xtho

The e-mail pops out on your desktop pc or whatever you use. You can then copy it to the kindle via usb or whatever you prefer.

I don't know. I think it would be better to have ruby 1.8 and ruby 2.0 around and to state clearly that some code requires this or that version than having to deal with ruby 1.9 that is still close to 1.8 but not close enough not to break code.

It's not a habit but when I think 30 years back I'd actually say that what killed most of my creativity are computers and the Internet. They simply offer too many distractions and cannot replace the intimacy of working with pencil and unlined paper. But maybe it's just the way I use it -- e.g. that I answer questions like yours and follow sites like hn etc. They offer pleasant/stimulating distractions but on the whole ... Maybe it's a good idea to display your question as screen saver.

Nice quote although my habits were much better when I was 30 than they are now.

Yes, that question was an easy one.

Allow users to add tags to posts. Make it possible to restrict the posts on the frontpage (when logged in) to a list of tags.

With the introduction of additional data structures (lists, dictionaries that can also be used for prototype-based programming) in vim7, I don't think vimscript is that bad. And you can also use python/ruby/perl/tcl/scheme/lua/whatever when you have the proper version of vim.

> The best hot water kettle w/ temperature control

I'd suggest to forget anything hi-tech when drinking tea. Better go for a small, plain teapot like this one: http://www.everyonestea.com/data/everyonestea/image/ETS/teap...

Since vim integrates with the world and doesn't try to rebuild it in lisp, you can use the google command line client. An example from the docs (from the command line):

google docs edit --title "Shopping list" --editor vim

Considering how they implemented closures, I wonder what that revolution would look like.

Something went wrong when they built the earth. It shouldn't be spinning.

From the page: "George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. ... George Dantzig (himself the son of a mathematician) received a Bachelor's degree from University of Maryland in 1936 and a Master's from the University of Michigan in 1937." Not exactly my definition of somebody ignorant.

:-)

The existence of a black swan doesn't imply that swans are usually black.

A. "There are examples where newcomers to a field found a novel solution that senior experts have missed."

B. "It is often the ignorant who succeeds."

B does not follow from A. Not even in mathematics where people use to say that you have to prove yourself worthwhile by the age of 25 or it won't happen.

> You have to spend a career following the party line in the hope that ...

This is a slightly different discussion but IMHO in many fields (e.g. medicine) contemporary science has little to do with genious or insight but rather is an industrial effort ... and that _often_ isn't fun.

> eat at a Europeans house

I like the notion but do you actually think that it makes no difference whether you are in Italy, France, Germany, Finland, Poland, or the UK?

> It's often the foolhardy and the ignorant that [...] sometimes end up succeeding.

Please name some examples. How often is sometimes? What is their probability of success compared to that of domain experts?

> Rolling release means that you don't have to do distribution upgrades.

This goes beyond the OP's question. How does arch handle changes in essential components like the switch to upstart in ubuntu? Does this work well with rolling releases?

    Logic programming languages [...] have not had 
    significant impact on the computer industry.

    Mercury is a new logic/functional programming language

Mercury is "new" and admittedly interesting since 15 years now. Please somebody update the blurb.

It think it's more like "abandon Perl/php/javascript/whatever in favour of Python/Ruby/Lisp/whatever".

As long as there aren't more than 10 books written about the yet unborn data-cruncher saviour and as long as the brand new alternative isn't adopted in courses, I wouldn't bother -- unless you want to be the saviour's father (i.e. developer) of course.

Pressing <a-s-f10> works ok with gnome. Or run either:

    silent !wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,fullscreen

or

    silent !wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -b add,maximized_vert,maximized_horz

But isn't that the point of a social news website that the community (whose members should of course have similar preferences as you have) does the filtering for you by upvoting interesting articles. Otherwise I could run such a filter over a collections of rss feed aggregators, couldn't I? By using a social news website, users IMHO implicitely claim that community-based filtering works better than any algorithm could, don't they?

I just tried to send an e-mail. After a few seconds I got tired looking at the "Loading" label, so I switched to html mode. I personally wouldn't say it's slow. I'd rather call it broken.

There still is the question of how much time you're willing to spend to hunt down bugs in the interpreter/standard library/framework or to work around certain idiosyncracies that once upon a time might have looked like a cool idea. Will a "good coder" tolerate more or less such wtf moments?

Interestingly I recently attended a talk by Loic Wacquant[1] about prisons in the US, the US as penal state. This somehow fits.

[1] http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/

I personally think it's rather irritiating that you go off on such weird reasoning when somebody offers you a place to stay. The difficulties with that line of reasoning become obvious if you start thinking about whether Turkey or Marroc have been free of guilt during the past 100 years. (Although that would be weird reasoning in itself.)

Anyway, if you had ever been to Vienna you would know that the people there aren't oblivious to the events of WWII. And greeting somebody with Yes/Ja isn't all too unusual in Vienna. I also wouldn't assume a girl selling bread in a Viennoise bakery is necessarily Austrian who speaks fluently German. The simple assumption that she had to be Austrian demonstrates a certain nationalist/racist bias on your part.

He blogged about cleaning up his (home) office.

The characters you listed are defined in latin-1. They really don't serve as a good example for the urgent need to use unicode.

Some people call that innovation.

You should really ask that question on Digg, Ask Yahoo, and maybe the Bing support forum.

> "cost to society" would be more directly attributed to the increased time of travel

That's probably what he meant but it's not necessarily how you have to read the quote in the parent comment. I'm still not convinced that a speed limit of 50 would by a bad thing but maybe that's a cultural thing. My memories of my economics class are fading so I cannot counter your argument about the stability of the increase.

You like the analogy because a speed limit of 50 would result in a decrease of fatalities due to car accidents? I guess that's what he meant with "cost to society" since IIRC more fatalities result in a higher gross national product.