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trothoun

134 karma · joined April 12, 2013

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trothoun··on Consumer Safety Notice for Nest Protect: Smoke and CO Alarm
If you think QA is ever complete, then it is clear you have never worked on a QA team. You can always come up with new ideas on how to break things.
trothoun··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
If this really was his personal decision, then he would have written the press release, and the chairwoman would have issued a press release expressing support.
trothoun··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
This is going to come back to bite us when the political winds start blowing the other way. I'm disappointed in how short sighted our community has proven itself.
trothoun··on Suspension of NASA contact with Russian entities
Umm... there was some collaboration. But characterizing it as "free" seems rather optimistic. Even the present reduced degree of collaboration represents, I think, a much closer tie to between the two countries space programs than ever existed during the cold war.

http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html

trothoun··on U.S. autism rate surges, CDC reports (1 in 68)
And even scientists can really only be be deeply familiar with the experimental basis for a few narrow fields of study. For all the rest, they too have to take it on faith.
trothoun··on Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move (2007)
I used my clamshell feature phone to login to my home pc via ssh. Granted, the typing experience was pretty painful, but it did work. People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone. It's just that the earlier versions of app stores, carrier decks, were managed by carriers who cared a lot more about preventing apps from interfering with their business than they did about providing their customers with good, useful apps. And they ran on operating systems that were customized or custom written by carriers who saw them primarily as a marketing tool useful for pushing their more expensive services.

http://www.midpssh.org/

trothoun··on Flood: Geometric visual programming, driven by a Scheme interpreter
Demos like this are cool, but they make me think that we'll never see a non-toy visual programming tool. Even a fairly simple bit of logic quickly becomes an incomprehensible soup of interconnections.

edit: Thinking about it a bit more, whats lacking in all the examples of visual programming I've seen is a clean way to build abstractions. It would take a while to learn to efficently read and style visual code just like it does with text based code. That I think i could get used to. The thing that I find alarming is the prospect of manipulating an ever growing graph.

trothoun··on The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years
I think this is why all of our recent presidents seem so similar once they are in office. They all have the same dirt on them. As with information revealed in the pentagon papers, I don't think we have much hope of decent governance until the cancer is excised.
trothoun··on Show HN: World Population with D3
Yeah, I have to agree I tried looking up demographic information about Chongqing and Chengdu and while they do seem to be growing, I didn't see anything that could explain a growth of that magnitude. Maybe it's an artifact of some interpolation method he's using? The source data he linked to seems only to go to 2000, so I'm not sure where the data for 2005 - 2015 came from.
trothoun··on The Observatory of Economic Complexity
Germany is both a big importer and a big exporter of dairy products. I guess this indicates that there isn't any substantial cost associated with cross border trading of these products?
trothoun··on Algebraic and calculus concepts may be better way to introduce children to math
For a good motivated treatment of calculus I'd recommend going back to Isaac Newton's Principia. It is surprisingly accessible, and really quite beautiful.
trothoun··on How our 1,000-year-old math curriculum cheats America's kids
Fortunately, TI continues to provide this to many students.
trothoun··on Pets vs. Cattle
It's not just on "factory farms" where animals raised for meat are considered temporary. If you are going to slaughter a pig in 18 months, you probably are going to be disinclined to form emotional bonds to it.
trothoun··on MtGox.com is offline
It may not be a hoax, but it is definitely wishful thinking.
trothoun··on Mt. Gox Resigns Bitcoin Foundation Board Seat
Like SEO :)
trothoun··on This Man's $600K Facebook Disaster Is a Warning For All Small Businesses
Presumably that 1% is continuously depleted by facebook's detection and deletion of fake accounts and continuously replenished by the creation or subversion of new accounts. A high turnover rate may drive the proportion of fraudulent activity on facebook still higher.
trothoun··on Your Path to a $16B exit? Build a J2ME App
This is also why Brazil is heating up so much in terms of start-up interest. It has a large population speaking the same language with significant income and a single government. And its government tends to be somewhat less nervous making (at least in some regards) than China's.
trothoun··on Ukraine protests: Before and after photos from Kiev's battle zone
With the notable exception of 1968 Democratic National Convention[1] I'm having trouble finding any news coverage of multiple injuries at a RNC or DNC. Care to provide references?

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Conven...

trothoun··on Amazingly insane spam email I just received
Also, a possible visit from the FBI for incitement.
trothoun··on US Supreme Court declines to hear appeal by patent troll
They also like cases that are purely questions of law, they tend to avoid cases that have unresolved questions of fact.
trothoun··on The Rise and Rise of Television Torture
The other thing is, it's not just the US that benefits from the status quo. Lots of allies get to ride on their coattails.
trothoun··on Bodily maps of emotions
Shame appears to be the spiderman emotion. Interesting.
trothoun··on On The Information and How We Operate
> So it is indeed ambiguous, and it would make sense to clean up, in a vacuum.

hmm... that seems analogous to saying that it's proper behavior for a compiler to silently delete references to uninitialized variables.

trothoun··on Sprint Preparing a Bid for T-Mobile US
Hasn't it been something like a decade since Sprint was last profitable? How do they have the money to do this?
trothoun··on Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger
Not to nitpick but artificial selection in plants started a lot earlier than Mendel[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#Developm...
trothoun··on New US spy satellite logo features world-devouring octopus
I found this[1] one to be particularly reassuring.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_pa...

trothoun··on No Girls Allowed
Would examples of large, unsuccessful marketing campaigns, be equally strong evidence that marketing does not affect our perceptions of cultural norms?
trothoun··on Small things add up: 4chan's migration to a cookieless domain
If the urls are guessable then someone could harvest images without having been given urls by authorized users.
trothoun··on Amazon Prime Air
Maybe they could do something like the Spirit and Opportunity rover's balloon mechanism to make it safer in case of accident. It would still be heavy, but it wouldn't be hard and it would have much greater air resistance so it would fall slower. Or maybe they could have helium canisters that inflate a balloon big enough to offset a portion of their weight. It'll probably be difficult but it seems like there are a lot of possibilities to explore.
trothoun··on Penny Arcade’s Insultingly Horrible Job
Maybe they are building a blacklist from the applicants and will post the real job description later.

If this were true I would be more at peace with the world than I presently am.

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