pwk

16 ms·

31.
by pwk 18y ago
I used to rip my music losslessly, and then process tracks using an unholy mixture of iTunes, AppleScript (shudder), perl (semi-shudder), and ecasound (command line sound processing) to add audio-domain compression for use in the car. It ma
32.
by pwk 18y ago
We use pen, which can be configured to avoid this issue as well. Just specify the maximum number of connections to be the same as the number of backend servers (via the -x option), and it will queue connections beyond that number and hand t
33.
by pwk 18y ago
if you write succinctly it forces you to be clear Well put. I think this is also true for code: succinct code is generally easier to read and understand. This only works up to a point, though: overly succinct code becomes obfuscated code.
34.
by pwk 18y ago
I've been using the AeroPress: http://www.aerobie.com/Products/aeropress.htm -- an odd gadget from the inventor of the Aerobie. It's pretty quick to use, results are off in the direction of an Americano, and it's really easy to clean. I'm
35.
by pwk 18y ago
One of the sadder examples for me is Polaroid, they were doing some strong work in digital imaging but supposedly it didn't receive internal support because "it would undermine our film business". It's one thing to turn a blind eye to upsta
36.
by pwk 18y ago
Absolutely. I already wrote in another part of this discussion "Most of the things one wants or needs to do on the net are most easily accomplished with dedicated tools, so places where only netcat will serve are rare." On the other hand, m
37.
by pwk 18y ago
Sometimes handy for me: if you have information that you've sent in an HTTP POST, and you need to recover it for whatever reason, there's often no easy way to get at it from the browser interface. The browser will send the data again if you
38.
by pwk 18y ago
See also: Facebook and Myspace How many millions a year do they spend? 4chan is a lean one person operation, probably costing less than 100K a year to run. Given the traffic he's getting, he could be getting miniscule CPMs and still be do
39.
by pwk 18y ago
Most of the things one wants or needs to do on the net are most easily accomplished with dedicated tools, so places where only netcat will serve are rare. It comes in handy for odd corner cases, or in restricted environments where dedicated
40.
by pwk 18y ago
Fun article. I loved Moneyball, and enjoyed other stuff Michael Lewis has written. I'm glad he's looking at basketball, since that's really the only sport I actually follow a bit, mostly through a blog dedicated to sports stats that happens
41.
by pwk 18y ago
Oh, and of course netcat (nc). Indispensable for debugging anything TCP/IP based. echo -n 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc news.ycombinator.com 80 Of course there are more specific tools for specific protocols, like curl or wget for ht
42.
by pwk 18y ago
I find xargs handy, it lets you use the output of one command as arguments for another command. As an example, I have a little alias that I use to grep through my ruby/rails source trees: alias gr 'find . -name \*.rb -o -name \*.rhtml -
43.
by pwk 18y ago
Incomes of the richest Americans more than doubled in the past eight years. Do you think they got twice as productive? Well, lots of people are now coding in Ruby/Python/etc instead of Java/PHP/C++/etc. (Written only mostly tongue in chee
44.
by pwk 18y ago
There are some benefits to digital content that might help work against the "black hole" effect: 1. It's much easier to create copies of digital documents. Looking at my own data that I consider important, many photos I've taken of my famil
45.
by pwk 18y ago
In 10 years "they" will still be saying learn C because C is nothing but a glorified assembly language with some syntactic sugar. C shows you how your computer works. It's possible to be a solid C programmer (ie clear understanding of poi
46.
by pwk 18y ago
Allowing creatives and intellectuals to pursue their art as a profession is one of the greatest accomplishments of modern society... ...We really need to figure out a way to preserve this... It's possible to agree with this sentiment whil
47.
by pwk 18y ago
Is time for an Arlington YC meetup? I work in Arlington, and live just one town over. Yup, Ruby. An Arlington meetup might be fun, I never seem to be able to make the Boston Ruby events in Cambridge.
48.
by pwk 18y ago
In a down market, investors should be buying and not selling. In the context of VCs, it's probably a good time to fund ventures because the equity they get for their cash will be higher, and it's probably a bad time to exit because the cash
49.
by pwk 18y ago
most people in developing countries aren't going to be able to afford a $300 iPhone. They're going to be getting a cheap phone with basic functionality. In 3-5 years, a "cheap phone with basic functionality" will have the same basic featu
50.
by pwk 18y ago
"They continue to try to fit every new product into the existing Microsoft ecosystem" As companies get both bigger and older, internal politics seem to have a larger impact on company policy. There are surely many Microsoft employees who ha
51.
by pwk 18y ago
"In 100 years and beyond, Microsoft will disappear and Google will achieve immortality" I suspect that, in a mere 25 years, Google will get the same respect that Microsoft does today (ie some, at least from some quarters, but much less than
52.
by pwk 18y ago
I played Nine Mens Morris with my grandmother when I was growing up (we called it "Mühle"). She never gave me an inch just because I was a kid, and I still remember with great vividness the first time I ever beat her. A few years ago I wrot
53.
by pwk 18y ago
"I just don't believe that PG & co are capable of separating the potential winners from the losers based on a short application and a 10 minute interview" In poker, if a pot is very large, calling a bet (ie investing some money) can hav
54.
by pwk 18y ago
"I wouldn't want the best surgeon in the world using a clotheshanger and a steak knife, though." I'd prefer that over being operated on by a monkey in a fully stocked OR. The surgeon will probably know enough to correctly weigh the risk of
55.
by pwk 18y ago
"Why pay foreigners when American wines are just as good." A few reasons: 1. If I'm shopping for wine, and I don't see any producers I'm familiar with, I have a good tool for picking likely winners for imported wines: looking at the importe
56.
by pwk 18y ago
"I try to go to the wine store with a wine list but what does one do when none of the items are on the list." A useful trick a friend taught me for buying non-US wines in the US is to pay attention to the importer. For example, when buying