jgfoot

10 ms·

1.
by jgfoot 14y ago
OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any English speaker. I'm thinking of lawyers, who want to be able t
2.
by jgfoot 14y ago
No, that list of steps is wrong. Google Wallet doesn't require you to unlock your phone or launch the Wallet app. You just hold your phone up to the reader and enter a PIN.
3.
by jgfoot 14y ago
The old PalmOS also had a global find option. The OS would call every app that registered for this function and pass it the query. Problem was, this meant that having a single buggy app on your device would cause Find to crash for everyon
4.
by jgfoot 14y ago
Was the problem that they were "unable to adapt to the new world," or was the problem that they editorially went off the deep end? Readers abandoned Newsweek as Newsweek's quality declined. Perhaps the one drove the other--with fewer read
5.
by jgfoot 14y ago
You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. Also, it looks like the scan option is not available for Ukr
6.
by jgfoot 14y ago
I have been bike commuting for nine years. The biggest things that change since the initial rush of delight? First, as time goes on, you care a lot more about safety. Newbies may write about how they can meditate or listen to music while
7.
by jgfoot 14y ago
I commute to work on bike every day, but I still am a happy member of my city's bike share program. Even though I have a bike locked in the garage under the building, I use bikeshare to go to meetings at other buildings in the city during
8.
by jgfoot 14y ago
Salon published in 2003 a great series of articles by John Sundman about the Loebner Prize. He describes a two-time winner, "ALICE," in a way that doesn't inspire awe for the creator's programming achievements: """Wallace’s theory of A.I.
9.
On Vacation and Sick? European Court of Justice Says, Take Another(nytimes.com)
2 points by jgfoot 14y ago|0 comments
10.
by jgfoot 14y ago
The Stanford Prison Experiment still gets a lot of ink, but unfortunately the criticisms of it do not. I recommend this article: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker82.html """over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Expe
11.
by jgfoot 14y ago
But remember that War and Peace was not originally written in English, and the quality of translation matters a great deal. With Russian literature especially, the quality of translation varies widely, and some of the best translations int
12.
by jgfoot 14y ago
You don't have to imagine a horse expert getting upset about unrealistic portrayals of horses. Check out this take on the Spielberg film _War Horse_ for a lack of "agricultural realism:" "Ploughing that stony virgin (never ploughed) fiel
13.
by jgfoot 14y ago
Perhaps darcs' most prominent user base is the guys who work on GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. They still use it, but have not been completely happy: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsEvaluation
14.
by jgfoot 15y ago
This article is from 1998. A lot has changed since then: Ruby, alternate JVM languages like Clojure and Scala, C#, Perl 6... If I were to make a sweeping historical characterization, I would say that Perl was exactly what people needed in
15.
by jgfoot 15y ago
This completely misses the point. The justice system is already crashing, from being underfunded. """ “cuts already imposed on the Los Angeles Superior Court, if unabated, will force the closure of over 180 courtrooms and layoffs of more t
16.
by jgfoot 15y ago
Mike Maples talks more about Microsoft back then: ( http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107465/1/oh387mm.pdf ): """I can remember going to the first Microsoft Company picnic in 1988. There were only two children. Microsoft had 1,800 emp
17.
by jgfoot 15y ago
An underappreciated benefit of computer programming "languages" is how human begins use them to communicate with other humans. Once you get two or more programmers working on a project, they have to be able to write code that the other pro
18.
Steal This Column(nytimes.com)
2 points by jgfoot 15y ago|0 comments
19.
by jgfoot 15y ago
When travelling in Puerto Rico recently I tried to access Hulu, and got the message that it is available only "within the United States."
20.
by jgfoot 15y ago
OK, copyright infringement isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. And copyright infringement is illegal. I am sorry that some people are "frustrated" because they cannot see their favorite programs at the same time that people in ot
21.
by jgfoot 15y ago
The article is useful because it repeats and glorifies this shibboleth: "So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globali
22.
Carrier IQ analysis finds no evidence of 'keylogger'(news.cnet.com)
3 points by jgfoot 15y ago|0 comments
23.
by jgfoot 15y ago
If this interests you, there is an entire hobby that consists of inventing constructed languages. For example, check out this guy's web page, featuring a lot of languages he personally constructed, each with really creative grammar, phonolo
24.
by jgfoot 15y ago
A revealing part of the article comes when Yale Prof. Hicks says that, rather than develop skills with consulting firms, "There are a half-dozen more life-affirming ways you can acquire those same skills, including taking a class at night a
25.
by jgfoot 15y ago
Also, the Tea Party has so far found a far more effective means of political engagement than protests like these. For better or worse, they've actually gotten involved with electoral politics, and they've had a huge impact.
26.
by jgfoot 15y ago
I am an employee in a non-technical position working in a locked-down environment with (appropriately) paranoid IT staff. The only applications on my work computer that can talk to the Internet are a mail client and a web browser. There ar
27.
by jgfoot 15y ago
What I'd like to see is an easy-to-set up way to run my own version of Dropbox on a small server in my own home. It needs to have a web interface, not just rsync, because a lot of people (like me) don't have access to anything remotely lik
28.
by jgfoot 15y ago
Airlines have been doing their own research into this, apparently. American Airlines is switching to randomized boarding (one of Steffen's proposed solutions) and United is partially switching to window-middle-aisle. http://online.wsj.co
29.
by jgfoot 15y ago
I found your article interesting but I was really distracted by your characterization of DLI students as douchebag fraternity boys who love The Fountainhead and think all Arabs are "scary men in turbans." Totally doesn't jibe with the guys
30.
by jgfoot 15y ago
I like this part: >It’s kind of insulting when I hear the phrase "translate things into English." It puts the blame on the person on the team most equipped to solve the problem. The person, who wants "things translated into English," is

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