cgranade

31 ms·

271.
by cgranade 17y ago
I honestly love Buzz, but the rollout was terribly executed. It's rather ironic, since the product itself is one of the better designed social networking tools I've seen. Like Beacon was a real defining moment for Facebook, though, I think
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by cgranade 17y ago
Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound waves ( http:
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by cgranade 17y ago
It is a Herculean task, but that's part of the miracle and promise of open-source: you don't have to do it alone. To address the lack of a good MATLAB-style science oriented IDE, I started a project ( http://github.com/cgranade/scicore ) to
274.
by cgranade 17y ago
That statistic would be more impressive if their download site worked properly. I've been stuck without Flash for a while now because I use Linux on a 64-bit machine, but the Flash 10.1 beta page has only dead links ( http://labs.adobe.com/
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by cgranade 17y ago
That is an overall net positive, but I still think that, in order to be fully compatible with the ideals of academic freedom and reproducibility, papers should depend largely (ideally, only) on code that is fully open source. I recognize th
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by cgranade 17y ago
Cheesy, but cute, and not nearly so misogynistic as what seems to be the norm this year.
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by cgranade 17y ago
The specific claim that the original author made in attributing an error to political motives was, in fact, debunked, as the entire claim rests on a single he-said-she-said between a scientist and a journalist, the latter of whom has made a
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by cgranade 17y ago
It doesn't directly try to deny it, no, but it undermines the politics based on outright falsehoods spun with half-truths, then begs the question of how we can trust the science given political failures. That is at best a slimy tactic, and
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by cgranade 17y ago
No, not all are. Just all but a vanishingly small number. For instance, the article takes the strategy of undermining climate science on a political basis then claiming it has no scientific credibility. This is a standard denialist tactic--
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by cgranade 17y ago
They may have apologized for the inaccuracy, yes, but the article claims that the inaccuracy was included on purpose for political reasons. This is a claim that, at best, is completely unverifiable since the only citation for it comes from
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by cgranade 17y ago
The article opens up with a debunked denialist canard... but it still makes front page. Why is HN a haven for climate change denialists these days?
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by cgranade 17y ago
That article makes some really good points, but I disagree. To me, Python is quickly becoming a good middle ground where I can use these powerful functional ideas, then drop down to imperative whenever I need to. In particular, this means t
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by cgranade 17y ago
Just wondering what the HTML 5 Notifications API is, and where it is documented... the only reference I can seem to find to it other than the Chrome code review is this commit log showing that notifications were removed from the WhatWG HTML
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by cgranade 17y ago
I was actually thinking of cases in which storage is limited, or in places where, for instance, that tend to get less wind. As for the energy storage issue, while storage technology has gotten much, much better, I don't think we're yet wher
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by cgranade 17y ago
I wholly agree that, where feasible, wind and other renewable energy sources can and should be employed in preference to non-renewable sources. That said, as far as I understand, there are cases where such renewable energy sources are not f
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by cgranade 17y ago
As Cory Doctrow points out, Amazon has not revealed exactly what they mean by DRM-free. Moreover, the difference is not labelled on the Kindle store for consumers to see. Thus, while it is absolutely true that the publishers deserve blame i
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by cgranade 17y ago
My point with the parenthetical note is that Amazon is not acting in a consistent manner. With music, they trumpeted the virtues of going DRM-free and allowing for dynamic pricing, while with books, they're sticking to DRM and not allowing
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by cgranade 17y ago
The question of which is ultimately better for the consumer is non-trivial to my mind. Not to mention that, because publishers tie author royalties to the physical cost of production, the authors stand to lose a lot in this struggle.
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by cgranade 17y ago
At the same time, it also turns reality on its head to portray Amazon as being pro-consumer in this case (where's the good old Amazon that helped force Apple out of music DRM by launching Amazon MP3?). In this struggle, it seems that both s
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by cgranade 17y ago
It really does a lot to hurt the community here. I joined HN because it seemed like a more critical and intelligent community than most others around, and yet this kind of unscientific garbage makes the front page with depressing frequency.
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by cgranade 17y ago
How? Package management is simply a different model entirely. One that doesn't encourage people to go download random files and give them full privileges on their machines. It's no harder to go to System > Administration > Add/Remov
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by cgranade 17y ago
Quite right, but now they have a really good first step both on the client and server ends, so this acquisition brings such a goal into the realm of feasibility, I think.
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by cgranade 17y ago
If you have to have a Google login to get to DocVerse, and if they make DocVerse-hosted Office documents available through Google Docs, then they've made the barrier to entry into Docs a hell of a lot lower. Moreover, this could work well w
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by cgranade 17y ago
I have never understood the legal doctrine by which inalienable rights suddenly become quite, well, alienable at the border. If a right is truly universal, then it should hold at the border just as well as it does anywhere else. This is one
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by cgranade 17y ago
Sadly, I think we won't get too much more info for a while, since Watts is not in a place to say much right now, and I don't think that the border guards will have much to say...
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by cgranade 17y ago
FYI: Updates from Watts' blog are online at http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=935 .
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by cgranade 17y ago
If following procedure means beating someone senseless and trying to get them to waive their legal rights, then procedure is fucked. Yes, I am taking Watts' story at face value, and I could be wrong in that, but given my experiences, it see
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by cgranade 17y ago
It's not just Cory Doctrow vouching for him, but also Charlie Stross and Neil Gaiman. Is it possible that there is more to the story that exonerates the guards? Of course it's possible, but given the US border crossing guards, it's not bloo
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by cgranade 17y ago
The article makes its stance quite clear in the title: "The Fiction of Climate Science." This constant denialist spamming on HN is getting extremely tiresome.
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by cgranade 17y ago
What I don't understand about all this is where the savings of lower marginal manufacturing cost per book go. Once a Kindle or Nook is out there, the materials cost of adding another book to it is nearly zero compared to printing and shippi

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