sketerpot

10 ms·

61.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I always get annoyed when people stretch the definition of religion, because it's seldom useful, and usually used to equivocate.
62.
by sketerpot 16y ago
One of the classic hunting methods that humans evolved to handle is to just chase after an animal with less endurance until it collapses of exhaustion. Humans are designed to run farther than other animals, and deal with the heat better.
63.
by sketerpot 16y ago
The latter is what raises your baseline level of happiness, while the former is mostly temporary and fleeting. I like them both, of course, so don't think that I'm knocking vanilla fun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
64.
by sketerpot 16y ago
There are machines in Taiwan that do exactly this. It's very convenient, because you can get really hot water for tea just by pushing the right button, or cold water if you press another button.
65.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Or resubmit every month, so the posts don't go stale.
66.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Except that they had more than one ball to balance on; they just used the balls as omnidirectional wheels. (And they were awesome.)
67.
by sketerpot 16y ago
What browser are you using? I've tested it on Safari/OSX and Chrome/Windows, and it was perfectly fast and responsive, even on a three-year-old budget laptop.
68.
by sketerpot 16y ago
It's a little ridiculous that we can now get a microcontroller with a 50 MHz ARM Cortex-M0 core for $0.85 in bulk. Imagine how things will be in a few years (and a few more process nodes).
69.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail, Facebook, an
70.
by sketerpot 16y ago
LLVM is a good deal lower-level than the JVM. It lets you build representations of a program in an internal representation that's higher-level than assembly but doesn't limit you as much as the JVM; for example, it doesn't come with a built
71.
by sketerpot 16y ago
I haven't seen any with PowerPC processors nearly as fancy as the dual-core 800 MHz Cortex-A9 they're putting in these new FPGAs, though. The fact that they're building the whole thing in 28 nm technology also kicks ass. This thing is a bea
72.
by sketerpot 16y ago
We need a better word for "anti-gay bigotry". Or, better yet, a set of such words which apply to common subsets of the LGBTQ alphabet-soup categorization. Right now all we have are words like homophobia and transphobia, which would do alrig
73.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Such overwrought, content-free PowerPoint presentations have their place: Hell. Maybe the problem could be averted if the presentations were replaced with short articles, like blog posts. It would be hard to do worse than what you've descri
74.
by sketerpot 16y ago
About transactional memory: I know that software TM has 2-4x performance overhead, but hardware can eliminate that. I've been working on hardware transactional memory design, and I can say with some authority: if chip-makers add proper HTM,
75.
by sketerpot 16y ago
It shouldn't take a month to copy hard drives.
76.
by sketerpot 16y ago
For still images, why would you ever go with GIF over PNG?
77.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Works just fine on Chrome 5.0.375.9 dev on Windows. What versions are people seeing the crashes on?
78.
by sketerpot 16y ago
That's as good an excuse as any to post the Periodic Table on the wall.
79.
by sketerpot 16y ago
If you're responding to a poorly-disguised lazy homework solution request, then the really strange version is the one you should give. Any student who tries to turn it in will arouse the suspicion of the grader, and they'll deserve it.
80.
by sketerpot 16y ago
The form that you submitted contained no fields, only a submit button. It has no way of knowing that you didn't type in any data.
81.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Hell, you can even start pointing at particular bits of science. For example, there would be mass famine without the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia synthesis.
82.
by sketerpot 16y ago
A simple way to do it is to imagine your apples sitting in a row, assign each one a random number, and sort them by those random numbers. Then the first ten apples go in one crate, the next ten apples go in the next crate, and so on. But fo
83.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Mandatory silent updates are great for security and stability fixes; the complaints people have about it are when the web browser changes the UI or breaks compatibility with extensions. Maybe a hybrid approach would be best.
84.
by sketerpot 16y ago
The code preceding that is actually pretty simple if you translate it to Haskell: my_if test result alternative = if test then result else alternative It's just trying to get currying and lazy evaluation in Python which causes all
85.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Google is using Scheme for most of the code on their "App Inventor for Android" program, which is supposed to be a modern-day successor to Hypercard: a way for interested amateurs to easily make basic mobile phone apps. Then again, not ever
86.
by sketerpot 16y ago
The reason is complacency. For a long time, Flash was the king of its niche, so they didn't bother to make it perform better on systems other than Windows. Adobe needs a kick in the pants. It's the same way with Acrobat Reader. How many peo
87.
by sketerpot 16y ago
Maybe it was like the golden age of New Math: theoretically supposed to happen, but never really did.
88.
by sketerpot 16y ago
When I found out about National Novel Writing Month, I declared February to be an extra November in my personal calendar, and wrote a 204-page fantasy book. It actually came out a lot better than I expected; my writing improved enormously,
89.
by sketerpot 16y ago
As web sites go, this one is pretty decent. There are some navigation issues, sure, but the design is simple and the text is a readable size, with a good line width.
90.
by sketerpot 16y ago
If you use a really high resolution screen for a while, every lesser screen looks bad in comparison. It's the expectations ratchet.

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