Viewing profile — noamyoungerm

It's totally possible (and a relatively frequent occurrence) to have pdfs where the order of characters in the code has no relationship at all to how those same characters are laid…

> the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about anc…

Notice that 17 days is basically what is needed to add the issue to the next sprint, complete its development along with everything else for that sprint, and deploy to a live site.…

I would argue that the surveillance isn't in how the data is used, but rather in the fact that NYC has that data at all. Limits on acceptable data collection are more straightforwa…

I once made a moderately interactive widget using pure CSS, and it was a relatively interesting experience. The widget itself had buttons that let you choose several parameters (ab…

There are a large number of issues for which there exist equally well-informed arguments for both sides, or that there is no actual 'true' answer to be chosen.

Why aren't kids able to read text written in rows like everyone else? Programming languages just for kids seems mostly like a way to limit them.

Well, we're all familiar with https://xkcd.com/221/ or http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 The possibility, however remote, exists that you will randomly select a sequence with pat…

CMSs are dying and static sites are replacing them - there's absolutely no reason to run a complex backend when the entire site is supposed to hold some text and maybe a space for …

> willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time. That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and re…

Subscription models and micropayments are not mutually exclusive, as in Spotify - you pay a subscription fee to listen to unlimited music. In practice that is the same as paying a …

A friend-of-a-friend of mine built the Red Alert [0] app that sends a push notifications when a rocket is fired from Gaza. Alerts can be as short as 15 seconds, so if you want your…

> Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language Then how do babies ever learn to speak? The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because…

IIRC, the workflow in Photoshop is this: If you open a photo file, and when you press save there is only one layer in the file, pressing ctrl+s will not change the file format. Gen…

This is the type of question that quickly runs into problems wrt incompleteness, but there are a few key points that show that there are infinitely many theorems For any given stat…

I live in a country that has bomb detectors in every doorway. It's not that bad - at the very least, everybody preferrs a bomb detector to another suicide bombing. I think that whe…

Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguisti…

I'm not sure whether the distinction between sub-categories and their parents was treated correctly in this analysis. There is a huge gap between the popularity of HTML and HTML5, …

Gifted people always end up turning out average. Because they aren't special. Nearly every school catering to the middle class and up has a 'gifted' program. How many kids is that?…

Why do you think old people and young people should behave differently?

These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam. There is another, more benign phenomenon, where …

I don't get why people always think that "programming for kids" has to be done with blocks and drag-drop interfaces. It feels like it limits the complexity of what you can build to…

The average person doesn't have the time needed to learn how to build a house, either. As a society, we solve this problem by delegating the construction industry to a group of peo…

While it is true that in practice, the size benefit of both compressing and minifying is optimal, the LZ77 algorithm is nearly the same as a minification algorithm, so running both…