Viewing profile — ntownsend

The LulzSec twitter feed now appears to be empty.

Lesson learned: the public can (and must) stop big telecom putting Canada in a digital ghetto.

Alton Brown is the reason I started caring about food preparation. Good Eats is unlike most food shows in that its primary motivation is teaching the audience about food and the ho…

Libertarian clap-trap. Governments and pies only become a bad combination when there is no meaningful oversight or regulation. Your point of view makes sense in America where this …

The case is similar in Canada. I think this recent article by Jesse Brown reflects the reality for a lot of broadband-connected Canadians with similar viewing habits to broadband-c…

RIM has extremely talented engineers and developers, but it does not have a culture where engineers can say "We are doing the wrong thing" and have any decision-makers take notice.…

And on that note, the creator has made the common mistake of performing the calculation speed_of_light * age_of_universe to determine the radius of the observable universe. Space h…

I had very similar thoughts when I read the book. It seems to me that if there is no desire for class mobility then strata are not evil. However, humans being what they are, it see…

You can set a few other parameters like your size, too. Unfortunately, no one else can see it. I was the biggest sperm you never saw.

...we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space... ...it might take a little more than the ten years to…

In 2006, nearly half the population of Toronto was a "visible minority". It's estimated that more than half are now. Similarly, half of the population is foreign-born.

In JavaScript, Arrays are not actually arrays. They're not a contiguous block of memory. They're just Objects (i.e. hash tables) that key on integers. If you look at the indices it…

Whoops. You're right. I'm embarrassed because I do know the difference.

The argument that XML can have various different structures for storing a person's name, while JSON provides one simple solution, doesn't fly. You could run into something like { "…

If any HNers work or have worked at Amazon, is it a good place to work?

I found that book a little too precious.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Relax, buddy. It's a joke.

I've just thought of the first app I'll make for the iPad. It will be a version of top . Seeing as the thing only runs one process at a time, it should practically be a one-liner.