Sideways reply due to stack depth, sorry... What's the practical difference between a government saying "You must sell your product for this price or we won't allow you to do business in this industry" and Wal-Mart…
How is that a free market? A free market doesn't guarantee that you get to stay in business. what good is a socket set for 15¢ less than the competition when the socket set company that used to pay you $35,000 a year…
I agree, this is compelling for a lot of the same reasons as the anagrams problem. I spent weeks playing with anagram code at one point, and like you I felt an immediate compulsion to start writing code for Sling Blade…
It's a fun project! I built one several years ago, after playing around with a bunch of different approaches. I wound up with a human-guided tool that seems to work pretty well for coming up with interesting ones:…
If I had known about this 14 years ago I would have certainly tried it, I tried many things... the ones that I think were helpful for me are: Ice bathes for my arms: I filled a sink with water and ice and submerged my…
The "cylinder with accordion-like folds" looks like the business end of the toilet plunger I recently bought, so it's already mass produced and easy to source cheaply.
Photography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take…
I was amused to find this bit of awkwardly worded text in the article: "...the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the…
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers: a love story that touches on music, genetics, history, art... lots of themes that HN readers might appreciate.
Notational Velocity is great. Quite some time ago I wrote a little web-based note taking app, trying to make it as much like NV as I could -- I really liked NV, but wanted to be able to access my notes from multiple…
You also don't need to ask for the card type (Visa, MasterCard, etc); it can be automatically determined based on the number.
Well, scale can mean "spend time and money building infrastructure that supports lots of traffic" -- doing this before getting the traffic is premature optimization. But, scale can also mean "get lots of traffic" --…
Maybe not, perhaps he also tweets 'In closet, with gun' when he's in the closet, with a gun?
The Aeropress is pretty good. It's cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly easy to clean. I used to use it to make mochas and faux-cappuccinos (pseudo-espresso from the Aeropress plus milk frothified using a…
One of the comments reads Historically I’ve approached big projects with the nonstrategy of “let them overwhelm you in your head, then put them off till moment when the fear of not finishing exceeds the fear of…
The concept of a "risk thermostat" is interesting -- people seem inclined to maintain a more or less constant level of risk. I've noticed an effect that interacts with that: my risk inclination seems to have some…
As a user of ruby/rails, this whole issue is crazy. Don't waste your time paying attention to it.
Interesting, thanks for the pointer.
The language (interpreter ? VM? ) leaks memory? AFAIK the interpreter has no intrinsic leaks, but many ruby applications keep objects referenced beyond their intended life, preventing GC. Edit: You extended your edit…
The game he's writing about produced average revenue of around $4500 a month for it's first two years, and is currently making around $1000 a month. That's not enough data to plot a curve, but his long term revenue for…
From the article: Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the…
I don't agree with much in this article. My thoughts on Marcus' list of "dumb ideas": 1. Default Permit - this one makes sense, getting "fail open" vs "fail closed" right is important in lots of places in engineering.…
Think of it this way: the game cost his company 120K to build, and his company has pretty much made that back, so his company has broken even(1). While developing the game he paid himself a decent salary, so he…
Eh. There are different levels of monkeypatching. I have no problem with extending even a fundamental class with a new method if it's done with care, despite the potential downsides. I think the upside of monkeypatching…
...is Phusion essentially just a slightly better FastCGI? Well, it depends on whether you're looking at it from an academic or practical standpoint. AFAIK the technologies are not entirely dissimilar, as you suggest,…
Sideways reply due to stack depth, sorry... What's the practical difference between a government saying "You must sell your product for this price or we won't allow you to do business in this industry" and Wal-Mart…
How is that a free market? A free market doesn't guarantee that you get to stay in business. what good is a socket set for 15¢ less than the competition when the socket set company that used to pay you $35,000 a year…
I agree, this is compelling for a lot of the same reasons as the anagrams problem. I spent weeks playing with anagram code at one point, and like you I felt an immediate compulsion to start writing code for Sling Blade…
It's a fun project! I built one several years ago, after playing around with a bunch of different approaches. I wound up with a human-guided tool that seems to work pretty well for coming up with interesting ones:…
If I had known about this 14 years ago I would have certainly tried it, I tried many things... the ones that I think were helpful for me are: Ice bathes for my arms: I filled a sink with water and ice and submerged my…
The "cylinder with accordion-like folds" looks like the business end of the toilet plunger I recently bought, so it's already mass produced and easy to source cheaply.
Photography is different from other fields in that the typical unit of work is quite small: one photo. That means amateurs can overwhelm the professionals by shear volume. There are so many more of them, and they take…
I was amused to find this bit of awkwardly worded text in the article: "...the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that scientists theorize gives mass to other particles and thus to other objects and creatures in the…
The Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers: a love story that touches on music, genetics, history, art... lots of themes that HN readers might appreciate.
Notational Velocity is great. Quite some time ago I wrote a little web-based note taking app, trying to make it as much like NV as I could -- I really liked NV, but wanted to be able to access my notes from multiple…
You also don't need to ask for the card type (Visa, MasterCard, etc); it can be automatically determined based on the number.
Well, scale can mean "spend time and money building infrastructure that supports lots of traffic" -- doing this before getting the traffic is premature optimization. But, scale can also mean "get lots of traffic" --…
Maybe not, perhaps he also tweets 'In closet, with gun' when he's in the closet, with a gun?
The Aeropress is pretty good. It's cheap, easy to use, and surprisingly easy to clean. I used to use it to make mochas and faux-cappuccinos (pseudo-espresso from the Aeropress plus milk frothified using a…
One of the comments reads Historically I’ve approached big projects with the nonstrategy of “let them overwhelm you in your head, then put them off till moment when the fear of not finishing exceeds the fear of…
The concept of a "risk thermostat" is interesting -- people seem inclined to maintain a more or less constant level of risk. I've noticed an effect that interacts with that: my risk inclination seems to have some…
As a user of ruby/rails, this whole issue is crazy. Don't waste your time paying attention to it.
Interesting, thanks for the pointer.
The language (interpreter ? VM? ) leaks memory? AFAIK the interpreter has no intrinsic leaks, but many ruby applications keep objects referenced beyond their intended life, preventing GC. Edit: You extended your edit…
The game he's writing about produced average revenue of around $4500 a month for it's first two years, and is currently making around $1000 a month. That's not enough data to plot a curve, but his long term revenue for…
From the article: Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the…
I don't agree with much in this article. My thoughts on Marcus' list of "dumb ideas": 1. Default Permit - this one makes sense, getting "fail open" vs "fail closed" right is important in lots of places in engineering.…
Think of it this way: the game cost his company 120K to build, and his company has pretty much made that back, so his company has broken even(1). While developing the game he paid himself a decent salary, so he…
Eh. There are different levels of monkeypatching. I have no problem with extending even a fundamental class with a new method if it's done with care, despite the potential downsides. I think the upside of monkeypatching…
...is Phusion essentially just a slightly better FastCGI? Well, it depends on whether you're looking at it from an academic or practical standpoint. AFAIK the technologies are not entirely dissimilar, as you suggest,…