Viewing profile — nix

"Slope" implies that the denominator is a distance. In the context of a graph on paper or screen, it is clear how rise and run are mapped to distances. It's a totally sensible defi…

No ventilation? Have you tried running full blast with a temperature probe present?

"Shift" is a big omission, though you can guess at it from the emphasis on certain numeric keys. One of the great things about Python is that there are fewer chorded characters. It…

you're free to replace one by a facade around a remote service. RPC rarely lives up to this promise. Starting simple is certainly a good approach, but don't fool yourself about how…

How is demurrage different from inflation? Isn't the financial system already set up to encourage savers to invest their assets rather than storing value as bills under mattresses?…

The Freebase API is a hosted service. MQL is designed for fast HTTP queries that power interactive webapps. SPARQL is harder to learn and set up, but allows for more complicated qu…

This is interesting, but pedantic. Many words have a well-understood meaning that is only loosely connected to their etymology. Better to say that "present-day publishers work hard…

Title is wrong. NASA's Blue Marble is about 3.7 gigapixels.

They are using a bad dataset. Some of the discontinuities you see are administrative boundaries between National Weather Service forecast offices. http://nixweb.com/dust/ is my ver…

This works by sampling a static scene a very large number of times with a laser flash and a "streak tube" camera that records a picosecond-long movie of the light arriving at a sin…

More data is nice, but the experience with citizen-operated weather stations suggests that the data is useless without extensive quality control. Calibration is hard, and mobile se…

The Google Apps case is harder because of the existence of a separate "domain administrator" role with some powers over the user account. Many people on Google Apps domains are emp…

A standard here would be very welcome, though I still haven't seen anything I'd call intuitive. Visually distinguishing tap, double-tap, and "long press" is pretty difficult. The O…

Realtors can and do handle price reductions by delisting and relisting the property. This hides the ask price drop, and zeroes the days on market, to the advantage of sellers and r…

Neat. It makes sense that you'd have a fast-path for deflecting objects that are suddenly in your face. Lots of interesting stuff here on factors affecting reaction time: http://bi…

There's more than enough hacker-appropriate linkbait to fill the front page, if that's what the readership wants.

Large areas south of market. liquefaction hazards for SF: http://gmw.consrv.ca.gov/SHMP/download/pdf/ozn_sf.pdf other PDFs: http://gmw.consrv.ca.gov/SHMP/html/pdf_maps_no.html

People forget that you can just use C for the simple stuff. Many of these Objective-C classes are slow, verbose, buggy, and poorly documented compared to the equivalent open source…

You infer it from the existence of 10,000 year old musical instruments. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale#Prehistory - which also says that the circle of fifths was d…

The drawback to this explanation is that the diatonic scale is 10,000 years older than the "circle of fifths". So it presumably had some appeal to musicians as well as to music the…

Supposedly there is a mathematical reason for the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 spacing of the major scale. If you take all possible pairs of notes in the diatonic scale, you get a richer distribu…

My admittedly biased view: I spent two years of my life trying to make the JVM communicate gracefully with Javascript - there were plenty of us at Netscape who thought that bytecod…

When the continuation gets invoked by the event-handling loop, the stack is reset. You're not compiling to C here: "the stack" may be a chain of heap-allocated activation records t…

What the author is missing: tail recursion in constant space is an implicit requirement for practical use of CPS transformations. In fact this is probably the single biggest reason…