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danhon The Pirate Bay goes down after legal pressure

And now they are back.

danhon Why I Switched to Git From Mercurial

I agree that two-stage commits is a great feature to have. But there are downsides to making it the default.

Obviously, it trips beginners up.

And it encourages committing stuff that may never have coexisted in the working tree - and thus have never been tested together.

danhon Why I Switched to Git From Mercurial

Oh, I didn't say that it would have been brilliant if I had built it. But I'll bite anyway. Or at least provide a couple of thoughts.

The index is one of the key components in git, but it doesn't really have a name or label in the UI. Say that it was called "index"; then the current "git diff" would be equivalent to "git diff index", and the current "git diff --cached" to "git diff index..HEAD". Less special cases to remember. IMHO, of course.

The same way "git checkout index foo.c" would fetch foo.c from the index (I don't even remember the magic incantation for doing that now). Etc.

Also, I still think that using the index should be optional: "git diff" should default to "git diff HEAD", "git commit" should default to the current "git commit -a", etc.

"git checkout" tries to do too much. It creates and switches to branches, and copies blobs from the repository to the working tree. The first form is reasonably safe, and bails out without --force if you do something stupid, the second does not. At least for me, the only way to learn the difference is the hard way.

The branch-switching should probably be done by "git branch" instead, and the fetching of blobs by "git reset" (which sometimes already does this, but with very confusing options; I never remember the difference between --soft, --mixed, --hard, --mixed and whatever).

That's only a couple of changes that could have been made a long time ago. Now it is definitely too late. Even if the git UI could be made smaller and more logical (with a huge amount of work), it's not worth pissing off pretty much every git user out there...

danhon Why I Switched to Git From Mercurial

"I really don't get the complaints about git's UI"

I think it's because git's data model is so minimal and elegant, and the UI is anything but.

For me, it's not so much that the UI is quite bad (which it is), but that it could have been brilliant.

danhon Latin proverbs

Obscuris vera involvens.

Translation: Obscurity envelops truth (according to Virgil).

danhon Arrington : "You’re Welcome, You Bastards"

Thank you for introducing me to "antecdote". Brilliant word!

I suppose it is half anecdote, half antidote, which must be highly useful. Or is it maybe an ante-anecdote, an amusing story in advance (a.k.a. prophecy)?

Not surprisingly, such a useful word is in widespread use, apparently. 33,200 uses to be exact, according to Google. But no clear definition, according to antecdotal evidence.

danhon Today the Dow dropped 1000 points in about ten minutes.

Doesn't that kind of software have annoying dialog boxes saying "Are you sure you want cause financial meltdown?"? Or at least a less intrusive "Did you mean 'm'?"?

It probably should.

danhon Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

Turns out mobile phones are really old (for some value of mobile):

"In 1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

danhon Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

Oh yes. That must be the future.

Or perhaps this, ever so slightly more practical, one: http://www.ronpatrickstuff.com

danhon Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909

I find this interesting, but not that impressive.

When I was about 5, I predicted the iPhone.

Well not exactly the iPhone, but I made a lot of drawings of a device with phone, computer with touchscreen, music player, etc., in roughly the iPhone form factor. Since I am very old, mobile phones at the time were back-breakingly huge, and I had not ever seen a touchscreen.

My "design" was a bit different, though. I though it would look cool to carry the device like a giant Dick Tracy-ish watch. And it needed a very small cassette-tape memory for the computer (that was the only kind I had seen).

I also made a lot of drawings of cars with jet motors. That particular vision has not worked out very well. Yet.

danhon Antitrust inquiry into Apple over Section 3.3.1

Depends on your view of what a market is. Apple's app store is pretty dominant in the market for "mobile apps".

danhon Google waves embedded

Performance is still awfully horrible.

Just opening that page causes Safari to hang for quite a while, and memory use to shoot up from ~40M to ~670M. That's not even close to being acceptable.

danhon The Talents of a Middle-Aged Brain

"One of the most intriguing findings is that if you talk to people who disagree with you, that helps your brain wake up and refine your arguments and shake up the cognitive egg."

That strikes me as truth. And a very inconvenient one at that.

danhon Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

It seems like all Western (or westernized) countries have to endure an era of "sex & drugs & rock & roll".

It's like puberty for countries.

danhon Android 2.2 (Froyo) features

Very true, except that it's called Dalvik.

danhon Why waste time on a foreign language?

I agree that studying a foreign language in school probably is a waste of time (at least that's been my experience). But, at the same time, languages are a lot of fun.

This is my experience:

* English. Being Swedish, we started with English in 3rd grade, and continued for years. But I suspect that ubiquitous American series and films on Swedish television were way more important than the formal education.

* German. Three years in school, totally wasted. I managed to learn a whole lot of words, and still remember some grammatical rules, but I could not speak German even if my life depended on it.

* French. After university, I decided to take a stab at French. I came up with my own model, that basically consisted in keeping a French novel in my left hand, and a translation in the right.

That worked a lot better than the formal education in German: after a while I could read pretty much anything in French. Unfortunately my method doesn't help at all with speaking and understanding the French. So now I can read Proust, but have trouble ordering a beer in the darned language. I wouldn't recommend that method.

* Spanish. I decided to try another homegrown method with Spanish, basically focusing on listening alone. I listened to Spanish podcasts, radio and TV as much as I could, but not always very actively.

With a little help from some Spanish speaking friends, I am now quite fluent. And it turns out that learning to read Spanish is quite easy, if you already know most of the words by ear. So going from spoken language to written works, but not the other way around (at least not for me).

So, for me, formal language education has indeed largely been a waste of time. But it doesn't have to be. If I could come up with two methods better that the school's, the teachers ought to be able to at least do the same.

danhon Danger signs to search for in your writing

Another rule: use short words.

"Short words are the best and old words when short are best of all," as Winston Churchill would have it.

danhon App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist. For Satire

Except, of course, satire written in C, Objective-C or Javascript.

danhon New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

"Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript"

So porting from another language is now forbidden? Or is it unoriginal code that is banned?

Either way, the sheer craziness is astounding.

danhon Linenoise - A minimal, zero-config, BSD licensed, readline replacement

That is indeed exactly what I meant. Sorry about the ambiguity.

danhon Linenoise - A minimal, zero-config, BSD licensed, readline replacement

rlwrap does the same thing (and very well too, I might add).

danhon Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

Excellent article. Worth reading for this quote alone:

"I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else."

danhon Slovianski-language that a Slav should be able to learn in 7 days

That all depends on your definition of "language". For most linguists, all that matters is mutual intelligibility. For others, a language is a "dialect with an army and a flag", i.e. a political construct.

A Swedish person like me most of the time have no trouble at all understanding spoken Norwegian, and reading both bokmål and nynorsk is quite easy. Spoken Danish requires some effort and getting used to, but it is still quite possible to have a conversation.

danhon Slovianski-language that a Slav should be able to learn in 7 days

A linguist would probably say that Scandinavia already has a common language, and that Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are mere dialects of the same Scandinavian language. They are considered different languages mainly for political and historical reasons, but since they are mutually intelligible (with the possible exception of drunk Danes) "Scandinavian" is really a single language from a linguistic perspective.

Icelandic is a different story, of course. Thankfully, though, the Icelandic speak English rather well...

danhon About Adobe's Flash Player Not Having Access to H.264 HW Acceleration on OSX

Also, Flash often, rather surprisingly, uses more CPU cycles when a video is paused than e.g. VLC does actually playing the darned thing (on OS X).

I guess this must be because Apple doesn't allow Adobe access to its proprietary, hardware based empty loop optimizations...

danhon Minimalism

Favorite quote time: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead" wrote Blaise Pascal (or possibly Mark Twain, or Churchill).

danhon The official term for the smell after it rains

Isn't it strange that so very few smells have their own words to describe them? Supposedly, there are thousands of them, but, with the exception of the formula "it smells like X", almost without exception they don't have proper names.

It's like that tribe in South America somewhere that didn't have words for colors, except in expressions as "colored like the sun" etc.

danhon Hacker News reader for iPhone (new native app)

One way to achieve almost the same effect is through Google's mobile reformatting thingy:

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=news.ycombinator.com

Fast, simple and ugly as hell...

danhon Google Phone is confirmed, employees already have them in hand

I think you're right. This seems to be what Google calls its "mobile lab":

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/12/android-dogfood-die...

danhon New article series at catonmat: Detailed Summary of MIT's Linear Algebra

Also available in iTunes:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/mit.edu....