celoyd

9 ms·

31.
by celoyd 13y ago
In URLs, and especially user-visible URLs, file suffixes at all should be considered an only occasionally necessary evil. They’re ugly, redundant, brittle, and generally a headache. TBL wrote about this in 1998: http://www.w3.org/Provide
32.
by celoyd 14y ago
I was curious if you saved any metrics regarding how often a particular location (pixel) is clear or cloudy? We didn’t, but it would be pretty easy to re-derive. The cloudiest places at this scale are the sides of mountains in the Intertr
33.
by celoyd 14y ago
This is too interesting a topic to get into right now – I’ll have to do another blog post or something. For now I’ll say: looking at whiteness alone gets you like 80% of the way there. It’s kind of amazing how effective it is by itself.
34.
by celoyd 14y ago
Hmm. I don’t know of any specific product that does what you need (high resolution and near-realtime is usually an expensive combination), but I would definitely look through the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s projects: http://nsidc.o
35.
by celoyd 14y ago
Well, we’re actually filtering out pixels with clouds. That’s what makes it seamless. Or, really, it’s extremely seamy, but all the seams are very subtle and between individual pixels instead of larger regions.
36.
by celoyd 14y ago
In the current draft, exactly 81.7%. No kidding.
37.
by celoyd 14y ago
Author here. We’re doing almost the opposite – as little non-permanent snow and ice as we can manage. The reason is simply that we want to make this as useful as possible as a general-purpose base layer, and people usually want to see sprin
38.
by celoyd 14y ago
The Unicode people don’t sit around and invent characters – nor do they systematically determine the complete list of characters that should be in the standard. Instead, they consider proposals from people who want their already-in-use char
39.
by celoyd 14y ago
Author of TFA here. Discussing that very Wallace–Silverblatt exchange with a friend is one of the reasons I picked this as a Contextmas topic. I’m delighted to see someone else picking up on it. To me, “Infinite Jest” feels a lot like folk
40.
by celoyd 14y ago
Definitely. Mid-range and high-end receivers (for things like ecology surveys and continental drift tracking) integrate GLONASS and GPS already. I don’t have the RF/SP domain knowledge to back this up, but I speculate that multiple low-en
41.
by celoyd 14y ago
A Facebook “like” doesn’t just mean you like something; it means at least one of at least these options: 1. You like it. 2. You understand that “likes” are used by advertisers, distributors, etc., to track brand popularity, so you clicked l
42.
by celoyd 14y ago
Proprietor of that site here. Nope, “witch” can apply to men just as well as women and always has. In fact, you’ll find several dictionaries citing Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur” (1485) as an early usage, where Merlin is referred to by some a
43.
by celoyd 14y ago
It is, however, undeniably overcast-prone and short-dayed in winter. I think it’s worth it, but it is a legitimate problem for some people. To fend off uninformed remarks elsewhere in the comments, here’s Wikipedia on the climate of Seattle
44.
by celoyd 14y ago
Yes, but if anything that seems to contradict the gist of the first paragraph of the comment.
45.
by celoyd 14y ago
I don’t understand what you’re arguing for or against here.
46.
by celoyd 14y ago
The classic example is screen readers. A phrase that’s italicized because it’s important should probably be slightly louder, but a phrase that’s italicized because it’s foreign should probably be pronounced slightly slower. Those are entire
47.
by celoyd 14y ago
In fact, most of Germany gets less sunlight than most of Maine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insolation.png
48.
by celoyd 14y ago
As a gateway to further reading (covering many of the interesting facts people are pointing out here), I enjoyed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
49.
by celoyd 14y ago
It’s completely reasonable to say that we only know the upshot of events after we see them. Many things are not understood at the time. But many contemporary understandings are basically correct. If you do a Google Books search for the phra
50.
by celoyd 15y ago
Especially because it works in exactly the way you specify even when there’s only one sentence in a paragraph. So the paragraph: That was too much for the water district’s attorney. And: They were torn apart by angry ducks. Will both ha
51.
by celoyd 15y ago
I read the ethical objection as a pretty clear subtext. There’s a powerfully condescending tone here – “Since you clearly can’t make the right choice out of basic decency, let me put this in words you might understand”.
52.
by celoyd 15y ago
All good points. I would say that lists like that are also abuse; the hyphens there ought to be · or something similar. But it certainly appears in the wild. (Similarly, in formal contexts, the negative sign is − and not -, but very few peo
53.
by celoyd 15y ago
Why is - and -- used as a switch character if it is used in dates (and even quite common in normal text, names) Those uses rarely have it next to whitespace, and almost never immediately after whitespace. If someone’s named Jean-Claude, i
54.
by celoyd 15y ago
Yes, considering the size of their operation, the length of time they’ve been running, and the variety of instance types they offer, it would be really surprising to me if they didn’t have multiple generations. Also, they don’t offer {4,8}X
55.
by celoyd 15y ago
As people have pointed out, this is essentially how things like MacBooks work. I happen to know I have a “mid-2010” MacBook, but that isn’t printed on it anywhere and the average user would never know. It’s not a MacBook 7S or whatever.
56.
by celoyd 15y ago
I’ve had good (but not great) results from https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip . It has you download the database from http://mirrors.ipinfodb.com/ipinfodb/ip_database/current/ipi... , which doesn’t appear to be officially linked anymor
57.
by celoyd 15y ago
Partly. All through the 90s, Apple had ClarisWorks/AppleWorks,[0] which were basically what iWork is now – including that few serious Office users would look twice at them. (I liked them a lot, but I’m not in the Office demographic.) And Ap
58.
by celoyd 15y ago
That’s an interesting. I rarely use actual measuring cups for main ingredients, so I was thinking of everyday cups, not the well-defined unit. So I guess my error was using an ambiguous unit, which is even worse than mixing units.
59.
by celoyd 15y ago
I’m kind of hoping cultured human is delicious. I’m going to send a cheek swab to a PO box, and six weeks later a slab of my own pseudo-shoulder will show up packed in dry ice. My first experiment will be: 1 kg own cultured flesh
60.
by celoyd 15y ago
Saying it’s bad to think your vote is foregone is different from saying it’s wrong . And I’m not sure it is bad. It’s the truth, and it’s best to trust people with that. Knowing that my vote is effectively uncounted makes me more, not le

More ›