Edootjuh

I've heard 'piquant' (from French) being used for spicy in the red pepper sense. It sounds pretentious but maybe it'll be more mainstream some day.

I think he means the APIs that allow you to simulate mouseclicks and keyboard input on arbitrary windows and controls

You might be interested in GNU Unifont: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

I was very surprised he said Basic.

Of course, he presume he doesn't do much hard core software engineering anymore, but I assumed that family was pretty much a thing of the past (and legacy code).

Forgive my ignorance, but what is wrong with static class members?

I recently followed a Computer Networking course, and the teachers actually went though pains to ensure those with older editions could follow the assigned exercises.

From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates.

Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks.

EDIT: Oh, and I recently found this link: http://www.textbooknova.com/.

It's probably not legal, but free textbooks!

Or select the picture and copy it to the desktop.

    try:
       f = float(someText)
    catch ValueError:
       # I just parsed you, this is crazy,
       # here's an exception, throw it maybe?

Formatted That For You

It's not invisible when you're actually looking for an invisible file.

That seems like a bad idea. TeX doesn't allow separation between markup and presentation very well. Something like DocBook[1] with a presentation engine like XSLT might be better, if it wasn't for the verbosity of the XML source.

[1] http://www.docbook.org/whatis

This might be obvious, but PDF isn't usually reflowable (and if it is, it's not very easy to do so), which makes for a painful reading experience on a smallish widescreen monitor, and isn't editable easily.

I usually just decide between plain-text, HTML, Google Docs and LaTeX/PDF, going up the ladder as the complexity of the document requires, or if it needs to be editable.

I hate it when I'm e-mailed a Word document that could easily have been plain text, in which case it would be searchable and more easily found when looking through e-mails manually.

Very interesting, and not too hard to follow with little knowledge of statistics. I might even start taking an interest in the contest, despite the Netherlands coming up with terrible songs to enter every year.

Doesn't work very well when zooming.

I hadn't thought of that. You also made me realize that existing modules written in PHP can be reused this way.

Let me make sure I understand...

Is this meant to be run on a web hosting service that supports PHP in the 'traditional' way or do you need permission to run this as a daemon?

If it's the former, I can definitely see its benefits, but if it's the latter I can only imagine the target audience being people who refuse to program in anything but PHP and people who are by some bizarre policy required to use PHP but are allowed to run their own HTTP server.

Same here with Chromium 18

I assume that also doesn't count package manager or App Store installs. Still, OSX seems to be quite a big market there.

While it does require some terminal skills, as far as playing or streaming any media file and skipping left and right a bit (the largest part of my contact with a media player) or shuffling through a music library goes, I find it far easier to work with.

I feel that people too often confuse a user-friendly interface with an intuitive or noob-friendly one. But I guess seeing as most programs' user base's large majority are non-technical people that's fair.

What do you mean by that, exactly? Just out of curiosity.

21/75. It returns undefined after 75.

It auto-submits when you type the right language.

I can think of a few examples. Controlling your music player while in another program. For Wii-like games but also for example for making signals to teammates in FPSs. As the article said, presense detection. Perhaps for desktop switching to free up screen real-estate.

I think the problem with the font rendering in this screenshot is the hinting. When you hint the fonts too strongly they lose their character and the diagonals' width becomes inconsistent with the straight lines' width, as you can see in the lowercase 'w', for example. If this uses the FreeType library, you can set the font hinting to 'Slight' or 'Medium' and fonts look a lot better.

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...

You can disable the compatibility check in about:flags. Works fine here.

I noticed this book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13693/13693-pdf.pdf, perhaps others, are missing a table of contents but compiling the tex source does give me one; it has probably only been compiled in one pass.

The server crashed due to HN coverage: https://twitter.com/#!/aperiodical/status/195557677680689152

"the server has crashed after having HackerNews pointed at it. Trying to get it rebooted now, and then we'll enable caching! #toosuccessful"

Also, no search engines seem to have cached it.

EDIT: Blog linked to http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Mathematics_%28Bookshelf%29 .

It's on the right of the page.

You've never seen a VB.NET vs. C# argument? Call yourself lucky.

It's actually not so much netcat, but the Unix system that has such flexibility.

My peak is when I have to go to bed and the next day I have something very important to do, for which I have to be well-rested.