News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ATLobotomy

Re:IA or AI? on Monday October 12, 2015 @03:47PM (#10376603)
EDW387 [0] (which doesn't have NN0 or NN1 pseudonyms either) seems to be pretty clear about what the "anti-intellectualism" comment was about.

>The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous.

Wish the author went into more detail on why now may be different than during Kay/Engelbart's time.

[0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...

Re:Intelligent Dance Music on Sunday October 11, 2015 @03:29PM (#10370579)
Re:Dual-touch smartphone design concept on Saturday May 17, 2014 @11:45PM (#7762085)
Why does it have to be on the back? Some old Android phones had a trackball (or an optical sensor like on a mouse) to be used as a sort of cursor. The Palm Pre had a small touch sensitive area below the screen that could be used for OS specific gestures (much better integrated than what Android used the trackball for IMHO).

All of these ideas are pointing to the issues in the use of a touchscreen as input (imprecise, blocks screen during use, etc), yet for some reason they keep getting used (and even taking over regular buttons).

I hope that this decision is being tested by the companies HCI departments, but I worry that marketing is deciding that changing the input would be too much of a risk (or cause fragmentation).

Re:How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation (2012) on Friday March 21, 2014 @02:21AM (#7440939)
Step 0. Find stories where the software industry isn't benefiting from the frivolity of the system.
Re:Pop-Up House: The affordable passive house on Saturday March 15, 2014 @11:29PM (#7407666)
All that styrofoam makes me wonder if it would float.
Re:Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use on Friday March 14, 2014 @09:16PM (#7403027)
Reminds me of the "Future of Programming" presentation given by Bret Victor [0]. Bret's talk is much more focused on the concepts that were created during the early period of CS, but abandoned(more or less) over the years rather than the major concepts that have persisted.

[0]: http://vimeo.com/71278954

Re:Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @01:09AM (#7345621)
It shouldn't matter what the struct is holding, you are passing a pointer, it's always the same size.
Re:Google Readying Android Smartwatch with LG on Sunday February 23, 2014 @08:51PM (#7288677)
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think [smartwatches] are a pretty neat idea." - A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
Re:Christine: The World's Most Modular PC Design on Saturday February 22, 2014 @01:56PM (#7283095)
I could see a pump being included in each module. In a modular design such as this the flow rate through each waterblock would need to be guaranteed with many different possible restrictions.

Additionally, if the pumps were run serially, it could add some redundancy to the cooling loop (especially benefitial since each unit's pump might not have the same MTBF)

Re:3D GIFs Created with a Simple Visual Effect on Monday February 17, 2014 @01:29AM (#7250893)
SpeakMouthWords was describing the origin of the white bars shown here (i.e. originally separating gifs).

These style gifs came later (i.e. gifs with 3d effect from the addition of the bars), integrating the white bars that had come to be expected from Tumblr posts.

Re:How I built an application in two days on Monday February 03, 2014 @03:11PM (#7173142)
I wish that hyperlinks could be used in a more Wikipedia like sense (I.e. linking to description s, other relevant content, instead of just being used to get links for Site Loader.
Re:Netflix Is Going to Rule TV After All on Sunday January 26, 2014 @06:01PM (#7127471)
Have you seen what is run on standard cable channels lately? The cost to create some junk reality tv show (that will still bring in tons of viewers) is remarkably small compared to the cost of the infrastructure.