voidpointer

There's also a video lecture at Stanford in which Knuth explains DLX. http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/seminars/knuth/000222-kn...

Yep. I'd go as far as saying that the fact that Android users, on average, are downloading a similar number of apps as iphone users is hardly interesting at all. The average smartphone user just seems to get around 9 free and one or two paid apps per month. What is important is the number of users that are doing this on a particular platform and maybe any associated trends, if they exist.

The correct headline for this information is "iphone and android users have similar app download behavior". The actual headline implies that Android app download volume would be similar to iphone volume. That would have been a bit of a sensation (to me)... But that's just not what happened.

What I find problematic about this approach is that it leads to an implementation that represents the least common denominator. Protocols that have some conceptual overlap were devised for a reason and represent some sort of evolution. Treating them all the same is, to a certain extent, nullifying this evolutionary aspect.

FTP, Gopher and HTTP are related in a way where it doesn't hurt too much if a HTTP client also support Gopher and FTP. However, there are cases where this doesn't work out so well (E.g. cross platform GUI frameworks).

Consequently, I'd say that it is nice to provide a unified interface for conceptually related technologies. On the other hand, I'd be really careful about overplaying this sort of design principle where it may lead to sub-optimal or overly complex solutions, simply for the sake of supporting more technologies (who needs Gopher these days?)

I'm mostly suggesting that Adobe's tools may not be tied to the Flash platform as much as it may seem.

Best for shareholders?

It's not like they're making money from flash player. They're making money from content creation tools (i.e. Creative Suite). At this point it may be a bit easier for them to create Flash content but adding HTML5 to that mix should be doable. They are already creating native iphone apps with Flash authoring in CS5 (see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/)

Content creators will want to create content that is accessible to a wide audience with a good user experience. They will buy the tools that will allow them to do so efficiently. If that means HTML5 then that is where the money is and that is what shareholders will demand Adobe to support (follow the money).

Furthermore HTML5 over Flash makes a good argument for people to buy upgrades to their Content Creation Tools. So there is even more money to be made with HTML5 for Adobe.

Aren't Feynman diagrams already a DSL for a certain sub domain of quantum field theory?

See also: "The two party swindle": http://lesswrong.com/lw/mg/the_twoparty_swindle/

The left vs. right spiel is nothing but a simple exploitation of the human tendency to not think about actual facts when a simple (and convenient) explanation seems readily available.

The inverse of the assertion made in this article (i.e. anonymity leads to bad behavior) has already been theoretically predicted in "John Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Theory": http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070381.html

Yep, that is already quite interesting. He doesn't say how this compares to the situation on windows (and linux). Nevertheless - this is already far more substantial.

I'd love to see someone come up with actual facts around this Flash on Mac issue. There seems to be somewhat of a shortage of facts. Gruber has mostly hearsay (although he is very convincing with that).

We'd need to do real benchmarking for various sorts of flash content. What about poorly written ActionScript in the SWF? Does it matter when you are running multiple instances of the player, etc.

These ongoing political speculations are entertaining, but they are getting us nowhere.

Very nice. Here's a feature suggestion: allow me to specify the two locations in the URL so I can create bookmarks to pairs that I use all the time (e.g. Hamburg/NewYork, Hamburg/SanFrancisco...).

Nice. I didn't realize today's HTML implementations were handling soft hyphens. When I last tried that it didn't work, but that was a long time ago.

So we agree that there is a lot of room for innovation in the space of tools enabling people to output to the HTML5 stack.

I don't see how HTML5 makes authoring tools (commercial or not) redundant. Do you expect people that are relying on visual authoring software to migrate to writing HTML5/JS/CSS in a text editor "just because"?

Nice way to look out for an employer with sense of humor. This will be dismissed by all the people you wouldn't want to be working for in the first place. Unless you are really desperate, it looks like a great strategy to end up working with people that are actually nice.

Hello pot. This is kettle. You're black.

> It'd be SO easy to fake even ridiculously complex performances

Given the number of full playback performances that are already happening, I don't suppose the faking could get any worse. "Real" musicians will never fake a performance others in the industry will use all means available to them to fake their way to fame and fortune. Both ends of this spectrum are targeting different audiences though.

Notice how similar this is to what happened when programming computers was made easier through the introduction of high level languages. CSS (and HTML) are the the Assembly Language of web page layout. The more standardized they become, the more it makes sense to use higher level abstractions in order to produce code. JavaScript frameworks which hide particularities of the different browsers are another part of the same equation. This is progress.

The idea seems good. Have you thought about asking someone with experience in web design to make a more streame-lined and less clunky version of the landing page? I think you are on a good way in terms of keeping it simple but in my humble opinion the execution isn't quite there yet. I'm not that competent of a designer myself but I'd bet someone who knows his stuff could improve the page quite a bit.

The software companies themselves often argue that they don' really want software patents. However, the fact that other can file patents puts them into a position where they need to file patents themselves for protection. It's just a stupid arms race. Now and then, a patent troll with noting to lose shows up and shakes up the picture. You could call it a sort of IP terrorism :-)

The versioning nomenclature seems somewhat chaotic... here it says 10.5 and their current version is 10.10 and on the linked page they refer to 10.1 and also talk about 10.50. I guess that 10.10 == 10.1 and 10.5 == 10.50 but it is a bit confusing...

Oh, and the download crashes with SIGBUS on my MacPro running 10.6 :(

Why on earth would you recommend Agave syrup as a sweetener when it has an even higher fructose/glucose ratio than the dreaded HFCS? There are sweeteners that are 100% glucose including plain old corn syrup but also other nice alternatives (maple syrup etc...) or even refined dextrose...

This was really very interesting. I for one was mostly ignorant to the big difference there was between glucose and fructose. Also the bit on ethanol was quite interesting in itself.

The fact that HFCS is made from normal corn syrup (almost 100% glucose), which is processed into fructose seems almost ironic.

Is it known what the contractor was hired to do? I guess Microsoft didn't just post on rent-a-coder to get the lowest bid on "a microblogging site like Plurk.com".

How deeply was MSFT involved in the project spec and to what degree was that spec based on Plurk?

Keyboards really seem to be polarizing smartphone users these day. I am not very fond of sliding keyboards, but some of my friends would never consider buying a phone without a "full" keyboard...

At the level of abstraction I would expect from a String object, the reverse of \r\n should be \n\r. Basically, you example is another encoding issue. I think strings should be free from any encoding concerns. Those should be handled when parsing/serializing.

I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the unicode consortium but rather on the assumption that a character in a programming language should conform to the notion of a character in UCS-4 or some other unicode encoding.

From a programming language perspective, I think it would be ideal if strings could always be viewed as lists of encoding independent characters, such that reversing this list is equivalent to reversing the string.

If you want to be able to maintain a one-to-one mapping to unicode, you will need to use unique characters for an "ä" and an "a with combining-diaeresis" but ideally that should be hidden from the user of the language.

Thus, in my ideal world, both "LATIN-SMALL-LETTER-O-WITH-DIAERESIS" and "LATIN-SMALL-LETTER-O COMBINING-DIAERESIS" would each be one single element of a list of characters which is a string.

That very much depends on your definition of a String.

I'm not sure what you mean by reversing a string not being equal to reversing its characters. It's certainly not always equal to reversing its bytes (depending on the encoding). Same goes for Strings that are implemented with UTF-16 characters (e.g. Java, win32 wchar_t etc.) all suffer from bad abstractions driven by implementation/efficiency concerns.

Well put.

There are far more relevant points, such as the fact that the fudged data series isn't even used anywhere in the rest of the program. The code fragment is indeed pretty useless without the entire program. It seems like ESR has stopped looking at the code once he thought he had found what he was looking for. The adjusted data is never referenced in the rest of the program: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=964896

Ideally we would have access to the entire program + data and could re-run it to see whether the graph was produced with or without the adjustments enabled. It is very well possible that the program was altered after the graph was plotted and before that version of the source became public.

After ten fake yawns I felt more like I had been hyperventilating - I'm clearly doing it wrong :/