Viewing profile — EvanMiller

I cut my teeth on Perl 5 in the early 2000s, and I've been curious about Perl 6 for a long time. Last year I sat down with Perl 6 for long enough to form opinions on the language's…

I recommend the approach described in this article: http://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.ht... In this formulation, s_k equals utility. Like the Wilson score f…

This Economist article's a bit chatty and superficial (surprise), but in an age of mass anxiety and digital distraction, I think the goal of the Epicureans is as important as ever:…

Nice interactive examples but I'm afraid the basic setup here doesn't make sense to me. The "atom" is defined as the average encoding of inputs with the feature ("faces with a smil…

I'm a fan of this library -- I used it to build Hecate ( https://github.com/evanmiller/hecate ), a terminal hex editor. If you get creative with Unicode box and box-drawing charact…

Hey guys! I know I'm a little late to the conversation, and while tragedies like this are totally sad and tragic, they're not unpreventable. Here at BurritoTech, we've developed a …

The method described here is simple because it's only looking at the mean of the belief about each item; it uses the prior belief as a way either to sandbag new items or to give th…

This is a compelling little essay. I think the author left out a couple of important points, though. 1. Design systems may be "algorithmic," but they're primarily mathematical, and…

I really like the analysis of finding versus maximizing product cycles. There are a few aspects of "Moral authority" that I think have been left out. 1. The rank and file know (or …

That's a great story! What's the app if I may ask?

I received an interesting reply over email which I wanted to share here. With the author's permission I've reproduced it below but blanked out some details: > I (or we as a company…

There's no desktop section on Flippa.

Yeah, and it's not just APIs. Some of the changes are much more subtle, e.g. how often a particular event fires. If you're not careful these can destroy performance in baffling way…

Thanks for advice. The main issue is that I have better traction/reviews/revenue on another app, and the work required to get #2 and #3 on your list would seriously detract from th…

Bugs (including, but not limited to Yosemite) and some significant UX issues. One marketing problem I have is that although it's better designed than the competition, in practice i…

This is a good point. However, in this particular case, the software has reached a size where it's more stressful than relaxing for me to think about. My sense is that this psychol…

I like the idea, but it seems a bit risky and would require a lot of trust. I'd be open to this with someone I trusted, but I don't want someone to take the software as passive inc…

Thanks for the advice. I've basically ignored it for the last couple of years, but with the Yosemite changes the bugs are reaching a breaking point. One of my concerns is that the …

Thanks. To sell to a larger company I think I'd need to build a small company first with at least a handful of employees. I'm trying to step away from this code if I can to focus o…

Looks interesting, I will take a look. Thanks for sharing.

Very cool. Let's talk over email. Home page is in my HN profile, email is on my home page.

Thanks for the suggestion. The code is somewhat complex, though I've tried to isolate the really hairy parts in separate libraries (e.g. OpenCL code). I'm really not sure what the …

You're right, it's a fair amount of money, and I'm lucky to have this problem. Right now I'm doing everything I can to focus on another app. I'm trying to give that app 100% of my …

Thanks. The only Mac-only competition I know of is Cartographica, which is $500 vs $40 for Magic Maps. It's mostly Objective-C. The core map-projection library is C and OpenCL, whi…

In 2011 I wrote a low-end GIS program for Mac, called Magic Maps. The idea for the app was to make a simple, Mac-like alternative to ArcGIS and QGIS that makes it easy to plot poin…