pattern

I really like this snippet from the justification for the symbol chosen: "APL apparently used +.×, which by combining a multi-character token, confusing attribute-access-like . syntax, and a unicode character, ranks somewhere below U+2603 SNOWMAN on our candidate list".

One of the reasons I have been such a fan of Python for so long is the relatively no-nonsense approach to design decisions that many others would have rushed through.

A meta-comment to your unrelated comment - there is a Chrome extension called "WhatFont"[1] that gives you a button you can click, which adds a tooltip to your cursor telling you what font it is hovering over! It's useful to be able to painlessly determine what beautiful font you're looking at :)

[1]: http://chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

Nothing an Amazon-Prime-Air-follower-and-grabber drone couldn't handle!

The parent wasn't claiming this; they were merely adding a single data point about a relevant topic! I for one had not thought about pre-filling the coupon code box before, and I'm glad the parent brought it to my attention.

To expand on your comment "rare diseases are actually quite common", I was struck by this in the article:

    More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans

That's almost 10% of Americans! I suppose this shouldn't have been surprising given the Birthday Paradox [1], but the ~1/10 statistic puts things into perspective for me.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

> A sense of wonder (sometimes jocularly or cynically > abbreviated to 'sensawunda') is an emotional reaction > to the reader suddenly confronting, understanding, or > seeing a concept anew in the context of new > information. [1]

I was unfamiliar with this concept! I can surely relate to the feeling though, especially in the context of seeing the beauty of a solution to a problem, maths or otherwise.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_wonder

Since I had to look it up: FTFF = Fix The &$%#ing Finder[1], a blanket term for OS X Finder woes!

[1]: http://www.applematters.com/article/ftff/

In TextMate (OS X), a Cmd+/ does the same thing as well! To the author's credit, he does mention his hack has "no tool dependencies".

Shameless plug: I wrote a short post on this exact subject two days ago[1]!

I also describe how to display the '{{' and '}}' strings in Jinja2, which is comically non-trivial :D

[1]: http://www.verdantrefuge.com/writing/2013/angularjs-custom-s...

My absolute favorite is Białowieża Forest [1] - I died laughing many many times, and I even learned a thing or two along the way. For me, nothing beats enlightening educational entertainment such as this.

[1]: http://idlewords.com/2012/02/bia%C5%82owie%C5%BCa_forest.htm

The navigation was so poorly executed that I didn't even realize there was more than one page! I admire people experimenting, but this feels like taking the idea 80% of the way there, and just kind of leaving things unrefined/unusable.

I love these kind of interactions; both listening and explaining equally! I find I can elicit these kinds of explanations from others by being actively interested, reading how they react and what they emphasize, and asking the right questions to really get at their passion.

I exhort everyone to strike up these kinds of conversions especially with strangers as often as possible - I guarantee you will learn something interesting :) Ever since I got the hang of it, it has really enriched my life.

I understand your point, but just because we all love Miyazaki films (the objective truth :D) doesn't mean we each don't have our own unique traits/interests/hobbies/etc. that provide a well-rounded cultural outlook.

I agree with your notion that in hiring one should maintain a good balance of breadth and culture fit!

What percentage of 20-30 year old males do you believe have played Portal (2), saw this posting, had the inclination to download the mod, and the inquisitiveness and persistance to actually complete the puzzle/test?

Rarely is a filter perfect, but this is likely a lot better than taking a random sample from the population :)

My main takeaway was the following:

    Z-index only works on positioned elements. If you
    try to set a z-index on an element with no position
    specified, it will do nothing.

I know I have scratched my head in the past trying to get z-index do what I want, and this knowledge probably would have helped!

I love seeing how other people express and communicate the things they are passionate about. I fully support people geeking out about whatever they please, as long as it makes them happy :)

The first time I have seen the word "fellatious" in the wild - thank you for bringing this gem to my attention :)

You begin your sentence with "Except" -- however you and the parent are saying the same thing :)

I would guess a lot of the initial customers for the iPad Mini won't be too sensitive to the price difference between the iPad Mini and a comparable Android device. They may base their purchase decision on other factors such as aesthetics, or specific features, or app availability.

Also, it looks like "tablet market" outstripped "ipad market" in late 2010[1]!

[1]: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ipad%20market,%20tabl...

As another datapoint, I have been using a crappy old Linksys WRT54GL plus another $20 router to do every single thing you mention (except for handling large numbers of clients - although I would guess it would handle at least 20+ no sweat).

It's all thanks to Toastman's[1] version of the Tomato firmware. I wrote up a nice article[2] about my experience with the whole deal!

[1]: http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/ [2]: http://www.verdantrefuge.com/writing/2012/toastman-tomato-fi...

I enjoy finding out what I like, and exploring why I like it. I posit that this is an inherent property of appreciation which allows one get more out of something.

The "meta-HN" stuff is an incarnation of this, and shows that HN is appreciated by a critical mass of people. This is a huge boon to the community as it leads to things such as people using Markdown syntax for clarity, proper spelling/punctuation, well thought-out comments, and often (but not always) a positive and constructive viewpoint aimed at advancing the discussion.

I don't think the parent was claiming that Spotify would necessarily outlive the record labels, but rather some new paradigm for music recording/distribution would disrupt the label's current stranglehold.

Would you mind elaborating on what you use for static generation, and how you get it into S3? Any links to your work? I feel this solution has a lot of merit, and I would like to see how others are doing it :)

My first reading of this interpreted it as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "Static websites are resilient enough to last for years, for better or worse!" I do agree with the premise in that most dynamic solutions will in relatively short order (~1-2 years?) show signs of their age - be it memory leaks, security breaches, or just lack of flexibility.

"Me Too Aside": A few months ago I finally started up my personal blog[1] which uses Hyde[2] (the Python brother of Jekyll) and is served via an S3 bucket. I found it extremely refreshing not to have to worry about yet another web infrastructure to maintain. It's exceedingly easy to update and maintain.

[1]: http://www.verdantrefuge.com/ [2]: https://github.com/hyde/hyde

For those such as myself that didn't catch the reference, nor hear about this the first time around: "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle" [1].

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

To the parent and anyone else who hasn't experienced the wonders of `pip`, check out the article "Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip" [1]. All three of these tools are invaluable for even the most trivial of Python projects, and make developing in Python much more enjoyable.

[1]: http://www.clemesha.org/blog/modern-python-hacker-tools-virt...

I agree with this. I like knowing exactly what all the pieces of my stack are, and how they mesh together.

If someone is churning out websites right and left I could see this being a more interesting tool, as it seems to be more powerful that any "boilerplate generation" scripts I would write myself.

The pain point of managing dependencies is indeed non-trivial in my experience, so I will keep an open mind for tools that look to solve this.

Random stream-of-consciousness idea: I create a new directory, and in it a text file containing the following on separate lines: "jQuery html5boilerplate AngularJS". I then run a build command to pull all these resources together in a sane way. This would allow me the fine-grained control I prefer, help ease the tedium of fetching dependencies, and obviate the need for a stream of "yes/no" questions at the terminal. This functionality may exist already, and it seems like it could be built by leveraging the logic being Yeoman, but with a different "UI".

Food for thought!

For myself, I would broaden this and say that almost every link I visit on HN, or every forum post I read leads to more than 1 additional link. Thus three windows of Chrome open with 10+ tabs each :)

I find this drill-down effect to be quite illuminating, if not productive. Strangely, it seems to provide both depth and breadth of topics in relatively equal measures.

This isn't too far from the truth! I make extensive use of dotjs[1] to inject my own CSS rules into web sites that I use frequently. ~65% of what I do is simply hiding useless divs/ads/flash and removing background colors, with the other 35% being mostly typographic tweaks (`line-height` and `font-size` being popular candidates here).

[1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/

I'm on OSX/Chrome21, and it is quite hard to read for me as well. In addition to exploring other font options, I would recommend you play with the `line-height` css property to give the text some breathing room!

In the article "Secret Symphony: The Ultimate Guide to Readable Web Typography" [1] the author covers `line-height`, line width, proportions, and stresses the importance of getting typography right for to your readers. The article then goes into some golden ratio stuff, which may be a little more than you are interested in, but give it a look!

[1]: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography....