skimbrel

13 ms·

61.
by skimbrel 15y ago
The author of this article appears to suffer from the same problem a lot of non-Californians do: they think Southern California, and specifically LA, is the entire state. It would have been nice to see at least a paragraph or two on the Bay
62.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Sadly, the situation is different from Python's. Python 3 is well-defined, with a stable and usable implementation. You can port your code to it today, and even big projects like Django are getting ready to shift over to it. Perl 6's defini
63.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Needs a (2001) tag, but this is a great thing to read about. Western society is at odds with itself in the way it handles drugs, and aside from incremental progress on marijuana, it doesn't seem to be getting any better. People need to acce
64.
by skimbrel 15y ago
I didn't like OnSwipe when I first saw it show up on a WP.com blog, and I still don't like it. It breaks a lot of functionality in MobileSafari, and half of the time the "View Standard Site" link at the bottom doesn't work. It still feels l
65.
by skimbrel 15y ago
What I believe the GP was getting at is that "I could care less" is a corruption of the original "I couldn't care less", and one that makes next to no sense as an expression of contempt.
66.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Okay, so which of the one-password apps is the best? I keep meaning to start using one, but I don't know which to try. I'm an Apple user all the way (home and office Macs plus an iPhone and iPad) and some sort of sync would be great. Additi
67.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Actually, English phrases contain very little entropy -- as little as 0.6 bits per character. This is because the rules for what constitutes a valid word or phrase dramatically reduce the number of possible characters at a given position. T
68.
by skimbrel 15y ago
It has, but I bet this has trained a lot of Windows users to just click OK because it's another thing that gets in the way of loading a page… At least Chrome's interface for this makes it less obtrusive than a pop-up dialog.
69.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Ack is awesome. It makes life as a programmer so much easier -- no more fiddling around trying to remember the useful flags for grep. Plus it has --thpppt.
70.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Even with the restrictions in place I think Turntable is still in questionable territory as regards licensing. The "non-interactive" claim they seem to be making (at least, that's the way the linked article puts it) probably won't hold up i
71.
by skimbrel 15y ago
> bottom This is the opposite of top, it displays processes that are using the least CPU. This is exactly what I need! I've been planning an awards ceremony for the developers of the most efficient software running on my systems (measur
72.
by skimbrel 15y ago
> The network infrastructure to do that is just about there. There's a long way to go from having enough bandwidth to serve your personal blog or small-time web app out of your {apartment, house, office} to getting what you'd need for a
73.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Agreed. Your users should not find out about these things via HN (or any other news site). At this point, I don't think I can trust Dropbox with anything remotely valuable or private, and I bet I'm not the only person who feels this way.
74.
by skimbrel 15y ago
This was a fun post, but I found the other post on this blog more interesting: http://altreus.blogspot.com/2011/06/anatomy-of-types.html Not terribly useful to anyone who's been around the block in Perl at least once, but it's a great exp
75.
by skimbrel 15y ago
There's a comment on the article complaining about the hate for Perl -- I agree with its sentiment but not the way it characterizes so-called "brain damaged" people. Modern Perl is really a very different language than what people tend to t
76.
by skimbrel 15y ago
I was working from this definition of "almost surely": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely If I understand that correctly, we're dealing with a case analogous to the coin-flipping scenario. And since, as you admit, there are infini
77.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Not true at all. Given a uniform distribution over k discrete values (in this case permutations of the list), the expected probability of the next permutation is 1/ k . This is not the same as saying that if you take k samples from th
78.
by skimbrel 15y ago
It's good to see transparency in the targeting process. There definitely seems to be an industry move towards this -- I'm seeing those little triangle-i AdChoices icons everywhere, including on the internal beta release of my own company's
79.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Yeah. If this gets more robust and productized, it just might eat Scribd's lunch.
80.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Oops. Well, another reason for me not to buy the game. Thanks to everyone who wrote honest reviews, because audience goodwill is far more important than pleasing one game publisher.
81.
by skimbrel 15y ago
This is more commonly known as bogosort ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort ), and it's a good start for running time but isn't guaranteed to terminate. See my other comment for a link to something that goes one better than bogosort on
82.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Bogobogosort ( http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/bogobogosort.html ) would be a good candidate except that it uses random permutation and therefore might not terminate. Maybe if you replaced the random step with a deterministic one that a
83.
by skimbrel 15y ago
(USS Saratoga was our code name during development of the extended keyboard because of its eerie resemblance to the popular aircraft carrier. Not so much the shape as the size.) Nice bit of trivia there. I remember the Apple Extended Keyb
84.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Dammit, that was the joke I came here to make!
85.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Good. We need more smart judges and good decisions like this.
86.
by skimbrel 15y ago
This is a great idea. If I biked more regularly I'd want one of these.
87.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Check out SoundHound: http://www.soundhound.com/ It does exactly what you ask for.
88.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Agreed -- there are still lots of hard theory problems waiting to be solved, and we also still need people to write operating systems and design strong cryptographic protocols. Not everything is as flashy or "cool" as iPhone games, but it's
89.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Ah! I didn't know about that. It'd be nice to have the syntactic sugar à la Haskell, but oh well. Close enough.
90.
by skimbrel 15y ago
Use function factories to create utility functions. Often, especially if you're using map and filter a lot, you need utility functions that convert other functions or methods to taking a single parameter. In particular, you often want to b

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