podgib
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8 years ago
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on: Qantas wants to fly from Sydney to New York or London nonstop
I've never flown business class, but I'm from Australia and currently studying in the UK. When flying home, I generally try to find a 2-stop flight, which gives 3 7-ish hour flights, instead of the 14-15 hour leg on a one-stop.
podgib
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8 years ago
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on: Qantas wants to fly from Sydney to New York or London nonstop
Currently, the stopover is in Dubai, not Bangkok (on Qantas anyway).
podgib
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9 years ago
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on: Reasons not to use Uber
Reframing the debate can be useful - I actually agree with him wanting to use the term 'piecework subcontractor economy' rather than 'sharing economy' for example. That is replacing one term with certain connotations with another that is, at least in my view, more accurate. It's pushing people to use a descriptive term rather than a marketing term, and can add to a debate.
Wanting to call Uber 'Goober' or 'Guber' on the other hand, is just childish, and makes it hard to take anything else he says seriously.
podgib
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9 years ago
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on: Show HN: Automatic private time tracking for OS X
Do you have a timeline for Firefox site tracking? I'd definitely buy this to replace RescueTime if it supported Firefox
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Show HN: Objective-C to Swift or to Java Instant Code Block Converter
I copy and pasted in the example code from the link at the bottom, and the code it produced is not valid java code. It still includes Obj-C types (eg. NSString) and is repeating method names. eg:
NSMutableArray array=NSMutableArray.arrayarray();
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: React Native for OS X
My interpretation was that the iOS and Android versions of Curbit share 80% of code wih each other, not with Townske
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API
VS code runs on electron, so it's really just atom itself, not electron, that must be the bottleneck
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: The Single Piece of JavaScript on HN
This code is simple, works reliably and has done so for a long time with no changes. That seems like the opposite of broken to me
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: When slaves and free men were shipwrecked together
Bay area tech companies are hardly representative of hiring practises (or of anything really) in the economy at large
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Mimic – abusing Unicode to create tragedy
I've been bitten by things like this so many times, that my first reaction on seeing an inexplicable syntax error is to delete and manually re-type the line.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices
It's easy from a consumer point of view in the sense that it's readily available and easy to set up. The fact that it is still technically difficult to set up from scratch doesn't matter to consumers (or businesses) when there are multiple providers that hide that complexity for the end user. Hence Dropbox no longer has a competitive advantage from having produced a solid solution to a difficult problem.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: NASA Struggles Over Deep-Space Plutonium Power
Thank you. If there's anything worse than apathy, it's people who get frustrated with outcomes from politics, but do nothing but express how much they dislike politicians. Decrying the whole process and staying away from it is the best way to ensure that power stays in the hands of those whose decisions you dislike so much.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: The challenges of building a hypersonic airliner
"This thoroughbred airliner could fly from London to Sydney in 17 hours, three minutes and 45 seconds; compared to around 22 hours on a Boeing 747."
This sounds wrong - the concorde's cruising speed was more than double that of a 747. Unless they're taking the refueling time into account (Concorde would need more refueling stops)
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: A mobile game that pays you to play it
"We estimate that if we get 2.5 million people playing 20 times a day"
This seems ambitious. I must admit, I have little sense of what sort of engagement mobile games get, but this feels like a pretty high bar to expect.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: How JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
Not quite - it doesn't support ObjC/C++/C
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Facebook's New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding
Biilman isn't at Facebook - he is simply another person who likes Haskell. He's the one that doesn't use it any more.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Please don't block everything but Googlebot in robots.txt
Thanks. That's what I suspected - I'm just surprised that yandex is behaving like a good netizen :)
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: Please don't block everything but Googlebot in robots.txt
Is there a technical reason that other crawlers can't just follow the googlebot rules? It's great that bots seem to obey the wishes of site owners, but I'm genuinely surprised that the yandex bot doesn't just follow the Google bot rule and ignore the general disallow rule.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: A faster way to compute edit distance does not exist
In practice, yes, the computation time required to compute edit distance will depend on the actual data. Similarly, 'sorting' a list that is already sorted can be done in linear time, and near-sorted lists can be sorted much faster than a randomly ordered list.
This is certainly useful in practice, but it doesn't affect whether the worst- or average-case complexity is quadratic. I'd like to see a quadratic (or exponential etc) time problem that couldn't be solved faster in many cases.
podgib
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10 years ago
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on: First Look: GitHub Desktop
Fair enough. I've only seen the splash page. Surprises me somewhat given that they now have a solid cross-platform shell for 'native' web-based apps.
