nycticorax

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151.
by nycticorax 12y ago
One idea from the world of science that might benefit articles like this is that of the abstract. It's a one-paragraph summary that helps the reader decide whether they should bother reading the whole article.
152.
by nycticorax 12y ago
Has anyone ever tried to push seriously to just have governments fund more open source software development? It just seems that open source software suffers from all the funding difficulties that go along with being a "public good&quo
153.
by nycticorax 12y ago
Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to respond to a couple things: 6. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. To be more precise, the thing that I like is the menu bar as a central organizing element of the applicati
154.
by nycticorax 12y ago
I can't speak for others, but here are my objections to Gnome 3: 1. It is application-centric, rather than window-centric. For instance, alt-tab tabs between applications, not between windows. This doesn't mesh well with how I w
155.
by nycticorax 12y ago
> The non-'strict' sense of bug is the one used by almost everyone in our industry. I assumed that most of HN knew that. "I assumed that most of HN knew that", huh? This is the same kind of tendentious nonsense as &q
156.
by nycticorax 12y ago
I apologize for the snark. But I thought that your first statement was questionable, and that therefore your second statement was rather facile. > Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about
157.
by nycticorax 12y ago
When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? It certainly wasn't when TeX was first written. Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date? Also, isn't TeX lim
158.
The public domain, BSD, GPL, and all that(adamtaylor.info)
2 points by nycticorax 13y ago|0 comments
159.
by nycticorax 13y ago
This is just incorrect. By default, you retain the copyright to things that you write. Which means that others can't make copies without getting your approval. And in many jurisdictions, it is not at all clear that you can relinquis
160.
by nycticorax 13y ago
It's also worth mentioning that without copyright, all GPL-licensed code would enter the public domain, so you would then be free to modify it and only release the modified software as a compiled binary.
161.
by nycticorax 13y ago
That's not really correct. The derivative work can be proprietary, but the original work is still BSD-licensed. So in no way has the original BSD-licensed code been "turned into" proprietary code. And you could argue that b
162.
by nycticorax 13y ago
You can change many aspects of the look of GTK+ with themes. You can probably even make it look nice and flat, in keeping with the latest UI fads. Personally, I think XFCE looks nice out of the box (in Xubuntu, at least). And what's
163.
by nycticorax 13y ago
I'm sorry, but this just does not agree with my experience. Yes, if you work at it, you can probably get 80-90% of things on your machine to work. But even getting to that point takes some effort. And quite often, there is that 20-1
164.
by nycticorax 13y ago
As someone who until recently was a working scientist, all this anti-Powerpoint, pro-Tufte talk on the interwebs just seems weird and out-of-touch. Powerpoint/Keynote is absolutely central to modern science, just as overhead slides we
165.
by nycticorax 13y ago
"[The Clang and LLVM developers] object to the measures we have taken to defend freedom because they see the inconvenience of them and do not recognize (or don't care about) the need for them." I would call this an Orwellian
166.
by nycticorax 13y ago
I'd argue that the central mistake was the decision to radically change the desktop experience to conform with the touch experience. I.e. the radicalism was itself the mistake. My feeling is that Apple made the right call here: Deskt
167.
by nycticorax 13y ago
The central claim of this article, that releasing Windows 9 too soon will alienate customers, seems very weak. The author acknowledges that Windows 8 uptake has been slow, so there just aren't that many people out there that are runni
168.
by nycticorax 13y ago
It's funny that, in an article describing issues with a high-DPI display, the author never explicitly says the size of the screen (e.g. in inches), or the DPI. He just tells us it's 3200x1800. In case you were wondering, the dis
169.
by nycticorax 13y ago
I don't think The Information comes out of this looking bad at all. I think that PG was being somewhat disingenuous in "What I Didn't Say". Read http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-
170.
by nycticorax 13y ago
That's an interesting point, but it's orthogonal to whether PG was being disingenuous in "What I Didn't Say". And I'm not campaigning to push money in any direction. That's a separate issue. I agree that
171.
by nycticorax 13y ago
All this having been said, I think that the level of vitriol PG has been subjected to is completely unfounded. I think it's unclear whether YC is morally obligated to lower its standards for female applicants, or to make special effor
172.
by nycticorax 13y ago
I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards
173.
by nycticorax 16y ago
Seems to me this post is based on a misunderstanding of the Alan Kay quote. Kay wanted to minimize the role of _assignment_, not mutability. So instead of saying things like a=f(a), you say a.f(), where the method f simply mutates a in pl
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by nycticorax 16y ago
I more-or-less agree with the OP: I'm a neuroscientist, and it would be nice if I could use Bayesian analyses in my papers without it being a point of contention with reviewers. But it seems like one of the big advances in frequentist stati
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by nycticorax 16y ago
It's also odd because the various PC makers add all these "features" to their machines to try to differentiate them from their competitor's machines, when at this point the best way to differentiate themselves would be to just sell a plain-
176.
by nycticorax 16y ago
I think you mean "\ ". "~" is for when you want an inter-word space, and also don't want TeX to break the line there.
177.
by nycticorax 16y ago
I think this guy needs to get clear on the distinctions between typewriting, typesetting, and word processing. If you're typing on a typewriter, it sounds like it's generally considered admissible to use two (monospaced) spaces after a wor
178.
by nycticorax 16y ago
I use Google Reader, because I want to know when there's new stuff on certain sites without visiting them all, but I don't like it that much. I prefer to read the stories on the web site, with its "native" formatting and whatnot. Is there
179.
by nycticorax 17y ago
After reading this article, and the Yelp blog posts about the issue, it sounds to me like Yelp is doing exactly what they claim to be doing, and what they should be doing. Yelp says that there's a "Chinese wall" between the people selling