scriby's comments

scriby | 4 years ago | on: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

The Japanese language actually does have an idiom for "in the red". It's written as 赤字, which literally means "red letter" or "red text". The opposite is 黒字, or "black letter" / "black text" which is equivalent to English's "in the black".

I guess this just doesn't carry over into the charts used in the financial sector?

scriby | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How long does it take to learn a new keyboard layout?

I learned Dvorak in high school and was proficient in it after a couple weeks. In addition to actual practice, I found it helpful to just practice mentally during downtime.

I used Dvorak exclusively and lost the ability to type on qwerty keyboards. This became pretty inconvenient, so I re-learned qwerty, but then I couldn’t type in dvorak any more.

A while later I practiced dvorak again and have been able to switch back and forth without issue ever since (even though I don’t use dvorak very often now).

I found that dvorak wasn’t actually that good for programming due to the positioning of punctuation, math, and auxiliary keys. It’s also annoying for gaming or using hotkeys in general (especially copy + paste).

scriby | 10 years ago | on: Angular 2 Style Guide

The .ts files will be compiled to AMD modules, so none of the declarations will be in the global scope.

scriby | 10 years ago | on: Now: realtime Node.js deployments

I used to use a project called now on npm that was abandoned a few years ago (https://github.com/Flotype/now). I was curious how this new project was using the same name on npm as the previous now that I had used.

Looking at the npm release history, versions <= 0.8.1 are the old project, and the new project picked up at 0.9.0 (should have been 1.0.0 I guess). This is consistent with npm's statements about package name transfers during the leftpad debacle, but there's just something weird about reusing package names for totally different projects...

scriby | 10 years ago | on: A way to deal with enormous branching factors in strategy games

I think the branching factor is somewhat higher given that the order of actions makes a big difference. Also remember that when playing a card you have to choose where to place it, which can multiply the branching factor by up to 7.

If both of you have 3 minions on the board, each of your minions has a choice of 4 targets, which is already up to 4^3=64 choices. Then considering each order of attacks, and the fact that you can play any card of your hand before or after attacks, and the branching factor has the potential to explode.

scriby | 10 years ago | on: The Daily Mail Stole My Visualization Twice

The browser's built-in same origin policy will prevent the iframed content from being able to access cookies in the containing frame because it is being hosted from a different domain.

scriby | 12 years ago | on: Radiation-hardened quine

The whole paragraph can be translated like this:

"I didn't really think I'd be able to write this [program], but somehow I was able too. Ruby is scary, isn't it? I wonder if you could write this in another language?"

scriby | 12 years ago | on: Nightwatch.js

I'm working on https://github.com/scriby/browser-harness. It's a little different in approach because it doesn't use selenium at all (rather it uses a websocket connection with the browser to control it).

It's considerably more lightweight and compatible with all browsers you care about, but you can't do everything you can do with selenium.

We've been using it for about 6 months at work and having good results.

scriby | 12 years ago | on: Programming Interview Question: Eight Queens

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with this programming question, except that it might be a little involved for a short interview.

The purpose of this question isn't to tell you whether the candidate can program chess boards or not. It could be used to help find candidates who:

* Have experience with search algorithms

* Specifically have experience with backtracking solutions

* Can reason through a complex problem (and communicate while doing so)

* Paid attention in school / knowledge retention (for recent grads)

scriby | 12 years ago | on: Why does it seem like threading and fibers in Node have been abandoned?

It would be tough for Fibers to be totally abandoned, as http://www.meteor.com/ relies on it.

I don't think it's really needed any code updates recently, as it works on Linux / OS X / Windows and all recent versions of node.

I think it's somewhat hard to tell what the adoption of fibers looks like, as it typically wouldn't be used by other modules in npm. You don't want to force people using your module to use fibers. So, it would mostly see its usage in applications.

It will be interesting to see what happens to fibers once generators ship with core node (available now under the --harmony-generators v8 flag). The most compelling reasons for using fibers can also be met by using generators.

(I maintain a library built on top of fibers: https://github.com/scriby/asyncblock)

scriby | 12 years ago | on: Knockout v3.0.0 released

In response to your #4, check out the stopBindings option. It provides a pretty simple pattern where you can wrap your knockout bound components in a stopBindings, then you don't have to worry about other binds on the page interfering with them.

See here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9254632/how-to-stop-knock...

Also note that you can configure it as a virtual element, so you can use the <!--ko stopBindings: true--> syntax.

scriby | 13 years ago | on: Japanese Animation and Video Game Website Layouts

Japanese is generally more compressed than English. For instance, consider "dragon" vs "龍". The exception is when polite/formal language is being used, in which case it can get more lengthy. Instructions and descriptions would generally use more polite language, where navigational elements would be more pithy.

If I was to offer a theory on why the Japanese tolerate more text, I would say it's related to higher "skimability". It's easier to pick out symbols within a block of text and get a general feel for what's there vs. words in western alphabets. If this is the case, we would also expect Chinese websites to be similar, and I think that's the case.

Or, it could just be a design trend. For instance, usage of the color pink is much more prevalent in Japanese design.

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