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recurseron Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard

Yeah I don't really like them either, and I wrote them. I thought twice about including the percentages, and I did try to highlight that fact:

    Note that the percentages below are only relative to
    these 2 sets of 3 characters, and don’t represent the 
    total percentage of keystrokes saved.

The percentages are only really there to provide an easier way to compare the (relatively small) Ruby sample, and the (relatively large) PHP sample. Simply saying that one project saved 6000 strokes vs. the other with 100,000 strokes seemed a bit meaningless given the relative sizes of the projects, and doing a full-on frequency analysis of modifier key usage seemed like more trouble that it was worth... perhaps in hindsight I should have done it anyway.

zokier provided an interesting link to a previous discussion below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2973776, specifically http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977303) which does a much more thorough analysis of Finnish/Swedish vs. US layouts - I'd like to run his code using the Japanese layout when I get a chance.

recurseron Underscores are stupid? Get a Japanese keyboard

I'm curious - do you physically take the keys off and swap them when you do major mapping changes like this to make using it easier? Or just use touch typing/muscle memory and ignore what's written on the keys?

recurseron Underscores are stupid

Switch to a Japanese keyboard - none of the @ _ ; or : characters require the shift key.

recurseron Show HN: Bloggy - Add a Jekyll blog to your rails app in seconds

good idea, i could definitely use something like this. how would this work on something like heroku, where writes are restricted? would you generate it locally and commit the generated HTML in public/ to git?

recurseron You have 404,722 users? Here's what you can do.

> A collaborative online recording studio. Fandalists could create open projects and see other contributing to their creation.

This is an idea that's been bugging me for a while.

Something like a multi-track SoundCloud, where uploading a song requires uploading each channel (drums, bass, lead etc) as a separate bounced track. Hitting play for a particular song plays back all the channels in sync as intended by the original artist, or the song can be 'forked' by other users, who can tweak or replace individual channels.

A high-school kid swapping Jimi's solo in 'All Along The Watchtower' for his own, or an electronic artist forking a classical pianist and adding breakbeats... karaoke for musicians.

You'd be able to track songs 'forked' from your own ala github, and forks-of-forks would quickly diverge into something quite unique.

No idea how you'd monetize it (pay-to-fork?), attract users (would the the separate-channel thing be a pretty large barrier to entry for the average musician?), more than likely a legal minefield, and probably not particularly useful to Pud, but I'd love to see it happen :)

recurseron Ask HN: What would you work on, if money was of no concern?

Algorithmically-generated music. I think you could get some interesting results applying markov chains etc to music generation.

recurseron Texts Editor - True WYSIWYG Markdown

Looks good - I've been looking for something exactly like this, to the point where I'd been considering writing it myself. Nice work!

recurseron Gauging Craziness: Why I own an iPod Classic

I used to be in a similar boat, with a bit under 300GB of music, until the great music-cull of 2009, when I deleted the whole lot and started from scratch. These days I keep it under about 6GB - if something new can't fit on my phone, I delete albums until it does. This has been pretty tough at times, but it has the advantage that I don't have anything in my library that I don't absolutely love :)

recurseron 37signals Is Selling Sortfolio. What Happened

A more user-friendly approach would be to do something similar to what soundcloud does with comments - I think the ability for people to leave inline comments within a video would rock. You could still tie this in with tweets, with a link to jump straight to the part of the video being commented on. You'd also be adding more value by actually encouraging discussion on the content, like a disqus for video.

recurseron ITerm 2

The only thing that stops me from using regular terminal is that I couldn't figure out how to make it automatically copy-on-select. Is this possible, or do you just use command-c?

recurseron Face detection with OS X and python

It's a demo of python/opencv via the command line - it doesn't use JS or the web.

recurseron Face detection with OS X and python

thanks for the link, very interesting - stereo cameras would never have occurred to me, but obvious in hindsight. If i can get my hands on another camera I'll give it a shot.

recurseron [dead]

One advantage I can see is that you'd have a video you could show to the rest of your team at their leisure, without everyone having to sit in on the phone call. Maybe you send the team a link to the list of applicants, where they can rate each one 1-5, and at the end of the day you have a consensus who you should talk to.

recurseron CompSci 101 - Big-O notation

Thanks for the feedback - I've updated the post to reflect the fact that it only relates to runtime.

recurseron Leaked DVD Screener of The Social Network A BitTorrent Hit

In Japan, cinema releases are regularly 9-12 months behind DVD-quality bittorrent releases. I recently saw a rental DVD in the 'new releases' section which I'd rented 3 years earlier outside of Japan. Similarly, my wife loves Desperate Housewives, but Japanese releases are 18+ months after the American release.

I have two choices - I can download a movie right now in around 10 minutes without getting off the couch, and watch it in widescreen/surround in the comfort of my home, or I can wait a year or more to pay $22 to see it at the cinema. By the time that year is up, if I've somehow managed to avoid reading spoilers online, and waited months after the rest of the world has stopped talking about the movie, there's a chance I might even enjoy the trip to the cinema.

I would love to be able to pay $10 to get a decent quality download at the same time the rest of the world is watching a movie. Hell, I'd probably pay $20 if it was something I really wanted to see - it'd still be cheaper than the cinema. If iTunes Japan had a rental section (or if the local online rental stores were up-to-date with the rest of the world) I'd probably be spending hundreds of dollars a year on it.

I realize it's probably fiendishly complicated to take an English-language movie, negotiate multiple foreign release dates, translate it, subtitle it, market it in the local language etc, but it seems like it should be fairly easy to allow a non-US English-speaker to buy a (DRMed if necessary) downloadable copy of a movie online a reasonable time after it's been released in the states. It takes the production companies a year, yet two days after a new episode of Lost has aired in the states there'll be multiple fan-subbed versions doing the rounds on Japanese p2p networks.

I have no idea how to fix the current system (and I'm sure smarter people than me have tried and failed), but I can't help but feel these companies are missing a huge opportunity internationally.

recurseron On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java

I haven't used WebObjects for years, but I'm curious how this whole Java kerfuffle is going to affect that. Do people still use it?

recurseron This is how bad I want a job at Gowalla.

"I am skilled in many technologies such as Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4, HTML 4/5, XHTML 1.0 Compliance, CSS 2/3 Compliance, Windows XP/Vista/7."

If it were me I'd drop all those versions (just say Photoshop, HTML, CSS, Windows) and focus on the marketing side, which seems to be your strength. Good luck!

recurseron Chrome Extensions for web development

I'm sure i'm missing something obvious, but how do you see Ajax requests and responses using the chrome debugging tools?

recurseron People Are Walking Architecture, or making NearlyNets with MujiComp

If any of the scribd guys are about, you might get some good beta-testing action out of automatically redirecting iPhones to the html5 version ;)

recurseron Short Studies On Excuses

Reminds me of a great talk i attended by Karl Kruszelnicki analyzing the increasing number of 'my grandmother died' excuses he sees each year at exam time. He ended up with an exponential-looking graph for the last few years which showed that in 10 or 20 years the average student will have 3 dead grandmothers each.

recurseron How Real are the Defects in Toyota's Cars?

Have there been many cases outside the US? This whole thing seems very US-centric, considering these cars are sold all over the world.

recurseron Ask HN: recordable video chat API services?

Sounds great! email sent.

recurseron Ask HN: Discovering new music?

I don't mean to promote piracy or derail the discussion, but if you're a what.cd member you can usually find interesting new stuff by watching the daily and weekly top 10 lists. Also, searching by tag for your favourite genres and sorting by seeders often reveals stuff you may have missed in the past.

recurseron Ask HN: What are you working on tonight?

Good for you :) please post it when it's done. I got a chuckle out of the python/Tex thing - I was chatting with a friend recently about how we both want to start writing, but none of the writing apps feel right, if only there was a markdown-simple native mac app that would spit out latex, etc etc. We ended up agreeing we'd probably spend more time on the app than actually writing - kudos on doing both.

recurseron Revisiting the click track

The guys at echonest seem to slip through the cracks a bit on HN, but they are doing some amazing stuff. I encourage anyone with an interest in music to check out the API.

recurseron A/Bingo 1.0.0 Official Release

Nice writeup, looks great. btw a tiny typo: "I intend to migration my own deployment to Redis"

recurseron Ask HN: What is your shortlist for hot/popular/trendy Open Source Projects?

Mogilefs, transmission & django

recurseron Doing things with Django forms

Nice summary.

recurseron When Google Runs Your Life

"All of Apps probably takes up less than 1% of Google's data centers, which have a million-plus servers."

a million servers - anyone know if this is accurate or hype/guesswork? I've heard from a couple of facebook guys that they have 50k+ servers, so 20 times that for google is conceivable I guess, but it seems like an awfully large number.

recurseron Amazon Will Set Up Asia Pacific Cloud Infrastructure in Singapore

Great news. Users here in japan have ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to burn, and it's always seemed a bit of a shame to serve them from amazon's Europe/US centers.