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pom

My favorite variation is: “if your only tool is a hammer, then everything looks like a thumb.”
Re:Dumb.domains on Sunday May 11, 2014 @07:32AM (#7728415)
Must... resist... urge... to buy... penis.computer domain...
Re:Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game on Thursday March 27, 2014 @10:28PM (#7484948)
If you are referring to 2048, that’s because it was ripping off 1024, not Threes.
This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”

I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.

[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Re:Taking a second look at free fonts on Thursday March 13, 2014 @05:18AM (#7390746)
I have been digging Karla recently and was pleased to see it mentioned. A few that I didn’t know look interesting as well.
Re:Scientists find gold growing on trees in Australia on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @12:35AM (#6596908)
TFA is an example of how to improve the quality of about any newspaper or magazine article: ignore the first and last sentence (or at worst paragraph.) Here, they both repeat that “money does grow on tree”, where the rest of the article describes how the gold is not grown by the tree, but extracted from the soil, thus contradicting the moronic introduction and conclusion.
Re:Github turns five on Thursday April 11, 2013 @03:41AM (#5530512)
It’s also my Github birthday, as I joined on April 11th, 2011!
Re:Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode on Sunday March 31, 2013 @11:33PM (#5471274)
So I found 2 red letters (C at -28.30,-57.30; M at 34.61,135.73), as well as three red signs (- sign at 35.11,-75.98, 9 at 76.50,-24.01, and 1 at 68.92,40.64) so there’s probably a super secret location given by the red coordinates but I don’t know what the letters mean.
Re:Negative space logos and symbols on Sunday March 24, 2013 @11:03PM (#5435121)
It should have more classic examples, such as the already mentioned Fedex logo, or the Carrefour logo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrefour)
Re:In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML on Sunday December 02, 2012 @06:46PM (#4863144)
Like many, I feel that the poster is throwing the baby with the bathwater. Yes, SOAP and XML Schema are horrible. Don't use them, then. Yes, XML is verbose, but that's exactly why Relax NG has a compact syntax. Use that if you don't like the XML syntax. Yes, data can be expressed as attributes or elements, but there are simple rules of thumb to decide between one or the other: if your data can have structure, or you may want to have multiple instances of the same thing, it's generally better to use an element; otherwise an attribute should do the trick.

There are also errors and approximations: XML did not introduce the bracket syntax, it inherited it from SGML. A DTD is not a schema (and if you want to criticize XML, you should point out that it should not have inherited DTDs from SGML.) He doesn't even mention the worst part about comments, which is that you can't have -- inside a comment (very annoying when commenting a large block of data...)

XML has many beautiful applications, like SVG, SMIL (which never took off but keeps getting rediscovered/reimplemented in an inconsistent manner [full disclosure: I participated in the SMIL and CDF W3C working groups]), XSLT, &c. XHTML was not perfect by a long stretch but the new HTML5 syntax is much, much worse.

Use XML, JSON, and whatever is necessary to get the job done. For the project that I am working on right now, I am using XML for serializing Web app descriptions; in this situation, XML is clearly better than JSON.

Re:A single line of Basic sends readers into a labyrinth on Friday November 30, 2012 @09:59PM (#4856669)
Reading this right now. I also made an SVG version at http://romulusetrem.us/10print/
His points are well taken, but as I player I refuse to participate in this business model. On the other, I would buy this game for more than one dollar, because it looks like it's worth more than that. Too bad.
Re:I built a tool to hack Letterpress on Sunday November 11, 2012 @11:46PM (#4771653)
Interestingly, this would allow custom localizations. I'd love to play it in French but as far as I can tell the word list is only in English.
Re:I'm Not Japanese on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @04:32AM (#4416511)
And amazingly, going to Google Maps still defaults to a map of the US... (edit: when you go to maps.google.com)
Too bad it doesn't include posters... I would have made the list :(
Re:Confirmed: Windows Azure downtime caused by leap-day bug on Thursday March 01, 2012 @05:23AM (#3651603)
This sort of thing happens every leap year, and everytime I remember that the very first exercise in the very first CS class that I took in college was to write an algorithm to decide whether or not a given year was a leap year.
I think that if you had to select just one book, none of the obvious, literal programming or technical books would seem enough... so I would suggest "Fictions" by Borges as a real mind opener.
Re:Rround on Wednesday September 14, 2011 @11:22PM (#2998786)
I get a "Retrieving position timeout" error, even though I accept to share my location (on both Firefox and Google Chrome on OS X; geosharing works otherwise, for instance on this: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#geolocation.)

EDIT: Additionally, it would be nice to have a short description with screenshots of what it is supposed in the case that you cannot get through the location stage...

Re:Non-Deterministic Infinite-State Automaton on Monday September 05, 2011 @12:57AM (#2961201)
I was intrigued by the "INfinite" in the title; but the author of the article just seems confused.
Re:When Patents Attack on Tuesday July 26, 2011 @10:49PM (#2810520)
For some reason, every time I read the name Intellectual Ventures I sound it in my mind as Intellectual Vultures.
Re:Fake apple stores on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @03:13AM (#2784652)
This reminds me of how Tower Records opened their first store in Japan, when a fake Tower Records store was already operating in Sapporo... (see http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/MTS-Inc-Com...) Interestingly enough, the Japanese branch became independent a few years ago and is still in business, when the US stores have now disappeared.
Re:The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages on Saturday June 25, 2011 @10:34PM (#2697228)
I was just reading this lately; really interesting stuff. However, I wonder how much has changed in the last 25 years since this book was written? Or to put it in a different way: what to read next?
Re:Poll: Have you moved from JavaScript to CoffeeScript? on Wednesday June 22, 2011 @09:37PM (#2686246)
But better expressiveness is exactly what you need to get your shit done. Being able to say what you mean concisely lets you focus on solving your problem and move on to the next task faster rather than getting bogged down into getting some petty details right.
Re:Poll: Have you moved from JavaScript to CoffeeScript? on Wednesday June 22, 2011 @12:32PM (#2683863)
No. Mostly because of the egregious use of significant whitespace :(
Re:ICFP Programming Contest started on Friday June 17, 2011 @03:36AM (#2664712)
Although I had stumbled upon the S and K combinators with Unlambda (http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/) I didn't know about Smullyan's book and this related paper by Keenan (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs655/readings/mockingbird.html)

Sure seems like an interesting contest this year even though I didn't people still cared about Magic: the Gathering.

I have been updating a few repos on Github daily and got in without a hitch. Nice.
Re:The ReadyForZero Programming Challenge on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @08:28PM (#2655464)
That was a fun before-breakfast warmup; the input was always short enough that a simple, brute-force approach would usually work. The problem statements could have been made a little bit clearer though.

And what's up with the green-on-black Mac screen?!

EDIT: my solutions (using Node.js) https://github.com/julienq/incubator/tree/master/misc/readyf...

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