bp_

Screen rotation is also a thing on desktop. My Dell has three external monitors, side by side, all rotated in portrait; use a decent window manager and you can have a decent 3×2 grid of windows that easily leads to Perfect Window Placement™ just by using Move Window to Top (Bottom) Half. Gnome and pals know how to handle both horizontal and vertical RGB subpixel arrangements and automatically switches configuration as you rotate the screen.

Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…

You still wouldn't be able to hug your counterpart.

No. Even if they both have monitors that move with your head, they are very, very different products. One's a head-attached smartwatch. Another's a presence creator.

I like that your main argument against trees for organizing files is that people use specific applications per file type to organize them... _in trees._ Photos are sorted by year first and album then. Songs are sorted by artist first and album then. People understand trees just fine.

Also, the problem of being unable to put the same thing in more than a place is a) not one fixed by app silos b) part of our daily life while sorting physical objects c) fixed with filesystem links (soft/hard).

Your argument only proves today's mainstream file management programs/save as dialogues/etc. are inadequate. Trees remain the best simplest model to organize files in a filesystem

Time however is a finite resource and it is effectively wasted on 'fun' questions. Every 'fun' question steals time off the actual Q&A content that is the whole point of SE.

Hiding stuff that doesn't below under the rug doesn't make the problem go away, fixing the problem does.

In a gamification environment moreover you need to make sure that the rewards are given for activities you want users to do more of. Participation in 'fun' questions is not one such thing. Since they get ALL the votes etc. they naturally attract more of the same 'fun' questions.

No, those 'fun' questions just have to go.

Most of the time protection kicks in _because_ the question has received many "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. Indeed, the third deleted answer on any question automatically triggers protection.

"I want to be in places where I can be myself, which might include chuckling at the same old jokes or discussing how much my job sucks. The more SO/SE is a place where I cannot be myself, the less desirable a place it is for me to be."

There's nothing stopping you from being your whole self on chat, but it's the relentless focus on signal that makes Stack Overflow what's wholly Stack Overflow.

You can't just build communities by randomly amassing people together. Communities need to have a common goal; in our case it's the building of the best goddamn Q&A sites we can possibly make out of the SE engine. That's what leads us to be "all business" on the site while wholly goofing off on chat :)

"Fun" questions are bumped over and over again; thus, they accrue ALL the votes and farm ALL the badges. They're just constant noise on the homepage.

The problem is mainly that chat.SO sucks in a lot of ways and probably should be reduced to a single room where all SO regulars who have time to chat do chat - together. That's the way pretty much all other sites do chat (including MSO) and it's... saner. I just don't know how much it'd scale.

No, opinion is welcome (on Stack Exchange, not necessarily on Stack Overflow) but it needs to be backed up by research or fact.

That's not the problem on the sample question.

It's really the software. It isn't made to host lists. Votes on lists are historically on the item (OMG YES JQUERY!!!!!), not on the answer (You should use jQuery because a. b. c. d.), and that isn't how the rest of the site works.

Besides in a Q&A network, a "list question" has "list answers" where every "answer" is a "list", rather than an item of that list. Even that doesn't really work because that's not historically the way the site is actually used.

See also the following for the rationale:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/real-questions-have-an...

SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion.

Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and other people will be annoyed at you. Different solutions for different needs.

I apologize for sounding condescending.

However... the blog is for superuser.com, this is hacker news and I'd say the audience probably does know that Windows 8 and Metro do, indeed, exist :)

Here's the thing though: it surprisingly also works with mouse and keyboard! You do lose some display density, mind you, but the upshot in size allocated more than makes up for it.

Actually that's a comparison I meant Grub to win.

To reiterate and clarify: if the price to have all the bells and whistles of the Win8 bootloader is to have it take as much time to load as the entire damn operative system you're loading in the first place I'll prefer the very basic and functional interface of Grub immediately.

Have you tried right clicking the whitespace? or are you talking about the charms bar, which does indeed take too long to come up?

There's very little in Windows 8 that requires multiple touch input - pretty much the only thing touch input can do and the mouse can't. This is what's ultimately allowing Win8 to keep mouse keyboard and touch on the same level.

Compare with Apple and some of the iOS gestures such as four-finger (!) swipes...

(I wrote the article)

I'm perfectly aware, but can you take that approach and execute it in 6 "steps" for all data sizes?

Since the whole point of the exercise is "optimizing" maxPairSum so that it runs in 20 "steps" or less, I guess this slower solution is still more "optimized" - which was my whole point, after all. :)

(Please note 6 steps is the bare minimum - one for the function definition, one for preparing input, one for calling the function, one for calling the function, one for assigning function arguments, one for the actual function and one for returning from the function. You can't go shorter than this.)

The tool is awesome, but I wouldn't rely too much on the instruction bounds. For example, the greatest sums exercise (http://people.csail.mit.edu/pgbovine/python/question.html?op...) can be solved in six "steps" for all input lengths, while it's certainly no O(1) business.

  def maxPairSum(data):
    return sum(sorted(data)[-2:]) # one "step"

US only.

It might however prevent or deter contributors living in Italy from contributing. And those are, quite obviously, the vast majority of the people contributing to the localized wikipedia.

You seem to suggest that a geolocation-based "blocking" of Wikipedia would have been more effective, but that would mean this appeal wouldn't have reached any of you - including myself, an Italian student in an exchange period abroad.

Besides, I can't really see wikipedia doing geolocation-based blocking of anything. It's just not coherent with the project of a global, free, libre, neutral, universal corpus of knowledge.