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See this article on Digg's blog for an interesting look at the reasons why people may have IE 6 on their computers.

http://about.digg.com/blog/much-ado-about-ie6

Because it can lead you to make arbitrary choices. People usually disagree vehemently on matters of aesthetics. I didn't say it shouldn't play any role, it just shouldn't be an important one. Focus too much on syntax over semantics and you're bikeshedding.

That's a usability issue, not an aesthetic one.

Syntax aesthetics shouldn't be an important metric for technology choices.

$12 / month gets you 10 repositories / 5 collaborators. I guess it's subjective but that seems pretty cheap to me.

I'd rather pay and know that the service is being run as a viable business because that gives me confidence it's going to continue existing.

Nokia ran an ad down here in Buenos Aires for the N95 which used the tagline "It's what computers have become" (in English, but that's another story).

The problem for Nokia is that their tagline is correct, and they make wonderful telephones. They just still haven't figured out how to make a good pocket computer like Apple and Google/HTC do, or good platform to build apps on, or a good way to distribute them.

Ditching Symbian for Maemo rather than Android was probably a terrible decision - now they're going to be bogged down trying to play catchup with RIM, Apple and Google and I just don't seem them pulling it off. They should have focused on making hardware and left the rest up to somebody else.

Well, I guess you can just count me in the "knows how to code" camp. :) I know very little about typography but find the subject pretty interesting.

I'm always impressed by people who know how to code, and also have a good understanding of the subtleties of typography. Bravo!

Modern linguistic formalism is not derived from written language at all. I studied at MIT and UConn in the mid '90's and the separation between prescriptive grammar and linguistics is pretty clear.

That's not to say that current approaches to linguistics are correct; I don't know enough to make that judgement. But I think the problem lies more in the complexity of the domain - not because modern linguists are so foolish as to base theory on written language.

It's more than just linguistic software. Our knowledge of linguistics itself is currently very limited; it's a nacent science and there's still a great deal of debate about how to even approach the study of language. Even leaving aside the difficulties in just transcribing speech, linguists are still a long ways off from coming up with any formalism of human syntax that could help create software to syntactically parse normal human speech.

One of my friends in college was a 72 year old widow who was bored and decided to go back to school. She was in some classes on theoretical linguistics, German and Latin with me. She had had little formal education earlier in her life, but was one of the best students and an incredibly fun person to study with. We ended up graduating together.

So really I think it's all a matter of your own personality and attitude. If you're willing to work hard and are genuinely interested, I definitely think you can do it.

He just brought that up as a part of a "wish list." Nothing has been implemented yet.

Roberto Ierusalimschy of Lua fame often uses this example of how PEGs (parsing expression grammars) can be much easier than regexps for some tasks.

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-10/msg00817.html

For sure. But I do think it's just a sign of good design that Git is easily usable in ways that are unexpected and outside its original intended purpose.

Ha, that's very cool, never saw that before. Thanks for posting.

Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically than, for example, English, which has to mostly rely on word order and prepositions to indicate subjects and objects. The lack of machine translation tools for Latin has more to do with lack of demand than the technical challenge.

"I would suggest that as an admitted non-fan of Ruby then you are in no position to comment."

I like _why too, but but by telling gdp shut up because he's not a "fan," you're actually making it much easier for him to make his point.

Well, I don't know about the measurements - I'm just an ignorant programmer, not a climatologist. :)

But AFAIK you can get sunburnt in extreme latitudes, ozone or no ozone in fact.

http://arcticglass.blogspot.com/2006/04/bedroom-view-938-pm_... http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayint...

Down here in Argentina we haven't forgotten about it at all. Tourists heading to the far south in the summer are often cautioned to wear lots of sunblock because it's so easy to get sunburned there.

Good to know. I've been reflexively doing that for many years now, and wasn't aware that JS implementations had finally optimized around it.

I use Arch but I wouldn't necessarily take the author's advice. If you enjoy tinkering and want to learn more about administering a linux machine, Arch is great.

But if you want things to "just work" then Ubuntu is also great.

It's a game. People are having fun. Playing golf is also pretty pointless when you think about it.

Relax, nobody is suggesting this is how you are supposed to write all your code.

There are lots of ways some kid's straight parents could be stigmatized too. Your argument doesn't really hold any water.

What a great story. One of the things I love most about our field is hearing from and meeting people like you who obviously love what they do for a living.

What an idiotic premise. Nobody deserves to die from having sex.

I couldn't agree more. I left linguistics 10 years ago for the same reasons you described and never once looked back.

Exactly. There are more than a million natives of Haiti living outside their country, many presumably with potentially decent internet access.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_diaspora

And even people who don't have internet access at home can go to an internet shop, translate and print a bunch of documents, and take them home to read offline. So Google is potentially benefitting millions of people by providing this service.

Canned Unicorn Meat: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml

Brazilian websites are just as bad, if not worse than American ones about this, probably because websites that do online sales in Brazil tend to cater to a primarily domestic clientele. If you happen to live in Argentina, as I do, entering your address when you buy things in Brazil can be comically frustrating.

Americans definitely don't have a monopoly on ignorance when it comes to other countries' address formats.