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stusmith1977on Flat-Earther's rocket lofts him 1,875 feet up

Wouldn't it have been more sensible to do the launch from somewhere nearer the edge of the earth?

stusmith1977on Pinterest’s Problem: Getting Men to Commit

I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.

The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.

(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).

stusmith1977on Ten years of Ubuntu

What was always worse was that the choices never came with any explanation. I remember a while back trying some flavour of Linux or other, and during installation it asked (paraphrased):

"Use Nautilus or Thunar?"

I imagine the story behind this is that half the Linux devs preferred the first, and half preferred the second, and so instead of the distribution having the balls to choose one, they forced they choice onto the user.

For the average user however, the choice read as:

"Open Mystery Box 'A', or Mystery Box 'B'? Warning: opening the wrong box will mean that many of the things you try to do simply won't work!"

Choice here is very bad: it makes the user feel powerless, yet simultaneously assigns blame to the user in the event that things go wrong.

stusmith1977on Announcing UberPool

And on desktop too. Page up / page down keys don't work unless you focus the page. There is a scrollbar within a scrollbar.

stusmith1977on I found a bug in the .NET framework and fixed it by hand-altering the DLL

In situations like this, you can report the bug to Microsoft Connect:

1. Submit bug report. 2. Wait six months. 3. MS tech will post a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release". 4. Wait two more years. 5. Bug report will be closed as "won't fix".

stusmith1977on GHC 7.8.1 released

I've found the "24 Days of Hackage" series incredibly useful - each day is a brief introduction to a useful Haskell library, many of which show off features of Haskell that aren't available in 'standard' languages. Even better, each one comes with working example source on GitHub, so you've got a starting point if you do want to experiment.

http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/

(I'm a Haskell beginner, currently experimenting with using Scotty, Persistent and Esqueleto to make a web API - and these articles have been so useful to me - I'm finally getting my head around monad transformers, using them to extend the standard Scotty one. Proud moment for me.)

stusmith1977on “Vacations are for the weak”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_insolvency_law#U...

and

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

stusmith1977on A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

I can't remember how tight I made it... but I would think you need a couple spare: one for the number of iterations, and another for the screen stride. But yes, spilling registers like SP and LR is a useful trick if you need it.

stusmith1977on A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

Reminds me fondly of the time I was writing assembler for the ARM2/3... it had such a nice instruction set that made hand-writing assembler pleasant.

It had a "barrel shifter" that gave you free shifts of powers of two, so you could calculate screen byte offsets quickly:

  // offset = x + y * 320
  ADD R0, R1, R2, LSL #8
  ADD R0, R0, R2, LSL #5
  // = 2 cycles

It also had bulk loads and stores that made reading/writing RAM cheaper. The trick there was to spill as many registers as you possibly could, so that you could transfer as many words as possible per bulk load/store.

  LDMIA R10!, {R0-R9}
  STMIA R11!, {R0-R9}
  // Transfers 40 bytes from memory pointed to by R10 to memory pointed to by R11,
  // And updates both pointers to the new addresses,
  // And only takes (3+10)*2 = 26 cycles to do the lot.

Happy days...

stusmith1977on Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google

Surely open-source handset OSes are just as vulnerable to patent attacks? If Firefox OS were to take off, it would immediately become a target for exactly the same sort of lawsuit.

stusmith1977on Americans Fall Behind In The 'Getting Older' Race

The article compares to other first world countries, where I seriously doubt there is a problem with (under-)reporting infant deaths.

stusmith1977on Kids Were Terrified of Getting MRIs. Then One Man Figured Out a Better Way

It's not just kids who are reassured by cosmetic changes. MRIs used to be called NMRs. People freaked out because of the word 'nuclear'.

stusmith1977on Why Your Startup Can’t Find Developers

The problem there is the word "allotment". How can you allocate in advance how many sick days to give? If you allot (say) four days sick each year, and an employee is sick three times, surely the rational choice towards the end of the year is to "use up" that allotment?

Without an allotment, employees will generally take a sick day when they're actually sick. Sometimes you'll notice someone who seems to take a lot of sick days. In that case you want to have a friendly chat with them - it's almost never the case that they're just taking free days, rather it's almost always situations like: they're not happy for some reason, they need flex working, they can't afford to repair a car and the commute is worse, they're suffering stress, etc etc. In other words, things it is useful to know about so you can help them (and hence help the company).

Sick day allotments are a way of ineffective managers avoiding confrontations with people: they just end up punishing everyone.

stusmith1977on Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algorithm, “Hummingbird”

Does "verbatim" mode approach what you need? Google won't attempt to guess what words it thought you meant in that mode.

stusmith1977on Intel proves once and for all that PCs are not coming back

Judges flaunt the law, surely? I mean, if you're wearing a huge wig and robes, you've got to be flaunting something.

stusmith1977on UK Porn Filter Will Censor Other Content Too, ISPs Reveal

The press could mention it, that would be a start. BBC news for instance barely mentioned the proposed blocking. The only stories to hit the front page (and then, right at the bottom in the Tech section) were the links to Huawei and the spat between the minister and the reporter. The actual proposed block has barely been mentioned. Apparently a baby being born warrants continuous headline coverage; loss of civil liberties gets a footnote.

stusmith1977on There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

And in fact, writing scads of dumb code is often the sign of a poor developer. It often follows from the "never turn back" mentality, that leads them to follow an initial poor choice of solution through to the bitter end.

stusmith1977on How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays

Steam Cloud Sync can be a bit flaky at times, which is annoying when you play something like Civ V on multiple machines.

stusmith1977on Why HN was down

I'm going to add step 5b - save what SQL you executed (against what server, and for what reason), ideally in source control, as an audit trail.

Otherwise, I end up having this conversation (which actually happened):

Him: <Big Client> is having troubles! Features X, Y, and Z aren't working! Me: Hmm, has anything changed? It was all OK on Friday. Him: No, nothing's changed. Me: Really? Him: Well I ran a bunch of scripts on Saturday while I was visiting them. Me: OK, so what exactly did you run? Him: Just a bunch of scripts.

stusmith1977on What happened with LEGO

Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff.

(Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).

stusmith1977on The joys of having a Forever Project

I'd add one more thing to this article: don't throw these projects away, even if they seem failed/doomed/incomplete. Store them somewhere. Back them up. Whatever. You might need them.

Back when I was a teenager, I wanted to write an art package for an obscure computer (Acorn Archimedes). I wrote the first version in BASIC, then decided to re-do it in assembler. The assembler I first used couldn't cope with the size of the project in the end, so I wrote my own assembler; at that point I discovered C, so wrote it in that. Unfortunately the C compiler I used was so full of bugs I decided to port LCC to produce ARM assembler, but then I needed a linker, so I wrote that as well. Got it all working lovely to the point where it could compile itself.

At university I figured Intel PCs were more useful than my obscure computer so... I forgot about it. Lost it.

And to this day, I can't help but wish I still had it... I had written, and lost, a complete C development system, faster than any of the other compilers/linkers I tried, small footprint (it had to fit in a machine with 4Mb RAM), and ARM chips are now everywhere. Damnit!

So please... save your work.

stusmith1977on Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

The UK did use legislation to gradually switch to the metric system, with certain exceptions.

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

One major way in which metrication is being introduced properly is via schools - nowadays schools generally only teach the metric system, and the generation below me genuinely do weigh themselves in kilos, and measure themselves in meters.

stusmith1977on Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You

The selling point would be that you might only need one car instead of two - which would make 25k more attractive than 2x20k. The use of a self-drive car isn't that it drives you to the office, it's that it drives itself back home for your partner to use.

stusmith1977on Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You

Agreed. As I understand it, these automatics kick in when there's a certainty of a crash ahead if no action is taken. In those circumstances, it's better to avoid the certain crash and take a risk on a uncertain shunt from behind.

On a similar note, in the UK, where most people have manual gearboxes, the advice for an emergency stop used to be to jump on the clutch and the brake, to prevent stalling. Nowadays you're taught just to stamp on the brake: in an emergency, who cares if you stall? Pushing the clutch can lead to the car "surging" if going downhill, so why risk it?

stusmith1977on You are committing a crime right now

I vaguely remember there was some discussion of this in 'Metamagical Themas' by Douglas Hofstader. It's been a while since if I read it, but if I remember correctly he drew some parallels between law and provability in maths - basically, you can either have a system of law which cannot cover everything you want to make laws about, or you have a system of law which does, but which has some undecidable laws. Feel free to correct if I've misremembered.

stusmith1977on The Quiet Ones

Hearos ( http://www.hearos.com/ ) do a really nice range... I find their foamy ones amazing, comfortable and blocking even quite load noises.

stusmith1977on Introduction to genetic algorithms (example in Javascript)

Bingo. So many genetic/evolutionary algorithms assume you need a large population with crossover to avoid these supposed 'local minima'.

Very often, the most efficient evolutionary search algorithm involves a population of one (or two, depending how you count them): generate a mutation, compare it to the current best. If it's worse, throw it away; if it's better or the same, keep it and throw the original away. Rinse and repeat.

Search for "neutral networks" for more information about research into determining the "shape" of the fitness landscape. (Unfortunately, Google throws in plenty of search results about neural networks and network neutrality).

stusmith1977on Ubuntu is coming back to Dell Laptops

I've got a Lenovo G770. Not particularly pretty but seems solid and has a nice big 17" screen for a decent price. I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu without problems.

stusmith1977on Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

It's a shame the website had a white background, and the video had a black background. The borderless, chromeless video could have looked awesome if it had the same background color as the webpage itself - it would have merged in nicely.

Instead the video stood out as a black box - it looked a little incongrous just 'stuck there' in the middle of the page.

stusmith1977on Retina MacBook Pro Review: The Age of the High-Resolution PC

It's a chicken-and-egg situation, agreed, It just seems really strange to me that they spent so much effort pushing and developing the software side, without putting any effort into the hardware, when the two clearly have to go hand-in-hand.

Microsoft had the software stack ready - imagine if they had released (via partners) high-dpi laptops and screens shortly afterwards? That actually might have made a Windows machine a compelling and desirable product, instead of just an expensive way to run a browser.