willarson

4 ms·

1.
by willarson 18y ago
The problem is that the average textbook sells a small run of copies, and doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Unfortunately, it seems that the professors and the publishers both like the current system, and the students have very littl
2.
by willarson 18y ago
This is asking for speculative work on an awe-inspiring scale, and I find it brazenness to be a bit hard to swallow. Arrington wants other people to build something he wants, and will not pay them for it. Instead, he is offering a promise t
3.
by willarson 18y ago
Um. I wish I had an excuse. For some reason it just clicked and I never thought about it, although it is clearly and irrefutably wrong. Thanks for pointing that out, its been fixed (although the cached copy may take a bit to update).
4.
Stripping Reddit From HackerNews with Yahoo's BOSS Mashup(lethain.com)
5 points by willarson 18y ago|2 comments
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by willarson 18y ago
Actually, it works in Opera, Safari, Firefox and in Internet Explorer (using the excanvas). Its still evolving a bit, and I hope to add more statistical analysis to it, but its a bit fun.
6.
by willarson 18y ago
I think the key in my statement was easy copying . The inability to copy and paste clearly frustrates people, seeing as its the number one complaint against Scribd. But thanks for the sarcasm. ;)
7.
by willarson 18y ago
I'd pretty much guarantee that its real purpose is to serve as a simple but pleasant portfolio piece for a designer or developer, and that purpose isn't defeated by it being copyable. But, I think the point of the service is that only on
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by willarson 18y ago
With all due respect to their work, I don't think that its an IE7 problem.
9.
by willarson 18y ago
First, the first amendment has absolutely no relevance here, since it is a restriction being placed on government, not on individuals. There is a chronic habit to misinterpret this as "I can say what I want, wherever I want, whenever, howev
10.
by willarson 18y ago
I think "is expected to generate" is much more appropriate than "generating" since it doesn't exist yet. I would have been suitably more interested if it was real instead of a prediction.
11.
by willarson 18y ago
The person who runs that site is top notch at creating interesting or controversial headlines, but usually delivers a rant at best or--in this case--nothing at all. As best I can follow, this article's outline is this: 1. He met a presumabl
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by willarson 18y ago
Its actually not that bad, but it really depends on your browser. I've been throwing together (meaning not at all finished) a tower defense game using it ( http://www.willarson.com/code/processing/ptd.html ), and it plays amazingly quickly
13.
by willarson 18y ago
Most up-to-date Markdown implementations support footnotes (specifically the Python one does for certain, but the syntax has been around for a while). The syntax is pretty easy. [^1] [^1]: And really adds some jazz to blog entries.
14.
by willarson 18y ago
I am interpreting this question to mean "How is posting this link different then posting a new topic on HN with the same text?" (Please stop me if I have simply misinterpreted a snarky remark about the value of my comment. ;) I wasn't inten
15.
by willarson 18y ago
It seems the crux of this post is that "while I don’t know the exact donation totals, I bet the site has raised a thousand dollars in a couple days." Or to summarize slightly: something almost positively probably happened, and by god I'll u
16.
by willarson 18y ago
In mentioning that its "the new things that give you an edge," are you suggesting that web2py is one of those new things? In what non-trivial way do you feel that it differentiates itself from the literally hundreds of other web frameworks?
17.
by willarson 19y ago
Trying to go to their website using Camino (I realize that its working for Firefox and other more popular browsers, was just kind of surprised): javax.servlet.ServletException: agent.filename property not set in config file at com.cmp.nucl
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by willarson 19y ago
Woah woah woah. First, calm down and remember to breath: its gonna be okay. Next, you need to figure out why the company you are working at has allowed you to hang around for six months without helping you get integrated, or--if you really
19.
by willarson 19y ago
Slightly unrelated, but the word 'nampa' means to pick up women, but also has a second meaning of 'to be shipwrecked'. An infinite wealth of puns are available between the two.
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by willarson 19y ago
This is a topic that used to bother me before I graduated and left academia behind. When I attended a private middle and lower school, parents would call my mother and ask her how she completed the current project. The level of penetration
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by willarson 19y ago
I think that portfolio's of software get messy in exactly the same way that joint research papers get messy: how do you figure out who did the work? That said, I think you're right that in a large body of work you see the little eddies in t
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by willarson 19y ago
Good article, but its unfortunately also a good example of how misspelling and using the wrong words can really hurt public writing.
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by willarson 19y ago
It isn't necessarily a coincidence, but couldn't it be reasonable explained that when the first few went down it lead to a higher level of strain and utilization of the remaining cables, thus making them far more likely to break themselves?
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by willarson 19y ago
Although refutation by dictionary is a valued technique, I think its invalidated here by the capital A in Agile.
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by willarson 19y ago
I would take the networking class. My first reason is that it is a survey course, and networking is a massive topic. Its helpful to have a wide exposure to different parts of it. Once you know a bit about the various parts you are in a much
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by willarson 19y ago
It depends on the type of the error, but most errors fail quietly in Django templates. For example, you can pass a Python object to your template, and can reference its fields using syntax like {{ object.absolute_url }} if, for example, y
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by willarson 19y ago
I also agree about JSON. JSON is quicker to serialize to and from than XML, and it also uses less bandwidth. Realistically though, the serialization should be a simple layer on the top of your API, and there isn't anything that should preve
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by willarson 19y ago
I would take the first job. Many people without a complete formal education have this fear about the things they should know. They also assume that if they had only completed a CS major they would in fact understand these things. Unfortun
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by willarson 19y ago
Epi0Bauqu is definitely correct that you do not want to access google 10-50 times with each page refresh, that would be very slow. However, with the number of pieces of data you are requesting you'll have to be intelligent with your stora
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by willarson 19y ago
It probably is a good idea to flag the account as inactive, and move it to separate table to keep the primary table clean. AFAIK FaceBook won't know that you're not removing the data completely, and this will allow you to restore the user i

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