nix

7 ms·

1.
by nix 14y ago
"Slope" implies that the denominator is a distance. In the context of a graph on paper or screen, it is clear how rise and run are mapped to distances. It's a totally sensible definition: slope only makes sense given a choice of axes. "Rate
2.
by nix 14y ago
No ventilation? Have you tried running full blast with a temperature probe present?
3.
by nix 14y ago
"Shift" is a big omission, though you can guess at it from the emphasis on certain numeric keys. One of the great things about Python is that there are fewer chorded characters. It's also one of the worst things about Lisp on a standard key
4.
by nix 14y ago
you're free to replace one by a facade around a remote service. RPC rarely lives up to this promise. Starting simple is certainly a good approach, but don't fool yourself about how hard it's going to be when you need to deal with latency
5.
by nix 14y ago
How is demurrage different from inflation? Isn't the financial system already set up to encourage savers to invest their assets rather than storing value as bills under mattresses?
6.
by nix 14y ago
The Freebase API is a hosted service. MQL is designed for fast HTTP queries that power interactive webapps. SPARQL is harder to learn and set up, but allows for more complicated queries that might require offline processing. (I designed the
7.
by nix 14y ago
This is interesting, but pedantic. Many words have a well-understood meaning that is only loosely connected to their etymology. Better to say that "present-day publishers work hard to make the cover something you can sell a book by."
8.
by nix 14y ago
Title is wrong. NASA's Blue Marble is about 3.7 gigapixels.
9.
by nix 14y ago
They are using a bad dataset. Some of the discontinuities you see are administrative boundaries between National Weather Service forecast offices. http://nixweb.com/dust/ is my version, for the SF Bay Area only. It was 15 years ago so p
10.
by nix 15y ago
This works by sampling a static scene a very large number of times with a laser flash and a "streak tube" camera that records a picosecond-long movie of the light arriving at a single scanline. A normal video camera records a frame at a tim
11.
by nix 15y ago
More data is nice, but the experience with citizen-operated weather stations suggests that the data is useless without extensive quality control. Calibration is hard, and mobile sensors are particularly challenging. What happens when one of
12.
by nix 15y ago
The Google Apps case is harder because of the existence of a separate "domain administrator" role with some powers over the user account. Many people on Google Apps domains are employees using their work email for personal business. If yo
13.
by nix 15y ago
A standard here would be very welcome, though I still haven't seen anything I'd call intuitive. Visually distinguishing tap, double-tap, and "long press" is pretty difficult. The Open Exhibits Gesture Library is another option. It looks l
14.
by nix 15y ago
Realtors can and do handle price reductions by delisting and relisting the property. This hides the ask price drop, and zeroes the days on market, to the advantage of sellers and realtors. A brief look at Trulia's "methodology" description
15.
by nix 15y ago
Neat. It makes sense that you'd have a fast-path for deflecting objects that are suddenly in your face. Lots of interesting stuff here on factors affecting reaction time: http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm#Type%20o... Yo
16.
by nix 15y ago
There's more than enough hacker-appropriate linkbait to fill the front page, if that's what the readership wants.
17.
by nix 16y ago
Large areas south of market. liquefaction hazards for SF: http://gmw.consrv.ca.gov/SHMP/download/pdf/ozn_sf.pdf other PDFs: http://gmw.consrv.ca.gov/SHMP/html/pdf_maps_no.html
18.
by nix 16y ago
People forget that you can just use C for the simple stuff. Many of these Objective-C classes are slow, verbose, buggy, and poorly documented compared to the equivalent open source C libraries. In many cases the C API is just as nice - mayb
19.
by nix 16y ago
You infer it from the existence of 10,000 year old musical instruments. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale#Prehistory - which also says that the circle of fifths was described much earlier than I thought.
20.
by nix 16y ago
The drawback to this explanation is that the diatonic scale is 10,000 years older than the "circle of fifths". So it presumably had some appeal to musicians as well as to music theorists.
21.
by nix 16y ago
Supposedly there is a mathematical reason for the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 spacing of the major scale. If you take all possible pairs of notes in the diatonic scale, you get a richer distribution of intervals than you can produce with any other seven
22.
by nix 16y ago
My admittedly biased view: I spent two years of my life trying to make the JVM communicate gracefully with Javascript - there were plenty of us at Netscape who thought that bytecode was a better foundation for mobile code. But Sun made it
23.
by nix 16y ago
When the continuation gets invoked by the event-handling loop, the stack is reset. You're not compiling to C here: "the stack" may be a chain of heap-allocated activation records that are still live as far as GC is concerned. What you're
24.
by nix 16y ago
What the author is missing: tail recursion in constant space is an implicit requirement for practical use of CPS transformations. In fact this is probably the single biggest reason for wanting efficient tail calls in a language. ECMA doesn
25.
by nix 16y ago
The word "visualize" makes this a somewhat leading question (though personally my process is visual/tactile). The best book I know of about this is Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field . He asked this s
26.
by nix 16y ago
Plan to arrive wet with a change of clothes. If you wear waterproofs you'll just drench your clothes from the inside: Gore-tex and other so-called "waterproof breathable" materials can't dissipate 3 miles of perspiration, let alone 15 mile
27.
by nix 16y ago
The #! declares to crawlers that a crawlable version of the page is also available from the server by replacing "#!" with "?_escaped_fragment=". This mapping is needed because the fragment string is never passed to the server, so it has to
28.
by nix 16y ago
Muscles Get Tired, Bones Don't. This is simply incorrect, as are most of the conclusions that follow from it. Basically, many muscles can trade off individual contractile fibers to remain under tension all day without perceived tiredness
29.
by nix 16y ago
Note that the USPTO is asking for comments on how it should comply with the Bilski decision, not for rants about software patents in general. Your comments will presumably carry more weight if you can explain why many software patents have
30.
by nix 16y ago
I think the real argument for testing vs. types is that for most jobs "programmer productivity" has to do with producing code that works in practice rather than code that is perfect under all possible circumstances. Most of us are not deve

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