Viewing profile — SeanLuke

I recall HN originally using Arc. Is there a history available regarding its development and redevelopment?

I need a UI which runs well on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without having to build three different ones. Swing is still easily the best, most consistent, and most native-feeling cro…

Well, I'll tell you one fun item. My teenage kids are practicing the piano downstairs. I hear a very wrong note being played over and over. I yell down to them what note they're pl…

Note that Prasad didn't reject their application: he prevented Moderna from even applying. Prasad overrode a phalanx of FDA career scientists who had studied and approved Moderna's…

I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't thin…

These are waaay too complicated. Web developers can't even handle the easy stuff. My email address is of the form sean@foo.bar.baz, and email address validators on websites reject …

That's not what stability is. A stable bike is one in which the steering is stable and easily controlled at various speeds. It's a function of steering geometry and mechanical trai…

Having lived in Italy and used the btwin folder quite a lot, I can assure you there are lots of basic folders in its category and price range which are much better. I'd look into D…

The strida is certainly the *dorkiest*, not nerdiest, looking design, but in terms of engineering, it's very bad. It is terrible, TERRIBLE to ride, with horrible mechanical trail. …

Praised by whom? The btwin folder is a low-rent and low quality version of a Dahon-style Chinese fold-in-half folder. That folding design is about 95% of the folding market, and ha…

Sadly, they no longer make the knob stems.

I own what could possibly be the coolest folding bike ever made: the Bike Friday Tikit Hyperfold. It has a folding mechanism with an extremely high nerd quotient. It has a reputati…

It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.

It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the…

I developed and maintain a large and very widely used open source agent-based modeling toolkit. It's designed to be very highly efficient: that's its calling card. But it's old: I …

Power draw, and 5V.

My bad. Of course it is. Had a brain fart there.

My answer: while 99% of the AI community was busy working on Weak AI, that is, developing systems that could perform tasks that humans can do notionally because of our Big Brains, …

US News rankings are garbage based in no small part on opinion surveys and famously manipulated year over year. Though I strongly disagree with their choice of conferences, probabl…

The Bobby Tables of paper submission.

> It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian. Absolutely. More to the point, it's an example of just how impressively detail-o…

No, it is not. When they say "capeesh" in the movie, they're trying to say "do you understand?" (second person singular). In Italian, that would be "capisci" (pronounced "ca-pee-sh…

If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, …