chris_j

26 ms·

211.
by chris_j 15y ago
I'm a native English speaker and I don't generally understand patent texts. In fact, I've filed quite a few patents and have always been amazed that I give something readable to a lawyer to write up and they turn it into something that I ca
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by chris_j 15y ago
First off, nitpick: I think you meant "lose" rather than "loose". Secondly, would you mind expanding on your point? I wasn't aware that a country being governed by a monarch implied a theocracy. Sure, you have countries like the UK where th
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by chris_j 15y ago
I'm British and, when I was at school, we were taught that punctuation should go inside the quotation mark. This was one of those horribly prescriptive rules, the breaking of which was considered very wrong indeed. I'm surprised that this a
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by chris_j 15y ago
Comment on the website: The main text goes off the bottom of the visible window and is obscured by the footer. This is on Chrome on Linux with the DPI settings increased a bit.
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by chris_j 15y ago
In the UK, most providers charge per-kilobyte. For example, I'm on a contract that gives me 1GB per month. Anything beyond that and I pay extra. It annoys me greatly that tethering isn't included in that (and costs a lot more), whether or n
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by chris_j 15y ago
Read the slides again. The author isn't concerned about deterministic memory performance. He's concerned about the fact that that you can't do RAII in Java and therefore any method that allocates resources, performs an action that could thr
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by chris_j 15y ago
That's true. A firewall won't protect a vulnerable webserver. Still, if ports other than port 80 are open then perhaps this is further evidence that the people running the servers weren't taking security as seriously as they should have.
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House hearing blasts Sony's "half-hearted, half-baked" hack response(arstechnica.com)
2 points by chris_j 15y ago|0 comments
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by chris_j 15y ago
I don't normally do this but Google Cache is being a pain for me so it might be being a pain for others. Here is the original article from http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... I’m Adam, and i’m a recovering Sing
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by chris_j 15y ago
The summary indicates that the music is played by the BIOS to indicate that the CPU fan is failing. I would have thought that it would be better to just play a warning beep; having music play randomly is a bit weird.
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by chris_j 15y ago
The problem that the author describes is certainly a real one. If you want to hack on an open source project, it is sometimes tricky to figure out how to get the source and dependencies and then build the thing. Still, surely the actual pro
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by chris_j 15y ago
You may well be repeating yourself daily. This "if you're not paying for it then you're not the customer" meme is getting really annoying, partly because it is repeated so often (whenever anyone complains about a free service on the interne
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by chris_j 15y ago
Since RiderOfGiraffes is not around any more, I'll point out that this has been on HN a couple of times before, with some interesting discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883663 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407796 I'm
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by chris_j 15y ago
I think there's an awful lot of truth in that. You could make the argument that customers of Enterprise Software (that we love to deride) are not paying for the awesome quality of the software so much as for the assurance that the company w
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by chris_j 16y ago
Very true. A friend of mine, who worked for a very large company at the time, once described the perfect system for achieving recognition as a developer. Firstly, write code that's full of bugs and is hard to maintain. Secondly, once the co
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by chris_j 16y ago
EDIT: I stand corrected: It looks like John Carmack has indeed been using C++ since Doom 3. I sheepishly admit to having based my believe that he still used C on having looked at the Quake 3 source code many many years ago. What next, Carma
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by chris_j 16y ago
What conditions need to exist in order for it not to be necessary? Or perhaps I should ask: what value are record companies adding today? 30 Years ago, it was clear that record companies were necessary. Making and distributing music was rel
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by chris_j 16y ago
Try getting up early to cycle to work, which worked brilliantly for me when I was able to do it.
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by chris_j 16y ago
You raise a good point about the distinction between a music discovery service and a way to avoid having to curate your own music collection. My personal use of music streaming services (we7 in my case) is built around the latter. If I have
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by chris_j 16y ago
I upvote comments if I am interested in reading them. I'm likely to be interested in reading anything that pg writes because he runs this site. The bar is set rather lower for pg than for any other user and for good reason.
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by chris_j 16y ago
Do you use viper-mode? What are its benefits, over and above just using vi? I switched from vi to emacs many years ago and I never bothered with viper-mode; I just invested an awful lot of effort into learning Emacs's commands and keystroke
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by chris_j 16y ago
Is it actually possible to implement quicksort in a pure functional language like Haskell (with immutable data structures)? Sorting in place would seem to involve mutating the list every time two values are swapped.
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by chris_j 16y ago
I'm assuming that this is the article you're talking about: http://blog.imranghory.org/facebook-ads-the-cheapest-traffic... Sounds like you have to decide which is more important to you: your startup or the veracity of your article. Faceb
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by chris_j 16y ago
Why doesn't Twitter buy TweetDeck? TweetDeck appears to be a better user experience than anything that Twitter have come up with themselves so far. If Twitter does want to own the client experience on their platform then what better way of
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by chris_j 16y ago
> A possibly more precise way of expressing this thought is: "Competition from big players doesn't necessarily equate to a death sentence to small players". Absolutely. The key point here is that you avoid being squashed by the competit
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by chris_j 16y ago
Let's be thankful that we only read this online, rather than actually sitting through someone delivering this presentation.
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by chris_j 16y ago
In one of the early slides, the author decides that Java is the only language that you would ever want to have running in your web server and eliminates all of the non-Java web frameworks at that point (of which PHP and Rail are the only ex
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by chris_j 16y ago
The article alludes to but does not directly state the most likely reason that the Android 3.0 code remains closed: that Google was forced to rush out Android 3.0 for a few tablet manufacturers but did not want smartphone makers to sell pho
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by chris_j 16y ago
If web design is a skill that can't be made with a degree then how do you learn to be good at web design?
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by chris_j 16y ago
Could you expand a little on what happened in your particular circumstances? The advice "Never accept the word of a lawyer on anything" seems a little controversial, to say the least.

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