delackner

I never use Photoshop, but sometimes I work with graphic designers who like preparing everything as one huge PSD with lots of layer groups, and it feels like an absurd waste of energy to keep subscribing to Photoshop just to export all layers as PNG, since that is all I ever use it for. Photoshop itself can barely do this, HOURS on moderately complex documents.

Maybe this would be a good time to ask, does anyone know of a 100% compatible way to do PSD -> any open layered format, without Photoshop? Maybe this is a business opportunity, to run a web service whose sole purpose is to open PSD files in photoshop with a custom export script, and then export the layers.

Fiber mixed with a nutrient soup is not solid food.

This is fetching every entity by its indexed key. My understanding of saving in a background queue is that during that 1-2 seconds, the ui will still be using the pre-modification data set, so very briefly the ui may appear incorrect, no? Not a huge deal, but if the ui will be wrong, then for our app that would still force us to pause the ui until the save finishes.

Fetch and save operations get pretty slow with even just 10,000 entities (if you touch all those entities). It gets a little better if you pre-fetch all the entities rather than one at a time, but the save is still very slow. Breaking that out into a backround thread is feasible, but as the previous commenter mentions, then you risk momentary divergence between the UI and the backend.

Really lightweight high level intro, but more than the technical side I was surprised to see a very famous Mac/iOS developer, creator of NetNewsWire, advocating using a Microsoft backend. Not meant as snark, just genuinely surprised and now a bit intrigued to see what the details are.

In most cases, paying a tax-preparer to do the annoyance for you is far less hassle than dealing with both trying to get rid of citizenship, and trying to attain citizenship in another country where you would like living.

Perhaps some European country would like to start offering citizenship to anyone that renounces US citizenship, as a way to encourage immigration of skilled and high net worth individuals.

A lot of people discussing the 1 hour in the morning, 1 hour before bed requirement. I also found this impractical, but lately I have been pondering something that Goenka said on this subject: If you don't have enough time, sleep less. When I heard this, it sounded ridiculous, since sleep is so important for the body.

A theory I have been developing is that perhaps meditation that achieves a no-mind state for a long period of time, may allow the practitioner's brain and body to enter the same kind of restorative repair cycle that it normally only enters during unconscious sleep (the only time a normal person's mind is truly shut-off).

A variety of experiences have lead me to suspect this, most profoundly being the night AFTER my 10 day retreat ended, when I was quite tired from a long day, having stayed up past midnight, despite having gotten up at 4:30 am that day for the final day of the retreat.

When I lay down to sleep, exhausted, I fell into a deep meditative state. I got up and opened my eyes, took a walk around the block, went back to try and sleep, and immediately was back in a meditative state. Gave up and just went along with experiencing being in that state all night, since I was totally aware, yet in the morning felt very rested despite having not slept a wink.

I am aware of the Wikipedia link. It also has no references, and is marked as being original content.

What term should we use to discuss garbage collection schemes that impose a real time overhead (those systems virtually everyone means when they say they dislike GC) and memory management schemes that involve no runtime overhead?

While some people might say reference counting is just a form of garbage collection, this blurs the useful distinction when discussing the overhead involved. Automatic memory management schemes that impose a variable runtime cost to analyze the object graph are simply totally unlike schemes that have no analysis step and thus no performance headaches. When people talk about GC being unacceptable for real time systems, they are not saying reference counting is unacceptable as well, they are simply saying that any system with a garbage collection phase are unacceptable. So that seems like a pretty clear split.

These terms have basic meanings that are independent of what you seem to wish they meant. GC is not reference counting, and it would benefit you to put he difference in your memory.

If you are in your twenties and healthy, please learn from my mistakes. I suffered from wrist pain and lower back pain. I used all sorts of ergonomic keyboards, chairs, even a special back brace. Eventually I was seeing a chiropractor and massage therapist once a week. None of that worked, because I spent all my time sitting in a chair staring at a computer.

I started weight training and yoga, and my wrist and back pain disappeared. I thought I was done and everything was fine.

But I was still sitting in a chair all day every day, and more than a decade like that herniated a disc in my neck. The initial symptoms were a persistent pain in my upper shoulder blade for months. The doctor said this would not have happened if I had just got up once an hour, and he sees tons of desk workers end up the same.

Since then I have seen some improvement by using a program to force me to look away from the screen at intervals, and to get up once an hour.

My posture is still horrible, but now the remaining struggle is simply staying aware enough to avoid bad habits (slouching, letting my head fall forward, etc).

He is being perfectly civil. He has succinctly stated a position that you find unpleasant, but that is all. It is not considered "civil" in the non-software world to suggest that someone should give away their possessions before you care about bad things happening to them.

Japan tangent: I am amazed on a weekly basis by the mountain of spam newsletters flooding my email inbox by some of Japan's leading internet services. Total lack of respect for the customer. Physical mail today is pretty much 99% spam and 1% bills, and it looks like it might take a miracle to stop email ending up the same way.

Just because your boss asked you to do something that many people HATE, doesn't make it better.

People handing over their email address in exchange for user registration or to gain access to a trial version of your product are not interested in receiving sporadic advertising for the next N years.

People are inundated by unwanted email every day, from companies that claim, like Dracula, "but you said I could come inside." Some people don't mind, but some of your target customers will already have very negative reactions to ANY marketing email, so it is incredibly important that you go out of your way to make it clear that you are trying to communicate something that will benefit the recipient, not just a sales pitch you can justify legally sending them.

I have been doing roughly this for a few years now. It isn't always possible to achieve, but it is incredibly effective if you can get beyond thinking about who is at fault, who is guilty, who has wronged you.

Looking at my own behavior, it is almost always possible to find something I could have done differently that would have avoided an undesirable outcome. Over time this has improved my intuition of whether certain actions are better avoided, even if doing them is theoretically something that should be just fine.

Concrete example: you could complain about getting hit by a car yesterday, or you might re-examine what was so important that you decided that driving two hours a day was a good idea.

Obviously every song is in some way building on other previous works, but there are degrees of originality and contribution above and beyond the building blocks that a song draws from. Some songs seem to be just "beautiful component" + "harmonious other beautiful component" = "pleasant synthesis resulting in more beauty", while others seem to be "beautiful component" + "rotting vegetables" = "pretty rotting vegetables"...

Click-and-hold on the firefox search engine icon in the search field, and a list of engines appears. I clearly see "Add DuckDuckGo" as an option in that list while I am on the site, and you can slide the mouse over to that option and release. So yes, one click.

The important part of the quote is "for jailbroken devices." I haven't seen any solid numbers on how many people jailbreak, but the various quotes for the US at least seem to hover around 10%. That is pretty low.

I would be wary of throwing the word censorship around. This is nothing of the sort. Instapaper deciding not to interact with a particular website (whether foolishly, in this case, or maliciously) is hardly censorship. At worst it is simply sticking your tongue out in the general direction of someone you dislike.

It is far worse than this. For the better part of the history of the world, basic arithmetic is 1 man and 1 woman produce > 2 kids. Those kids grow up and even if one of them is happy to live in their parents' home, the norm, hell, the EXPECTED norm in american society is that the adult children go out and make their own home. How are they supposed to do that when there are no homes available because all their neighbors sitting on the local board decided that you can't build any new homes? This kind of selfishness is infuriating and utterly indefensible. A system that allows such situations to occur is undemocratic and un-civil.

Breath deep. Someone had an unpleasant experience working with someone else who is in a different timezone, who reportedly explicitly said "...Change it to a 5 second Sleep so I have something to give him the next time he complains!"

You had a bad experience working with someone in a different timezone, forced to deal with necessary changes through a broken web interface.

The common issue here is the frustration that both sides feel when forced to work with people through a long lag. Ever try playing a networked game with ping above 500ms?

Just not being able to talk to one another in the same timezone, let alone face to face, are big hurdles that many people have trouble overcoming, despite the best of intentions on both sides (and occasionally, yes, incompetence or malice of one or the other parties, or both).

Some day in the distant future perhaps there will actually be a non-photoshop 100% psd compatible editor. I thought I could just tell my designer to do File -> Export Layers as PNG, but that command in Photoshop is intentionally broken, churning for several minutes before producing even the first of many output files. In the meantime, while I like seeing how far Gimp has come, it just isn't an option for me.

Honest question: since all devices connecting to a WIFI network are by definition within a short distance of the router itself, is there a WIFI solution that uses pre-shared key cryptography? That seems to me to be the only truly unbreakable option.

You are welcome to your opinion, but on your suggestion I just went and looked at John Siracusa's blog and for this entire year we have: 1: a discussion about various ways you can read his Mountain Lion Review. 2: How to cook pasta. 3: summer movies. 4: summary of 2011. That's it.

He writes also on Ars. In 2012, he has posted a single article, his review of Mountain Lion.

Might I ask, and I am being completely sincere, what DO you read regularly for "perceptive analysis of apple products" that goes beyond once a year OS reviews?

A great recent example that appeared on HN was the typeface designed for road signs, which the designers then put through Germany(?)'s test suite for legibility at distance in various road conditions and determined the new font was objectively legible at greater distance than all previous standard road-sign fonts with which it was compared.

[By request, I found the original article: http://ilovetypography.com/2012/04/19/the-design-of-a-signag... ]

I don't know their real answer, but I thought of it as a psychological experiment; people are much more likely to join a social service if it already seems to have lots of users.

This experiment provides a huge number of people a way to say "well, if there were actually X people on the service then sure, I'd also become a dedicated user". If they hit their goal, all those people will have paid enough that they feel emotionally attached to justifying their decision via using the service.

It just might work. A service doesn't need to have EVERYONE, it just has to have enough people to be more interesting for all its participants than the alternative.

quote from your link: "In some countries black or near-black has been employed extensively"

he also calls the shadows on a tree trunk black, so it seems he is not really arguing in favor of #000 but in favor of the use of very dark monochromatic colors, including true black. Also ALL of his examples are completely black/white or grayscale images of PRINTED or PAINTED objects, which naturally all do not achieve #000.

His views are entirely personal, as are our own. Personally, I found the #000 in his Next Logo to be the worst aspect of the whole design, since its extreme contrast suggests a low-tech print process or an old EGA screen incapable of more nuance. This is an aspect of most of his logos that I have never really liked, the same extreme contrast and blockiness that makes his IBM logo look more like an old ASCII display in someone's garage than the representation of a bold and powerful company.

Meanwhile, in Japan, you get absolutely no monthly cost benefit for buying your phone up-front, the same monthly fees either way, and you get horrible per-minute pricing if you go prepaid (up to 2x the average post-paid per minute price).

The link below says that LG is about to introduce their own very very cheap HDMI compatible ips 27 inch, the IPS277L-BN for just 30,000 yen. OK in USD that's like $385, but you get HDMI and a real company behind it. Also that price is for Japan so who knows what the US price would be.

(in Japanese): http://watchmonoblog.blog71.fc2.com/blog-entry-2304.html

[edit: m3koval rightly points out that this monitor is low resolution so only really fit for gaming or video viewing. My mistake. ]