage will cost you users in the long run

    Prelude> let developers = "developers" : [x | x <- developers]
    Prelude> print developers 

A Haskell tribute to Steve Ballmer

Yes-ish. I posted weekly programming essays in college, and post sporadically now.

I had developed lots of opinions about programming, and I couldn't clearly articulate any of them. Writing them for a broad audience forced me to adopt a consistent view of the programming world, and helped my writing develop.

As an added bonus, the internet is overly relentless when you make a mistake. It made me strive for a higher level of precision and quality that I wouldn't have developed just through my college courses.

Research libraries need books for a very obvious reason: Authors before the 90s did not write their content to be easily indexed by a search engine. That's what the keyword card index was for! I agree that the internet is the best first step for researching, but as articles age, they will become harder and harder to find.

When I wrote research papers in college, I always located the hard copy of articles I found online. I would yank the whole year of publication off of the shelf and spend some time digging for buried treasure. Sometimes it was a waste, but other times it paid off!

I vastly prefer handwritten presentations to Powerpoint presentations, but because it's so dynamic.

First, look at content. When you're delivering a Powerpoint presentation and a great side conversation arises, you are pressured to return to the content of your slides before you divert too far. If you don't, then you've lost your visual medium for interacting with your audience. Granted, sometimes it's better to refocus, but it's arrogant to believe you can always anticipate the best direction a conversation can take ahead of time. Anecdotally, my favorite classroom memories of school involve the teacher abandoning plans for the day because students were passionately interested in a side conversation. I'll note that none of those teachers used Powerpoint slides.

Next, there's form. Most subjects are easily broken down by bulleted lists, but that doesn't mean that it's always the most effective way to transmit information to others. Some Powerpointers are talented enough to genereate lots of high-quality picture-based slides, but they're few and far between. I've met some of these talented few, and they're always clearer on a markerboard, because they are able to dynamically change their diagrams as I ask questions and comment.

I realize Powerpoint works better for some scenarios, but if given the choice, I'll choose the guy with the marker in his hand every day of the week

To clarify, I was only focusing on their approach to emerging markets. How many successful products/services have they created and launched in the last year? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?

Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft, Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device and the ads

All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past decade! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did

Science had little to do with the failure of the anti-Global Warming movement. It's just an example of how bad marketing can be worse than no marketing. They've hit two home runs since the beginning of the movement, "greenhouse gasses" and the "green" trend. Apart from that, it's an incoherent jumble of wishful thinking.

A single sentence from Obama's State of the Union address did more to sell green energy than anything else I've seen in the past decade:

"But here's the thing -- even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future -- because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy."

This gives a path to the future: combining American Exceptionalism and Green Energy into the same thought

"I see no good reason why they refuse to do svg in text/html mode"

This probably breaks major assumptions inside the browser engines. Rendering most image types is a one-and-done type deal, just setting up a few calls to libjpeg or libpng, but SVG actually has to be XML-parsed and rendered element by element on page load. To do it in text/html, you'd need to hook together the html parser with the XML parser with the image generator. That's a lot of work to break the rules!

The way I thought of immediately uses 0 pointers:

  (defun nthFromEnd (lst n)
    (labels ((from-end-helper (lst n)
      (if (null lst)
        0
        (let ((ret (from-end-helper (cdr lst) n)))
          (if (eq ret n)
            (throw 'answer (car lst))
            (+ ret 1))))))
      (catch 'answer
        (when (from-end-helper lst n)
          nil))))

  CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 6)
  NIL
  CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 3)
  2
  CL-USER> (nthfromend '(1 2 3 4 5) 0)
  5

I didn't hammer it very hard so maybe I missed a case or two. The other obvious problem is that it's not tail recursive (nor very elegant in general)

On the other hand, do big companies ever get BETTER at something?

Large companies tend to walk off their own skyscrapers. Microsoft toppled IBM with the "PC on every desk" mantra. In turn, Microsoft never won on the Internet, because they just never understood that humans network. Phone+cable+Internet companies are begging for a sassy upstart to eat their lunch when competition opens up. American car companies missed game-changing trends in consumer automobiles towards fuel efficiency.

Should Microsoft abandon search? Probably not, but they're more likely to make money if they attack markets that only have awful products. Attacking a market with strong loyalties and gold-standard type products seems like a fool's errand

I bet someone in Boston will hear the announcement and think, "An iPad? So what? I've had an iPad for yeahs"

This was probably the most predictable Apple "new product" release I've ever seen. I'm not really thrilled about it, but then again I'm not really a gadget kind of guy

The best thing about this program is that it shows the power of Clojure's Java interop. Doing graphics programming in other languages often feels like a dirty hack, but this isn't so bad. This might lead me back to try Clojure again

Aside: A few months ago I decided to reproduce a program a friend of mine wrote, which was to draw Koch's Snowflake without using recursion. By the end of the day, this morphed into a throwaway Lindenmayer system viewer in C++ with OpenGL. Basically it just lets you toggle the number of iterations and switch between 13 different fractals. The Clojure code is a lot nicer than the C++ that I banged out, which probably goes without saying! I was trying to add 20, but they were a pain to derive and I didn't want to work on it for more than a day

http://github.com/jakevoytko/fractals

In the Flash VM's defense, the new alpha releases work pretty well on Ubuntu 9.10 x64. My laptop still can't handle two Youtube videos at once, but there's a lot less flickering and I haven't seen the 'flash crashed' gray square in a while

I'm red-green colorblind, and the best color-based systems have a few things in common:

1) High contrast colors

2) Unique icons assigned per color

3) They use traditional color intensity conventions

Usually, I can differentiate red and green by using intensity conventions. Red should be dark, and green should be bright. Visual cues help too: emergency colors should be red and white no matter what the object is. Interestingly, I can't tell blue, purple, and pink apart to save my own life.

To me, the system presented in the article is more-or-less garbage, since it doesn't provide an orientation and doesn't put any constraints on the contrast difference between the presented colors. I might get it right, but I'd waste a lot of time compared to a well-defined contrast system

I would most easily identify a system using black, white, light gray, dark red, bright green, and blue. Anything past that, and I'd start to have some problems. Pink might look like blue, yellow might look like bright green, brown might look like red, etc.

Sometimes I get false positives using my system: 3 years ago I found out that the Canadian flag is red and white, and not green and white. My friends and I were celebrating Canada Day as an excuse to have a party (nothing personal, Canada!), and I was explaining my color differentiation system, and very strongly asserted that the Canadian flag is green and white because it had a leaf. They spent a few moments exchanging "Is he serious? Because he looks serious" glances before spending a good 15 minutes openly mocking me.

"What languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make it obligatory education?"

My aunt forced her young children to learn conversational Spanish because she was convinced that "they're taking over." It was extremely misguided, but her children actually benefited from it, gaining both a language and some cultural understanding. How many misguided parents actually pull that off?

On a more general note, an internationalization of Americans probably won't occur until a few things happen:

1) The ridiculous taxes+fees on international plane tickets are lifted

2) It becomes en vogue to go to <country or Continent X> for vacation

3) Some famous people move to X and bring reality TV with them

or..

1) America enters a position where it is obviously no longer economically dominant BECAUSE of a lack of worldliness.

2) (1) becomes common knowledge

Until either of those scenarios occur, there's absolutely no reason for Americans to learn another language. Most Americans work and think locally. They're at least 500 miles away from another country, and they're not about to get any closer

Because it looks like the attack is a government-based attack. As presented in the media, IP theft is par-for-the-course in China, but the only benefactors from reading the personal information of activists are those in the government, or those with strong government ties. This wasn't just a mere theft of intellectual property, this was a case of biting the hand that feeds China.

China needs money flowing into the country in order to sustain it's big growth rate. They've traditionally gotten it through dirt-cheap manufacturing costs and exports. Google's marketshare is small, but they're very well connected in the US and are probably the US company most likely to start a "China-free" product trend. If it takes hold, the US would get a little bit of extra leverage (something we've sorely been lacking lately)

"I'm disgusted by the levels to which the Chinese Government can stoop."

Half of the surprise I received reading this article was my shock that the Chinese government would attack profitable companies like Google. Sure, they've always attacked foreign governments, but China's government depends on US companies spending Dollars overseas. Since consumer spending is down in USA, it only seems natural for China to start banking on the successful industries of today, like internet advertising. Is the political danger of human rights activists really worth more than the money that Google brings? Or were their egos so high that they thought they could get away with it, either by avoiding detection or keeping Google at status quo

Maybe the Chinese government + military is just too huge to get everyone to toe the party line.

http://www.vocabdojo.com : A website used to study vocabulary for the SATs, GREs, etc. I made a Django app to do this after I discovered that making 900+ flashcards is a huge pain in the neck, and then decided to turn it into something that everyone can use (after switching to Tornado, of course :D)

"Don't expect to actually develop websites in it"

I just tried to develop a website with SBCL and Hunchentoot, and it works relatively well for small examples. There's pretty good MySQL support, and it's all pretty fast. I couldn't figure out how to get a long-running SBCL process to keep even on memory usage. I saw a talk from a guy who works at ITA software [1] where he said they blow away their SBCL instances and restart them on regular intervals, so maybe it's just not possible!

To anyone who is serious about developing a Lisp website, I'd spend a lot of time up-front evaluating different Lisps

[1] I can't find this talk anymore :<

Cuil answered that question very definitively :D

For some test English words, it doesn't look any better than Wiktionary:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pants http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ostensibly

http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&... http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&...

As a plus, Wiktionary lets you download their data :). If Google opens this up, then it could get pretty interesting

Hopefully they'll help clean up Wiktionary. I downloaded the English dataset the other day and it's a mess. IIRC, less than 1/3 of the words are properly tagged as English words, and a significant fraction of the words aren't even rendered in the English character set.

The good news is that the editorial standards are extremely consistent, so it's easy to extract information. They also allow batch updates, so if I find an easy way to correct vast swaths of this data, I could send a batch update file once

You have to be honest about the best way to motivate yourself. In the speech "You and your Research," Richard Hamming[1] talks about how he uses his ego against himself. When he went on sabbatical to write a book, he told everyone he was going to finish by the time he got back. He wouldn't dare suffer the embarrassment of failing to finish!

Me? I respond well to A. small, well-defined tasks and B. limits. I get A. by breaking tasks up into tiny modules, and by using Git to make lots of small feature branches. I also write TODO lists with lots of 30-minute jobs.

I get B. by using LeechBlock[2] to restrict access to websites for periods of 1 hour. When I combine A. and B., I usually can find something that'll put me working long enough to get into the zone.

Having an interest in your projects also helps :)

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476