sqrt17

39 ms·

301.
by sqrt17 15y ago
small screen apps often do away with statelessness (one of the basic ideas in the standard windows/icons/menu/pointer world) to organize things in different modes/screens. And there are means for web apps to manage the browser history by se
302.
by sqrt17 15y ago
So, which battle are Java haters fighting? Java is mostly-ubiquitous and is "good enough" for a number of common tasks, and has good enough structure for mediocre programmers working on important-but-uninteresting problems. As a result (and
303.
by sqrt17 15y ago
It heaps on a lot of theoretical musing without providing either empirical evidence of practical relevance or providing a theoretical guarantee along the lines of "as long as the model is within delta of [something intuitively verifiable] i
304.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Companies pay whatever makes sense to pay from a business sense of view. If there is supply of software developers working for 65k/yr, and they don't know how to get 50% more value out of a 100k/yr developer (either because they're unable t
305.
by sqrt17 16y ago
My prediction is that, if large swaths of China and India get Internet connectivity, they, or their internet providers, will have to choose between * NATted IPv4 connectivity (maybe with one IP per city and not one per household) and * bugg
306.
by sqrt17 16y ago
IPv6 has been the future for quite a while (2002), and it will probably remain the future for quite a while because we have good partial solutions: * The HTTP Host: header means that you don't need a public IP address for every site. Heck,
307.
by sqrt17 16y ago
More realistically, the counterpart of a LineDrive map in current route instructions is the list-of-turns representation: drive straight ahead for 12 miles, turn left into Whatever Ave., after 2 miles east turn right into Something St. Once
308.
by sqrt17 16y ago
When you're actually wasted and don't get anything done because of it, staying up late and trying to get work done will not fix it. In those cases, it's pretty much the opposite. Stop procrastinating and get a nap or some real sleep. Of cou
309.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Yay! Back in the time I gave a seminar presentation on the LineDrive stuff. Pretty good combination of usability (show the user what he/she actually wants to know) and algorithmic stuff (automatic layout)... More to the point, I always get
310.
by sqrt17 16y ago
If you annotate text, you frequently want to attach information to (word or character position) intervals. And you do complex queries over these interval annotations, e.g. (for a simple example) "which sentences contain both a date and a ro
311.
by sqrt17 16y ago
It does help to have sketchy knowledge about some language to see how you can figure out things when you cannot assume any knowledge of them. Contrary to your point, early statistical machine translation only works well for relatively close
312.
by sqrt17 16y ago
> Note: English is my only language, which makes it hard for me to construct translation examples! Ouch. Building MT systems without knowing foreign languages is a bit like deaf people building a speech recognizer. No offence meant to a
313.
by sqrt17 16y ago
There is a major difference between sports and programming: In sports, everyone is a critic, and it is really obvious if people cannot skateboard, or cannot throw a basketball. Compare with programming, where overt effect and actual compete
314.
by sqrt17 16y ago
To see what compiler compilers are meant to do, you have to look back at the 60s/70s. Back then, people implementing a programming language wrote their own lexer/parser, in some kind of spaghetti code. Compiler compilers fixed this by provi
315.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Duh... for the pages I tried, it always gives me the "No article at this URL". I'd like to have some kind of boilerplate removal that works well for forum content (e.g. phpBB and related), and boilerpipe (the library that I tried) gives rel
316.
by sqrt17 16y ago
For the WTF kind of operation, 'while' loops are much more idiomatic - generally, you'd want to use a for loop for things that are minimally recursive (i.e., where you can see, before starting the loop, that the loop body will be executed N
317.
by sqrt17 16y ago
>> If some wants to use it in proprietary software they cannot, because if they did they would be unable to then share it with their neighbor. > So he isn't free to do what he wishes with the software. This is a common misconcep
318.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Sure! You use a line to queue theory books.
319.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Why would it make people's lives worse to have price transparency both on devices and on mobile phone contracts? Around here (i.e. Europe), you can get an iPhone 4 (24x25EUR) and the corresponding phone contract (20EUR/month), either togeth
320.
by sqrt17 16y ago
FWIW, some people don't understand _interactive fiction_ as being narrowly limited to text adventures: http://brasslantern.org/beginners/introif.html Text adventures and other subgenres of interactive fiction do share a lot of common subp
321.
by sqrt17 16y ago
How does this relate to established models of interactive fiction? In particular: Multi-user Dungeons (freestyle, text-based interaction, e.g. DikuMUD and similar) Visual novels (heavily guided, text+image, with some interactivity, e.g. NSc
322.
by sqrt17 16y ago
> Sergei compares Clustrix to MongoDB because their target markets are very similar Looking at a coarse, "they want money from people" granularity, the target market (people who need a database) may be similar. If we look closer, howeve
323.
by sqrt17 16y ago
They get strangled by their DBA before they're finished with it. And: the point of document stores is that you can denormalize (i.e. put lots of stuff into one data item) and _still_ use indices into the lots of stuff. Most commercial RDBMS
324.
by sqrt17 16y ago
... as in, most often-cited papers are older (taking some time to amass the citations), and effective collaboration tools only became available much later? Also, the progress that has been made on remote collaboration (say, Skype and DVCSs
325.
by sqrt17 16y ago
I haven't penetrated the whole patent mess, but I guess the patents on the basic idea have expired now whereas special techniques to make arithmetic coding faster (i.e., nearly as fast as Huffman coding) are the ones where the patents are s
326.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Arithmetic coding is patent-encumbered, and a bit harder to implement. The point where arithmetic coding outperforms Huffman coding is when you have very frequent symbols (i.e. less than two bit or so); you can circumvent this if you apply
327.
by sqrt17 16y ago
The BBC story from 2006 seems to be the one older story in there, while at least the first two examples were in the news recently. If this is not enough to make it a "real article with actual analysis and data", most of the stuff that makes
328.
by sqrt17 16y ago
The common goal is not just obtaining x - people buy a book to have a physical book and the sensory experience reading it. People who download (pirated versions of) books may or may not do the same with the book. Given that people who p
329.
by sqrt17 16y ago
There's definitely a large spectrum, between countries where the government uses violent means to suppress political oppostion (including but not limited to Belarus), over governments that deport people who met with a "person of interest" t
330.
by sqrt17 16y ago
Oh, it's not limited to the GDR. Switzerland in the eighties had the "Fichenaffäre" when it came out that the Swiss federal police did surveillance, and kept records on, about 10% of the population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_file

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