jrschulz

Actually, one of our customers started writing "Thank you!" e-mails one or two weeks ago. I guess my boss managed to convince her that twenty hours of support per day is not the norm.

I don't find HN's font too small, but I usually have Firefox set up with a readable minimum font size in the first place to evade that problem. This breaks a few sites' designs, but that is rare (and the "victims" are most of the time guilty of other design mistakes, too).

I don't use Apple products either but I know that they sell tracks AAC encoded. And that's exactly why I see MP3 declining: before iTunes, there was no serious competitor for it.[1] But now the biggest online retailer of music uses an alternative. MP3's "market share" may only have gone down by a few percent. But thanks to iTunes, AAC songs can now be played almost anywhere. Since most people couldn't care less about the format of theit digital music collection, as long as they can play it, MP3 has lost a lot of its relevance. It will probably survive as a household term for digital music, irrespective of the actual encoder, though.

[1] Yes, I do know Ogg Vorbis. It is even my lossy format of choice. But it's never been a threat to MP3.

ACK. Additionally, FLAC is perfect for future-proof archiving. MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) and while you will probably still be able to play MP3 files in twenty years, it will hopefully not be the format of choice. Other formats are superior to MP3 even today -- not only in sound quality, but in other areas like gapless playback and metadata capabilities as well.

But hey, Jonny is still one of my heroes. :)

Command substitution using $(...) is valid POSIX syntax, not a bashism.

   $ /bin/dash
   $ echo $(uname -r)
   2.6.31-rc7

If only those developers read books...

[Disclaimer: I am a big fan of Radiohead and at the same time listen to music almost exclusively album-for-album. No shuffle play for me, thanks.]

I seriously hope that they at least always release a couple of tracks together. Whether they call that an "album" doesn't matter to me.

I fail to imagine myself to buy a new song every couple of weeks and listen to each of them separately. Am I supposed to listen to new music for just four minutes and then skip to something else?

Complex, good music (which, for me, includes that of Radiohead) deserves attention. You cannot build up attention in such a short amount of time. An album is more tan a collection of songs. Every song not only stands for itself but also serves as a frame for all other songs.

If I had a short attention span, I would listen to the radio. (Ok, I actually do have a short attention span, but well...)

I agree. And it's not that Python strictly needed the "@"-syntax in the first place. They just implemented ("hardcoded", as the article calls it) it to make it obvious what is happening.

rest2web: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/rest2web/

It is not very flexible, but doesn't take very much effort either.

I always just "(Dis)allow pages using their own fonts" + a readable minimum font size. That makes browsing much more comfortable for me and doesn't break too many sites (only very rigid table layouts, most of the time crappy online shops).

A completely different approach to the problem is to minimize the number of necessary distance computation in the first place. There are various indexing algorithms which make finding nearest neighbours feasible in large datasets. Incidentally, I implemented two of them. :)

http://well-adjusted.de/mspace.py

For real usage, you would probably want to reimplement them with performance in mind (and in a different language), though. My implementation is dog slow. But on the plus side, it is very readable and heavily documented.