fendrak

This strikes me as a good mix of Balsalmiq (www.balsalmiq.com) and Photoshop.

One of my pet peeves is getting mockups from designers that clearly fail to take the actual abilities of browsers into account. Hopefully, this can change that, while still giving them the design freedom they want!

Here's the accompanying Netflix blog post:

http://blog.netflix.com/2012/06/announcing-netflix-open-conn...

One suggestion: make the input box have a type of 'password'. I was only a bit put-off by seeing my plaintext password staring me in the face!

This appears to me to be an implementation of a gap buffer:

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

I actually just implemented one in Python on top of the array module, planning to use it in a text editor:

https://github.com/jasontbradshaw/gapbuffer

This is all well and good, but it doesn't appear to add support for the one thing I've often wanted in Python: proper closure support for functions within functions.

Most people can't fathom what would lead a person to do this -- those people pick new surroundings, and don't see a reason modify their existing ones to suit their needs.

This is what sets engineers apart.

I don't think it's as bad.

I use a Pro at work, and have used friends' Airs at times. Since the Air is much thinner, I don't recall the hard edge being a problem.

As always, best to just walk into a store and try it out!

Right, but he's saying that if Earth's own signals fail to propagate even outside our solar system, alien signals will have to be exponentially more powerful than ours to even stand a chance of being received. The distance from Earth to Saturn is tiny in comparison to the distance between planetary systems.

Beautiful!

A suggestion, though:

Use the whitespace to the right of the status codes to display their explanations, rather than linking to a new page; it would be easier to browse this way.

When I read

  I have structured my city into smaller circular satellite cities (C1 to C6) which in turn are placed within a circle *with the airport at the center.*

I found myself wondering how happy the inhabitants would be about constant overhead air traffic, not to mention the crash risk for the immediately surrounding buildings.

A true blackout would be hellish: I don't know that there's a day that goes by that I don't read something on Wikipedia (which is the point, of course).

A simple, but effective, solution would be to simply change the site's style to draw all article text with a black background, a la redacted documents.

If this was done, users could still manually highlight using their browsers to view the text (and screen readers would still work just fine), but the effect would be still be striking, to say the least.

The rebellious nature of Unix sharing in the early days taught an important lesson for would-be sharers today: either take pains to make sure your software can be used by anyone who wants to, or risk being shackled by lawyers and corporations who don't want it to be used.

makerbot has the distinct advantage of having open-sourced a (largely) physical product. For me at least, paying them for the bits and pieces to put their printer together would be an order of magnitude less effort than compiling and installing some software downloaded from the internet. They still offer a valuable service in manufacturing parts, and hence don't have to just sell support to make a living.

Is it just me, or have all these implementations of fast Fibonacci servers missed the original intent of the 'Cancer' article? As I read it, it was more of a commentary on giving novice concurrent programmers enough rope to hang themselves than on the capabilities of Node itself.

This is why probability is such a useful math: it turns our intuitive reasoning on its head and gives us solid descriptions of the processes at hand. Another great example of probability in action is the Monty Hall Problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem). Totally unintuitive process, but unarguable results.

Being a software developer sometimes feels like an especially thankless position -- if you're doing your job well, users never think of you.

The best way I've found to learn a language is to use it for some non-trivial project. A good place to go for varied programming challenges is http://projecteuler.net/. The problems are generally math-related, but lend themselves nicely to programmed solutions. These help get you familiar with the syntax, and once you've got that out of the way learning the libraries is only a matter of using them.

I first learned C# at an internship last summer, and I did it by spending a solid week making a 'music database', basically a toy application that was a GUI front end to a SQL database. I learned how C# interfaced with databases, its threading model, the event system, the go-to data structures, etc. With a bit of time, a non-trivial goal directed towards your area of interest, and access to Google and Stack Overflow, there's little reason to effectively take a course in a programming language.

This approach may not be as structured as what you're hoping for, but for me it has been the most practical. I took a course on C++ at my university a year or so ago, programmed some trivial applications for it, passed, and came out with little practical knowledge or understanding of the language. Maybe that has soured me on PL courses though, so your mileage may vary :)

Bitcoins breach the divide between the physical and digital worlds, and it seems that when that happens the old guard throws a fit (cf. digital music/games).

In an ideal future, we'd have something like x86, but for graphics hardware. Standardizing the assembly language would go a long ways towards encouraging good compiler design and third-party libraries for rendering.

"Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world."

This is true, but for one very simple reason: at the time of these inventions, there was no other option. If someone needed a heart operation that required stopping the heart, they would die. If someone needed dialysis after kidney failure, they died. Rapid applications come in the face of dire consequences. In these cases, almost anything was better than death.

Exactly, that's why UNIX is for knights! Those who use it (at least, via the terminal) eventually become knights, and it's through that process that the curve shown in the article develops.

The reason we become experts as something (interacting with a computer here) is that we spend time thinking about it. By making user interactions harder, we're actually training people to think in a way that will allow them to extrapolate simple solutions to larger problems in the future.

Knights-in-training learned with heavier swords than they'd use in battle, so that when battle came they'd be able to wield their swords effortlessly.

This would find its best use in cell phone cameras. I don't remember the last time I took a non-blurry picture with one...

At what point will LibreOffice and OpenOffice diverge far enough for LibreOffice to stop adopting the improvements OO creates? At what point will these projects truly diverge? Until then, I see little reason to use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, besides on philosophical grounds.

"I don't have conclusive data on radiation but absolutely we have measured ~12 kW (at steady state) of energy produced with an input of about just 400 watts."

Free energy? Something smells fishy...

Alternatively, if you know you're going to want to do this beforehand, check out the 'nohup' command. It does basically the same thing with any command it's given.

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

This page demonstrates a true hacker ethic: playing with interesting phenomena to find out how they work. Aren't we lucky that you don't need electronics to hack!

Is it just me, or would Xmarks and Delicious make a good match? Both live in the same realm, and both have large and interesting data sets. I know Xmarks has been purchased, but would a match like this make sense?

Something that's always struck me as odd is the "importance" of prime numbers. It seems so trivial that a number having only 1 and itself as common divisors would be useful or special. Nevertheless, they're important indeed.

In other words, I'm struck by the ability of mathematics to generate such apparent complexity from simple principles :)

My Multiagent Systems class at UT Austin (taught by Peter Stone) discussed the Kiva system, along with many, many other topics pertaining to AI today.

A couple of videos about Kiva: http://www.raffaello.name/KivaSystems.html

A paper on Kiva: http://www.raffaello.name/Assets/Publications/CoordinatingHu...

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Courses/344Mfall10/assignme... has all of the readings for the class (with more on the 'resources' page). If you want to learn something about AI, it's certainly a good place to start!

If you're more into the algorithms side of AI, you should certainly read AI: A Modern Approach (http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approac...). It's a text book, don't get me wrong, but it clearly explains many relevant algorithms in AI today with accompanying pseudocode and theory. If you've got a CS background, it's a great reference/learning tool. I bought mine for a class, and won't be returning it!