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dennyabrahamon The Rust Belt Theory of Low-Cost High Culture

How are low cost concerts and museums funded? Are donors sufficient? Is it the low cost of living and resulting reduction in staff costs? Is it sustainable in the long run?

dennyabrahamon Questions with Vim’s Creator, Bram Moolenaar

neovim is in the process of several major under-the-hood refactorings to enable larger scale changes. If it's not immediately apparent to you what the team is working on, you can see the project goals and progress thereupon on the project tracker.

https://waffle.io/neovim/neovim

dennyabrahamon Show HN: Homogenius – Packer/unpacker to reduce the size of JSON

MsgPack is great, but pure JSON compaction methods like this or transit can be used directly in a browser.

dennyabrahamon Apply dog vision to photo of Robert S. McNamara

yes, it's one of the reasons they articulate and constantly wet their nostrils.

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/4/291.full

dennyabrahamon Ruby Gem Configuration Patterns

This pattern is meant to enact a single, global configuration, so the extra allocations are not likely to affect performance noticeably.

dennyabrahamon Clochure — A Better Clojure

https://github.com/videlalvaro/clochure/#clochure---a-better...

It's not serious: this was an april fools' day joke from earlier this year.

dennyabrahamon Swiss watchmakers – An industry ripe for a shake-up

Whatever you think the future of timepieces, there are few other objects that hold such palpable, visible evidence of both cleverness and craftsmanship. The most exciting bit about it is that though we don't currently have a large-scale watchmaking industry in the United States, there is some entrepreneurial effort to change that:

http://shinola.com/

http://www.hagerwatches.com/page16/index.html

dennyabrahamon Get Started Writing iOS Apps With RubyMotion

What I'm personally interested in is how well can you write pure ObjC apps while using RubyMotion's build and test infrastructure. I've spent some time searching, but I haven't been able to find many people talking about or doing it, at odds with the real-world interest I've seen so far.

Has anyone spent time using RubyMotion to simplify writing ObjC apps?

dennyabrahamon Where Digital Mars (language D) gone?

moreover, http://dlang.org works fine. is index0 significant in some way?

dennyabrahamon Fake S3 – Save time, money, and develop offline

I can only imagine this is specific to scenarios where you have to manipulate s3 objects directly and the fog::storage abstraction used for s3 isn't adequate (though I could not example such a scenario specifically)

dennyabrahamon Big Data's invisible open source community

Is there another data-specific conference you know of that has a stronger technical grounding?

dennyabrahamon Visualized Git practices for team: branch, merge, rebase

I'm not certain this is due to the particulars of the workflow of the team I was working with, but one of the benefits I saw of rebasing over regular merging was that rebasing let us resolve conflicts at the point of the commit in which they emerged, rather than in a merge commit at the end.

dennyabrahamon My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

I believe, at least for certain newer models, Microsoft's driver will correct the acceleration curve.

I personally use a Logitech and it seems to do the same.

dennyabrahamon The condescending UI

I'm wary of the recommendations in this article. If someone repeating a fact you've heard elsewhere makes you feel patronized, you're an outlier. The greater portion of your users, unless you're in a niche field, will need that repetition. Moreover, if we live long enough to need that help ourselves, we can count ourselves lucky.

We are not necessarily our users.

dennyabrahamon How Badoo built a billion-dollar social network on sex

Agreed. I hope I'm not alone in believing that the success of facebook---and myspace before it---heavily depended on leveraging this advice. They're definitely not bad examples to follow.

dennyabrahamon Ruby is beautiful (but I'm moving to Python)

sciruby is once again in active development

http://sciruby.com/

dennyabrahamon How to turn a biased coin into a Fair Coin

i'm not sure if i understand the problem. couldn't you just take the inverted result of every other flip?

dennyabrahamon How to create a (fictional) language in one day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain http://www.asha.org/practice/multicultural/Phono.htm

I don't write a lot of fiction anymore, but one of the best ways to generate names is to create a phonemic inventory and use markov chains to generate names from it. there are a couple such generators online that use established corpuses, but it shouldn't be too hard to write.

dennyabrahamon Apple Event for iPhone 5 announcement on October 4th

didn't they just do an mbp refresh this year?

dennyabrahamon The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

Original thread

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k70dh/whats_the_b...

dennyabrahamon The Secret To Rails OO Design

what i found odd about the original, that's clarified here, is that it's not really separating a concern. when, for moderate amounts of data, for nontrivially complex applications, you want to improve the performance of a call like this, you'll be digging into arel and lazy enumeration, both of which depend on how you access the datastore via activerecord.

dennyabrahamon How to charge clients: flat fee vs. hourly rate?

This is definitely my favorite system when I can get clients to sign on to it. It manages expectations, defines scope, and ensures communicative development at the same time.

I also worked for a firm that sold sprints whose point velocity would automatically adjust to account for point value fluctuations.

dennyabrahamon First Demonstration Of Time Cloaking

the abstract is clearer http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.2062.

here's the relevant bit:

Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking was proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time to produce a "time hole" in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer. This approach is based on accelerating and slowing down the front and rear parts, respectively, of the probe beam to create a well controlled temporal gap in which the event occurs so the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event.

dennyabrahamon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (July 2011)

Didn't http://jobs.usethesource.com/jobs replace the whoishiring bot?

dennyabrahamon Setting up Django with gunicorn, nginx, supervisord and fabric

thanks!

dennyabrahamon Nobody Understands REST or HTTP

iiuc, two resources can contain the same value, (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...) so you're not constrained by the number of identifiers with which you can reference a single entity. furthermore, it's debatable whether the versioned identifier hierarchy adheres to the principles of HATEOAS and discoverability, so practicality probably rules when implementing such an API.

dennyabrahamon Setting up Django with gunicorn, nginx, supervisord and fabric

I'm unfamiliar with python and supervisord, but is supervisord able to manage the status of gunicorn and its child processes without explicitly being given the gunicorn pid? I've been investigating doing the same in Rails (I'll likely use bluepill) and I'd like to understand how this is done in the python ecosystem.

dennyabrahamon The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle.

when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.

dennyabrahamon Erjang - A JVM-based Erlang VM

in an earlier talk, @drkrab said the project began as an exercise in learning erlang rather than to meet a production need

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/thorup-erjang

dennyabrahamon Erjang - A JVM-based Erlang VM

this reminds me of the effort to port erlang to android. both projects are of questionable utility, but so is climbing mount everest

http://www.burbas.se/artiklar/erlang-for-the-android-plattfo...