WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

nix's comments

nix | 13 years ago | on: Sal Khan responds to critic

"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 definition: slope only makes sense given a choice of axes.

"Rate" implies that the denominator is a timespan. This does not make sense, as there are many slopes which are not rates and which are not presented as rates.

It's kind of a silly thing to worry about, but Khan's answer is unequivocally better.

nix | 13 years ago | on: Most Pressed Keys and Programming Syntaxes

"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's also one of the worst things about Lisp on a standard keyboard.

nix | 13 years ago | on: I bet you over-engineered your startup

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 hard it's going to be when you need to deal with latency and partial failure later.

nix | 13 years ago | on: $199 Brings Google Knowledge Graph in Reach of Hackers and Startups

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 queries that might require offline processing.

(I designed the first version of MQL)

nix | 14 years ago | on: You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do

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 to make the cover something you can sell a book by."

nix | 14 years ago | on: Wind Map

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 version, for the SF Bay Area only. It was 15 years ago so pardon my Java applet.

nix | 14 years ago | on: Trillion-frame-per-second video

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 single scanline.

A normal video camera records a frame at a time, this one records a scanline-sized movie at a time. The raw data is noisy but the scene is static so they can sample the same line over many flashes.

After a few minutes of scanning they have a trillion fps video where you can see a wavefront propagate at the speed of light. Amazing.

nix | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Open source Android app building a network of barometers

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 sensors are particularly challenging. What happens when one of the sensors goes into a climate-controlled building, then takes an elevator to the 30th floor?

nix | 14 years ago | on: Google+ for Google Apps users - it's a matter of days

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 employees using their work email for personal business. If you want to create durable identities around email addresses, these people are kind of a problem, because the obvious way to do things gives control of their digital identities to their employer's IT department.

nix | 14 years ago | on: Cue: A different approach towards gestural icons

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 Open Exhibits Gesture Library is another option. It looks like they broke the old link at http://openexhibits.org/gesturelibrary but you can see an example gesture at http://openexhibits.org/support/gestures/35/two-finger-scale and click around for the rest.

The Cue icons will be clearer at small point sizes, but if you have enough pixels the (mostly) graceful hands in the Open Exhibits library feel more appealing than Cue's big fingernail.

nix | 15 years ago | on: Visualization of Home Price Reductions

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 realtors. A brief look at Trulia's "methodology" description suggests that they are just mapping these easily gamed MLS numbers.

nix | 15 years ago | on: iOS Libraries

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 C libraries. In many cases the C API is just as nice - maybe slightly less fancy, but polished from years of actual use. Why use ASIHTTPRequest or NSHTTPRequest when libcurl is mature and fast and cross-platform? What do you really gain by wrapping Objective-C around your regex or date handling? You'll find out when you start profiling (or porting to any non-Apple system).

The Objective-C language (Smalltalk in C) was a nice idea (in the 80s...) but newcomers to iOS should be aware that the non-UI parts of the Cocoa/UIKit libraries are garbage compared to what C programmers have built over the past thirty years. I've had to replace enough of the ObjC libraries I've used with plain C that I just start with the C code now.

page 1
more