pwk

8 ms·

1.
by pwk 16y ago
Sideways reply due to stack depth, sorry... What's the practical difference between a government saying "You must sell your product for this price or we won't allow you to do business in this industry" and Wal-Mart saying the same thing?
2.
by pwk 16y ago
How is that a free market? A free market doesn't guarantee that you get to stay in business. what good is a socket set for 15¢ less than the competition when the socket set company that used to pay you $35,000 a year moves to Indonesia a
3.
by pwk 16y ago
I agree, this is compelling for a lot of the same reasons as the anagrams problem. I spent weeks playing with anagram code at one point, and like you I felt an immediate compulsion to start writing code for Sling Blade Runner. So far my (ru
4.
by pwk 16y ago
It's a fun project! I built one several years ago, after playing around with a bunch of different approaches. I wound up with a human-guided tool that seems to work pretty well for coming up with interesting ones: http://anagramlogic.com/
5.
by pwk 16y ago
If I had known about this 14 years ago I would have certainly tried it, I tried many things... the ones that I think were helpful for me are: Ice bathes for my arms: I filled a sink with water and ice and submerged my arms up to the elbows;
6.
by pwk 16y ago
The "cylinder with accordion-like folds" looks like the business end of the toilet plunger I recently bought, so it's already mass produced and easy to source cheaply.
7.
by pwk 16y ago
Photography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take so many photos; so wha
8.
by pwk 16y ago
I was amused to find this bit of awkwardly worded text in the article: "...the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the universe."
9.
by pwk 16y ago
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers: a love story that touches on music, genetics, history, art... lots of themes that HN readers might appreciate.
10.
by pwk 17y ago
Notational Velocity is great. Quite some time ago I wrote a little web-based note taking app, trying to make it as much like NV as I could -- I really liked NV, but wanted to be able to access my notes from multiple locations. I still use i
11.
by pwk 17y ago
You also don't need to ask for the card type (Visa, MasterCard, etc); it can be automatically determined based on the number.
12.
by pwk 17y ago
Well, scale can mean "spend time and money building infrastructure that supports lots of traffic" -- doing this before getting the traffic is premature optimization. But, scale can also mean "get lots of traffic" -- this is growth, not opti
13.
by pwk 17y ago
Maybe not, perhaps he also tweets 'In closet, with gun' when he's in the closet, with a gun?
14.
by pwk 17y ago
The Aeropress is pretty good. It's cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly easy to clean. I used to use it to make mochas and faux-cappuccinos (pseudo-espresso from the Aeropress plus milk frothified using a whirly-agitator thing instead of st
15.
by pwk 17y ago
One of the comments reads Historically I’ve approached big projects with the nonstrategy of “let them overwhelm you in your head, then put them off till moment when the fear of not finishing exceeds the fear of starting.” This is well put
16.
by pwk 17y ago
The concept of a "risk thermostat" is interesting -- people seem inclined to maintain a more or less constant level of risk. I've noticed an effect that interacts with that: my risk inclination seems to have some initial static friction tha
17.
by pwk 17y ago
As a user of ruby/rails, this whole issue is crazy. Don't waste your time paying attention to it.
18.
by pwk 17y ago
Interesting, thanks for the pointer.
19.
by pwk 17y ago
The language (interpreter ? VM? ) leaks memory? AFAIK the interpreter has no intrinsic leaks, but many ruby applications keep objects referenced beyond their intended life, preventing GC. Edit: You extended your edit after I started respo
20.
by pwk 17y ago
The game he's writing about produced average revenue of around $4500 a month for it's first two years, and is currently making around $1000 a month. That's not enough data to plot a curve, but his long term revenue for a game seems quite re
21.
by pwk 18y ago
From the article: Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the amount of money hand
22.
by pwk 18y ago
I don't agree with much in this article. My thoughts on Marcus' list of "dumb ideas": 1. Default Permit - this one makes sense, getting "fail open" vs "fail closed" right is important in lots of places in engineering. 2. Enumerating Badness
23.
by pwk 18y ago
Think of it this way: the game cost his company 120K to build, and his company has pretty much made that back, so his company has broken even(1). While developing the game he paid himself a decent salary, so he personally has done well (and
24.
by pwk 18y ago
Eh. There are different levels of monkeypatching. I have no problem with extending even a fundamental class with a new method if it's done with care, despite the potential downsides. I think the upside of monkeypatching can outweigh the dow
25.
by pwk 18y ago
...is Phusion essentially just a slightly better FastCGI? Well, it depends on whether you're looking at it from an academic or practical standpoint. AFAIK the technologies are not entirely dissimilar, as you suggest, but there are notable
26.
by pwk 18y ago
Depends on the app platform. In the rails world Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails or mod_rack) in combination with Apache is making inroads for serving up dynamic content. Despite the bigger footprint and other downsides of Apache, I'm heari
27.
by pwk 18y ago
I do learn somewhat from reading stuff online, but it's often because I'm inspired to play around with something on my own. Like a lot of people, I learn the most by doing. So I think the point that a lot of people are making is a good one:
28.
by pwk 18y ago
It can be hard enough to make empirical observations about one's own performance even when not under the influence of a mind-altering drug. I did once spend an afternoon making recordings of myself playing guitar at different levels of sobr
29.
by pwk 18y ago
My second job in Boston was at OpenMarket, a now long-dead internet bubble 1.0 startup that was founded by DEC CRL alumni. I enjoyed my time there, but your term "unwieldy" might be a good explanation for why it didn't survive. The company
30.
by pwk 18y ago
我的汉语不太好, I needed to look up 厉害: http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E5%8E%89%E5%AE%B3/130... Pretty neat site, along with looking up characters by typing or cutting and pasting you can draw them and it tries to guess what character yo

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