iconjack

The explanation and the Python code were just fine but I was 100x more impressed by his keyboard performance. I still hit backspace at least once per line.

Not to mention the distraction it causes to many of those around you.

Mr. Edamaruku is a coward. If he believes in his cause and has a complaint about the wonderful miracles of India, he should man up and return home to stand trial before his own country's system of justice. —John Kerry

How are you searching for images? I used !images but it just sent me to Google Images.

This site had me going until I recognized that guy from Maron.

Does Stormpath have a painless way to extract user data? I worry about lock-in.

Nothing says "I love you" like a valentine made of dollars signs.

Finally! A video game for women.

The blame resides on the media and its partnership with an undiscerning public. Time after time, the same experts are trotted out, no matter how awful their track record. This is at its worst when it comes to politics, unsurprisingly.

As a prime example, remember all the experts who got Iraq wrong? They were wrong about everything: WMD, cost, duration, effects, etc. Fast forward to the brink of the next war—instead of hearing from the people who were right, we're once again bombarded with the opinions of the wrong. Cheney and Rumsfeld were both on tv constantly spouting their expertise on Libya, Syria etc.

This happens in just about every field, time after time. It's no wonder people don't care what the so-called experts think.

I know he has America's best interest at heart because of all the flags. Had he just had one or two flags, I would have been skeptical. But five! And they are large ones too. Plus a lapel pin for good measure.

Ironically, the question you linked to is exactly the kind that gets closed so often on StackOverflow as being "not a real question" or some such. Thankfully, when they close something it doesn't get deleted.

I wonder why Mother Jones went to so much trouble to not mention his name.

Their page says you can get a US keyboard layout but I can't figure out how to order one like that. I could live with the UK layout if it weren't for that key in between the Z and left-shift.

Chrome here and I couldn't see the slinky either.

Thank God! They no longer whip the search box across the screen the moment I enter a character. That was one of worst UX design choices I've seen. I know they were just making room for a longer search string, but to yank it like that gave me whiplash.

While TSA are examining my shoes and scanning my bum, they let through without fanfare my carry-on device: a solid brick of chemicals surrounded by advanced electronics including a radio receiver.

Seriously, I'm no bomb expert but wouldn't laptops still be the most fruitful terrorist attack vector? Mine laptop is 6 lbs and has never been given a second glance.

I like your philosophy, but I think this counterexample is misleading. The Hanoi puzzle is an old favorite, largely because it lends itself to a surprisingly short, recursive solution. If your goal is merely to churn out the steps, then an OO implementation is easily mocked as overkill, but that's because you went into the implementation with the solution already worked out. If your intention was instead to build a program with a UI for playing around with the pieces, moving discs around willy-nilly and perhaps adding more rods, then Rod and Disc classes present themselves quite naturally. In this more real-world setting I think an OO design would be quite elegant and flexible.

That was my first reaction too. I say that as a fan of both Stephen Wolfram and his baby, Mathematica. If there's one thing I've learned over ten years of using this product, it's that Wolfram does not give away Mathematica. They enforce their student- and home-version rules like nothing else I've purchased. And it's damned expensive in a pool full of very powerful, free alternatives.

But I don't know what he could be up to. Getting people hooked? Seems like running Mathematica on underpowered hardware could leave a bad taste in people's mouths.

The Simpsons in CSS isn't development advice, it's a piece of art that you can learn some advanced CSS features from. Click on "How I did it" at the bottom.

A few people in this thread say they are having a hard time embracing Bill as a good guy because of the monopolistic business practices of Microsoft in the 90s. To be honest, I've never quite understood the reasoning behind the charges made against the company brought by the DOJ or by the company's detractors.

There was a surge of hate for Microsoft back then that was frequently expressed in forums on the fledging web and in the newsgroups. Very often you'd see complaints about Microsoft being a monopoly, followed by (in the same post), a pitch for Linux or Mac or every once in a while some other system. “Linux is better than Windows, and it's free!” This left me scratching my head. So there's a superior, less expensive alternative to Windows—what's your definition of monopoly again? And what of OS/2? Runs Windows apps better than Windows, says IBM, a not so small competitor. (For the youngsters, IBM was a large computing corporation of the time, once the very symbol of market dominance.)

The judgment the DOJ eventually won forced Microsoft to untangle IE from Windows. While there's no doubt IE had a huge advantage by piggybacking on every copy of Windows, I say “so what”. Can anyone imagine Apple being ordered to not ship nor require iTunes on the iPhone?

Gates wanted to kill Netscape Navigator because it made business sense. Probably every company wants to knock off their competitors, whether they come out and admit it or not. Look what Jobs did to Flash. I don't mean to pick on Apple. You should read about some of the dirty tricks pulled by Nintendo, IBM, Dell, etc. More than likely every company of any size has some contemptible actions in their history; these are just ones I happen to know about.

I like Bill Gates. At the same time, I can see how some people wouldn't like him. But let's keep things in perspective. We're lucky to have a hyper-intelligent, eminently competent man at the helm of the world's largest foundation.

I saw this puzzle when I was kid, in a Martin Gardner book. Back then it was an inch worm instead of an ant. When I saw the answer, it blew my mind at first. Later I understood how it was related to the fact that the harmonic series diverges, and it became less mind blowing, but it's still a little mind blowing—because it's still a little mind blowing that the harmonic series diverges.

It became one of my favorite puzzles, and I tried it on friends and family. I certainly never thought it could have "real-world" applications.

But then it occurred to me, people were solving this puzzle every day.

Think of an ordinary loan. Each month, you make a payment that's part interest and part principal. At first it's mostly interest, then the ratio shifts over time, the final payments being nearly all principal.

You normally start with a loan amount (principal), an interest rate, and a loan duration (typically 180 or 360 months). From these parameters, you figure the monthly payment, a process called amortization. Part of the payment goes towards interest, part towards the principal.

Each month you're required to service the loan, which means to pay (at least) the interest. That's the cost of renting the money. Some loan arrangements allow you to pay down the principal at your own pace. If you only ever pay interest, the principal will remain unchanged, and the loan will go on forever. This is the Netflix model: they don't care how long you keep a disc—you're paying rent on it every month. Many people pay more than the monthly payment from time to time. The principal will be reduced by this extra amount.

The worm has taken out a loan. The twist is, we don't yet know the principal, nor the total amount to be paid, which corresponds to the final rope length. Instead, we know the payment: 1 yard. The interest portion varies, but the worm consistently pays down the principal 1 inch each pay period.

Some of the added yard (monthly payment) appears in front of the worm (interest portion) some behind it (principal portion). Stretching the rope uniformly has the effect of servicing the interest. At first, most of the newly added rope appears in front of the worm, but as with the ordinary loan, the back/front ratio increases over time.

That the worm will eventually reach the end of the rope is now evident. If your interest payment is taken care of, then even a small monthly pay-down of the principal will eventually pay off any size loan.

Writing is like a hard disk. Before that, everything was volatile RAM.

Interesting that the responses on to @KirstyWark's tweet are largely pro-Greenwald, while the responses to @BBCNewsnight's are pro-Wark.

[1] https://twitter.com/KirstyWark/status/385786002456842240

[2] https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/385885262565216256

Control key is the wrong place.

That may or may not be his prerogative, depending on the laws where he bikes.

"You can outrun his motor, but you can't outrun his motorola."

This is absolute nonsense. The US president, wrapping himself in the role of commander in chief, does just about anything he wants if it's even loosely connected to war or security, with or without congressional approval. Surveillance. Torture. Black sites. Assassination. Drone murders. Infinite detention. If he wanted Gitmo closed, he could close it. Congress won't give him the budget? Fine, he could order the closing as a military operation. He doesn't want to take the political heat. I voted for him (2008), but he is without testicular fortitude on this issue.

This is a very old trick. According to Knuth, it goes back to at least 1961, where it was found in IBM programming course notes in a more general form that includes a mask:

x ← x ⊕ y, y ← y ⊕ (x & m), x ← x ⊕ y

The mask determines the subset of bits that get swapped.

What do you mean, a dead user? I was just quoting from the document, as an example of writing some might find obnoxious. Personally I find it rather entertaining.

Wow, more people writing Haskell than HTML. I'm impressed.