Corun

Those look like pretty normal numbers in my experience. Certainly nothing to worry about. But, the effectiveness of your marketing isn’t necessarily a good measure of your idea and product. Different targeting can change those numbers drastically.

Also, how good web or search ads are really depends on the economics of your product. If your customers will be paying $60 per year then paying 5$ to acquire them is pretty damn good.

For the moment though, I would focus on getting into real conversations(phone or video) with your customers to understand what they want, how much they’d pay, etc. With so much competition for attention, the days of validating with a landing page may be over.

Knowing powers of two in your head (as I guess many of us do) can helps with root estimates and this algorithm.

Take an example sqrt(5819): That's between two powers of two 2^12 = 4096 and 2^13 = 8192. The square roots of those numbers are easy, since you just half the exponent sqrt(4096) = 2^6 = 64

That gives us our initial estimate g for the algorithm from the article. Now we do: b = n / g = 5819 / 64 To do this division in our head we remember that we already know 4096 is 64 x 64. So we just need the remainder (5819 - 4096) / 64 ~= 1700 / 64. Now that's low enough that I can approximate it in my head 64 * 30 is too high by about 3 * 64 so the answer should be around 27 (actual answer 26.5). So b = 64 + 27 = 91

So now we finish the algorithm, sqrt(5819) ~= g + b / 2 = (64 + 91 / 2) = 77.5.

So, how did we do?

The actual sqrt is 76.28, so seems pretty good!

If we are going for technical correctness... Anything being broken by this is relying on the output of man with no arguments which is not documented as far as I can see, other than that it should have exit code 0.

Where is the boundary between responsible and harmless fun?

Perhaps I should be careful not to edit this comment in case someone's test pipeline curls it and checks the content.

Turns out it's an easter egg referring to a song.

Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it. And the author has now removed it.

I find it hard to relate with people who not only would be annoyed by something like this, but are annoyed about it enough to push their view on the internet to the point that the author feels the need to remove it.

In my view, the best response to those people? Update it to a more recent, or perhaps a more recognisable reference. Perhaps "Rocket Man".

In reality it is still maintained though I think. They released an update to bring native Apple Silicon support for example: https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-v1.5-apple-silicon-macos-...

Smart C++ Engineer | CloudNC | London, UK | Full-time | ONSITE

CNC milling machines are at the heart of manufacturing with more than $300B of components produced by them each year. Despite this, their software is in the dark ages. Industrial CNC machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80iIhfjTm5I

We’re researching and applying breakthrough methods to control these machines automatically and more optimally than ever before. We’re looking for experts in C++, 3D graphics and GPGPU acceleration who want to help revolutionise how the things around us are made. From MacBook cases, to jet engine turbines.

Your role will consist of developing novel algorithms to solve real world problems in machining and working with a team to engineer our core product.

The perfect candidate would have:

• Experience working in C++ (11 or newer).

• A strong grasp of 3D maths.

• A solid understanding of computer architecture.

• A strong computer science background.

• Experience in software optimisation.

See: https://angel.co/cloudnc/jobs or email chris@cloudnc.co.uk

Related: http://monodraw.helftone.com is a beautiful ASCII Diagramming Tool for Mac.

Hey guys. I'm the developer of this. I'll be happy to answer any questions!

Also you might be interested to know that this is written in C++ and compiled to JS using emscripten and using WebGL.

I'm not sure, but I think the author means that there is no extraction of fields from the instruction, which is one way of defining the decode step.

Yup SketchUp is pretty good, but it's really not ideal for 3D printable objects. And it's still not easy enough to help enable the widespread adoptions of 3D printing.

SEEKING WORK - London or remote.

I'm an experienced iOS and Mac Developer who has released many of his own apps as well as collaborated with others.

- Developed Clear for Mac: http://realmacsoftware.com/clear/

- Developed and launched my first indie game, Pentumble: http://pentumble.com

- Developed and launched DisplayPad: http://displaypadapp.com

- Developed and launched DiskArt: http://diskartapp.com

- Interned at Google where I worked on Google Voice Search for Android

- First Class Degree in Computing from Imperial College London

If you need an iOS or Mac app developed fast, cleanly and with beautiful UI. I'm your guy!

Email me at chris [at] thecosmicmachine (dot) com

Implementation wise, it's using WebSockets to send relevant key up/down events. A key is considered pressed if more than 50% of active users are pressing the key (active users must have pressed a key in the last few seconds).

Hmm. This is unlikely unless Objective-C can be made to work on Vita with GNUStep or something. Doesn't look like anyone's tried it so probably a lot of work.

Maybe I should've used C++...

Thanks! We're still having trouble deciding how to monetize exactly. We were initially thinking $4.99 on Mac. But now we're thinking maybe freemium and you can buy the remaining levels after you've completed the first 9 (for still a few dollars on Mac). What do you think?

It's actually my own engine. The whole game started out as an experiment in lightmapping, believe it or not. The graphics are OpenGL, the physics are chipmunk physics ( https://chipmunk-physics.net ), I used Sketch-up and Blender for the 3D design and Lua for scripting.

I'm planning on writing some articles on the process over the next few weeks which will appear on http://blog.helftone.com :-).

Thanks! You're right that it feels weird on the underside of platforms, though you get used to it ;-). We considered some alternatives (if you jump on to the bottom of a platform then invert the controls until you let go), but they were just weird in different ways.

The feedback button does hide the window. Perhaps it shouldn't. I'll fix it :-)

Thanks! You're right that gaming isn't that big on Mac. The main target is going to be iOS initially with Mac on the side, but the Mac version is already ready and much easier to link to a bunch of people :-).

The game is written in Obj-C, but I think with either gnustep or cocotron (or I think there was a commercial one that I'm forgetting...), it wouldn't be too hard to port since it's almost entirely OpenGL. I hope that will be in Pentumble's future :-).

"Gnu" is another name for a wildebeast: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildebeest

Shame it's not "I don't often test my code, but when I do I do it in producting".

This is very cool and all, but I just see it as another example of a web tech demo that if rewritten for my 20 year old Super Nintendo would run with more frames per second. There appears to be no hope in the near future for smooth interaction on the web. WebGL can do the smooth web - But then it's not the web, it's just javascript+opengl.

Signed 64 bit seconds since epoch is enough.

"no one needs to look at mail headers and it should be the job of the user's mail reader to display it in a human readable form".

Exactly...

Who reads email headers? Maybe some server admin who's going through some backups of emails looking for something. He might even appreciate having a date format that's lexicographically ordered for his searching purposes.

Having a human readable date is like changing HTTP Content-Length to say "one million four hundred and fifty thousand and sixty four" so that when I'm reading through my raw server logs I can easily see the magnitude of the length of the responses.

I don't understand why you would ever use anything other than seconds/micros/millis since epoch. Basically no parsing; Efficiently storable; Simpler; Easier; Better.

Only argument I've ever heard is human readability... If you're reading these by hand so often then just write a script/tool/whatever to convert them to human readable. This is still easier since you don't have to find an acceptable ISO8601 implementation. And frankly, how often are you reading the dates manually but not as part of some log output of your program where it could convert it to human readable before logging?

This is sending dates the wrong way.

Did a bit of investigating. It seems you can make Android views use layers as iOS does. But it's off by default (maybe because of this OpenGL using 8MB of memory per process thing).

(Further reading: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.htm... )

Edit: Also, I missed where she said that in her post: "Starting with 3.0, if you set the flag in your app saying that hardware accelerated drawing is allowed, then all drawing to the application’s windows will be done with the GPU. The main change in this regard in Android 4.0 is that now apps that are explicitly targeting 4.0 or higher will have acceleration enabled by default".

Unfortunately only the the Samsung Galaxy Nexus has Android 4 and I'm not sure there's anything other than a few tablets that have Android 3?

Android's graphics problems are not due to a lack of hardware acceleration. They're due to poor architecture.

The reason iOS is so silky smooth is because each view in UIKit is backed by a CoreAnimation layer which will be a pixel buffer in hardware. This means that if you move a UIView in iOS, no new rendering needs to be done of stuff that was "uncovered" by moving the view since each UIView has the full contents of its view stored in its CALayer. All that needs to happen is all of the layers are composited in their new positions which hardware will blazingly fast. However, as I understand it in Android, each Window (containing multiple Views) is one pixel buffer in hardware. Each view then draws in to that. This means that if you move a View in android, another view will be "uncovered" and since that area of the screen isn't stored somewhere, it has to go down the view tree rendering the now uncovered area of the screen. Even if that rendering is hardware accelerated, it's still going to be muuuuuch more work that just recompositing all the layers on the screen as in iOS, I mean imagine if there's text uncovered there? That's not going to be quick.

Now, there are downsides to iOS's approach - it uses a bunch more memory. But the upsides are basically what makes iOS good - all those silky animations. Android's just getting to a similar level of smoothness, but mostly only through better hardware.

(Caveat: How android works may have changed since I last looked, but that just makes the mystery of lack of smoothness even more interesting ;-) )

In the document after the linked one ( http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/et_intelligence.pd... )

At the top: "In the most recent issue of the NSA Technical Journal-Vol. XI, No. 1- Mr. Lambrox D. Callimahos discussed certain aspects of extraterrestrial intelligence and included several messages to test the reader's ingenuity. In the following pages, Dr. H. H. Campaigne offers additional communications from outer space."

Implication is that they're just "for fun"?

Further, the NSA Journal referred to is at: http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/nsa/extraterres...

And reads as a discussion of how ET would communicate. Received by Sputnik indeed.