Viewing profile — aristoxenus

Man, you need to get rid of that TV! There are plenty of ways to procrastinate in the world, but that one must have the lowest "value added to life"-vs-"time utterly wasted" ratio …

It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native speakers. The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is that if you e…

Getting further OT: I used to agree wholeheartedly with this, but have you noticed how slow Gmail is getting? I recently switched back to Apple mail, after insisting on Gmail as my…

"Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit. Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never seen it done by publicly …

To someone with the proper technical skills, it's trivial as you say. But until you do something like what these guys have done, it's dishonest (or geek-myopic) to say that it was …

Let me put it another way: we all have a problem right now that we're trying to solve, which is that FB is screwing people. Your clever idea is screwing them worse, with no foresee…

Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these people on the web isn't helping…

You might be able to scrape color + ratings data from sites that offer downloadable themes / editor color schemes / etc. Or why not, a dataset of fine art paintings.

Unfortunately, that in itself is fairly common (gets past one reviewer but rejected/removed much later by another).

That's cool. Should have said "happy" instead of "impressed" -- knowing nothing about the technical side, I was imagining the impact of letting kids program ipods/iphones. They mus…

I agree that it should cause more concern -- but how about more "reflection and rethinking" than "outrage". The kids with the most to gain from an encouraging tool like Scratch can…

That post really puts the "C/C++/Obj-C" thing into much starker relief than the "wish I could use lisp" discussion. Geeks can get around 3.3.1 if they're clever enough; replacing a…

Ok, and one more thing -- poetic license. The guy is a great storyteller.

At least two things at play there: 1) Intuition. His non-conscious brain has developed an understanding of the machine. 2) Focus. When you're a warrior in his situation, you can't …

Always nice to hear when the good guy gets the girl.

I'm not comparing The Fame Monster to the Diabelli variations. She's (very) commercially successful -- her revenues have surely long since eclipsed the entire D&B economy totalled …

Have you noticed how much more sophisticated Lady Gaga's music is than the rest of what's popular these days? Her popularity has nothing to do with that. It's the way she throws in…

Nah, not useless -- come on. The speed variations aren't going to be that huge, and the variations will matter even less on an iPad. I can imagine a number of technical solutions t…

Because by being so strong and unkind, it amplifies the recognition of a material or perceptual accident of nature into a needless conceptual flattening of a person's entire presen…

I think it takes a certain lack of humanity to use the word "hideous" to describe anybody's born appearance.

As fascinating as I find the work Chris is doing and writing about over at the OkCupid blog, I've been pretty disappointed by his willingness to use all that data to "objectify" in…