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mdenon Google's Shell Style Guide

Disagree with your disagree. There is a difference between the actual code and how the code is styled. It makes sense to have conventions on how to format a for statement but not where to add brackets - making them be on the same line or on their own line makes little difference to noticing bugs and is purely a stylistic preference.

mdenon Google's Shell Style Guide

That wouldn't be hard at all. All you need to do is assign a default style and create the diffs in that style.

The hard part is creating a tool that can change between styles. Such a tool would need to be made for every language separately which is a pain. I've been wanting to try something like this for years but have never built up the courage.

mdenon Show HN: My embarrassingly simple printscreen weekend webapp

I like it. I only wish there was the option to crop an image. Especially useful for people with multiple monitors.

mdenon NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

How would not using their products resolve the issue with the NSA? If people switched to other providers than other providers will get accessed like Google.

mdenon April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

I'm not sure how your response is actually addressing the suggestion to pop-up a warning. If the company is aware of the issue and there is no technical reason not to implement a warning, even if it would help out only .1% of the users, then why not do it? I would understand if it was some large feature and they didn't want to waste resources, but it's unlikely the case here (undoubtedly they keep track of how many files you have synced and they already have the ability to do desktop notifications).

mdenon Self-driving cars projected to reduce injuries by 90%, save $450B annually

Why would the premium be higher than what it is right now?

mdenon Deep C and C++ (2011)

I think the point was that mathematics relies on a small set of postulates from which you can derive everything else. Changing a postulate results in a separate system. The same is true in programming languages, but the number of postulates is very large compared to mathematics to the point that their utility is greatly reduced. And also there are so many languages each with its own postulate set that it's really inelegant when compared to mathematics.

Another way to put it is, learning the postulates for langx doesn't provide enough value for many to be worth doing.

mdenon Wysiwtfftwomg

Contenteditable fails in many ways, but it's still something quite awesome and provides a good basis to build on. I built myself a wiki system because I find the current ones to be a huge pain to edit and I'm using contenteditable as the main tool. No need for separate editing pages, markup languages, or other nonsense - just click edit and make the changes immediately. I agree that contenteditable could have been way better, or in the very least more consistent between browsers.

mdenon Scott Adams: How to Be Successful

I'm guessing that a system is just a repeatable goal. So perhaps in your case, the repeatable goal wouldn't be to lose weight as that would invariably lead you to dying, but rather to do something that makes you healthier every day. That could be something like eating healthier everyday or exercising for 15 minutes. This way you shifting from the goal of being X pounds lighter, to a system of being healthy.

mdenon Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

It's the libertarians who, more than any other group, take reality into account by acknowledging that we can't engineer a "perfect" society by using force against one another.

I doubt anyone reasonable even claims that a perfect society is possible - someone will always feel wronged regardless of their circumstance. I don't think it's unfair to say that the main function of a society is to reduce the likelihood that a person of said society gets wronged. Which brings the question of how does a society do that without enforcement of laws? If we accept the NAP is a law, who reprimands those who break it? Who actually defines what it is in the first place? Undoubtedly there are many different interpretations of it and it's not possible to achieve a feeling of fairness in a society if not everyone agrees on its basic structure and laws. If you feel like these are too basic of questions, feel free to link me to what you would consider a definitive explanation.

mdenon Perl 5 + Perl 6 = Perl 11

I thought Perl was stuck at 5.x since they can't use 6?

mdenon Perl 5 + Perl 6 = Perl 11

v(0) = 5

v(1) = 6

v(2) = 11

v(3) = v(1) + v(2) = 17

In general sequences, especially short ones, can have many ways to be generated, but I imagine this is the one the GP meant.

mdenon Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

It's a fair point that most libertarians aren't for the complete removal of the state. However, in my experience they seem to try to vastly simplify many issues by waving their hands and talking about the non-aggression principle as if that automatically solves everything. The truth is, while there may be laws which are unjust, unfair, or plain silly, most of them were created to meet a need or solve a problem. Sometimes it's very easy to forget that.

A good friend of mine is an anarcho-capitalist and while he is overall a very technical, very logical, and generally smart person, neither of us have managed to convince the other that their view-point is flawed. It's rather frustrating.

mdenon Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace

I don't understand the willful ignorance of libertarians who make the claim that the state doesn't do anything outside of extorting people and ruling with guns. Yes, there are problems with every single government ever made, and there will be for the foreseeable future, but there a lot of obviously good things that come as a result of having a state. Listing them seems silly, but apparently it's not considering how many libertarians share your view.

Things like protecting weaker parties through a court system, providing national infrastructure for the economic prosperity of everyone (as opposed to private infrastructure for the prosperity of few), national defense, food and water regulation, base level research and development, protection from criminals, corporate regulation, are only a few that immediately come to mind.

mdenon Git concepts simplified

I think in many ways it comes down to the way people think about and use the product. For me svn and perforce are way more of unholy messes than git is and I find them considerably more frustrating to use.

mdenon Rainyday.js

If it does it, it doesn't do it very consistently as I was specifically looking for that effect only to be disappointed. That being said, this is still a really cool demo.

mdenon HelloRun - A WebGL 3D Game

WebGL relies on javascript to run. Looking at http://hellorun.helloenjoy.com/js/hellorun.min.js and searching for "png" you get images like http://hellorun.helloenjoy.com/assets/station/lightmap1024.j... which looks like a pre-lightning computed texture. Looking at the vertex data (in format x,y,z(,w)) there seem to be only 2048 defined vertices, which is a tiny amount for a 3d game.

mdenon Nphysics – 2 and 3-dimensional rigid body physics engine in pure Rust

Out of curiosity, in what ways is Rust that much less uglier than C++? I've only looked through the docs and the code provided and it seems to be riddled with the same type of "ugliness" inherent to C++ - namely the ugliness symbolized by the need for all of the special characters like * and &. It seems like Rust has some nice syntax for pattern matching, but what else?

mdenon Periodic Table of the HTML Elements

I'm well aware that the periodic table has a lot of various information encoded into it as I'm pretty sure anyone who's gone through high school is as well. I am not sure why you think the tags table is trying to fool anyone... it was chosen symbolically and it looks visually better than any other similar attempt I've seen before.

Not everything needs to be pigeonholed into the "must make perfect sense" category.

mdenon Periodic Table of the HTML Elements

It's just a way to visualize information. I find this interesting to look at and also well organized (personally love the color coding and the asymmetry).

In either case, no reason to be negative. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you are commenting to critique, no reason to be a jerk.