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muxxa

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There is a big problem in that the purple is much less visible when it appears on top of your own piece vs. a free square. I would suggest instead to color code it red when one of your own pieces is being attacked. There is no need to show the squares your pieces are attacking IMO (yellow heatmap)

Why not take this further to count up the simple point value of attacking/defending pieces, so e.g. a pawn that is attacked by a pawn but defended by a pawn won't show red, whereas an attacked but undefended knight would show '-3 redness'. Also if this was just briefly 'flashed' after the opponents move, or after you reopen a browser tab, it might serve as a nice reminder of the positional situation without interfering with regular/plain board visualisation, and without making the player reliant on it.

3 digit hex values are also handy for prototyping, e.g. #c40 for an orange, or #ccc for a light gray

I've never been able to do this as there's usually 1-2 hours of cleanup to do after bed time. And directly after bed time I have very little will left to do housework so instead the cleanup gets delayed til 9/10pm. (3 kids) Rinse repeat :(

Decentralisation in that you'd preferentially download 'web' content via your friends. Every house has an always-on server and networking hardware to enable selected local connections (long range WiFi?) across town with no reliance on an ISP. Think Wikipedia content living in tens of millions of locations around the world, with updates being pushed out with versioning and flagging if your extended network lacks consensus on a change.

git log -S'text of interest'

has always served me better than blame. It can better jump file boundaries and find e.g. prior code that the code in question was copied from.

I've always thought though that we need better conflict resolution that is code aware. And also better changeset specification, e.g. if a commit is equivalent to a s/foo/bar/ then this information should be included in the commit, or if a function signature has changed, then record that fact, rather than the dumb line by line diffs.

This is wonderful. I’ve often fantasised about unifying the command line and the desktop into a single UI paradigm and this project could just give me a realistic shot at trying it out.

Anyone who is interested, much of this classic has yet to be tried properly afaik: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

Another idea: instead of having Photoshop/Excel etc. clones, have a document centric rather than application centric UI and allow features to be installable when they are needed (micro-apps?). E.g. Gaussian blur or spellchecking could be things you’d add from a microapp directory which would add an extra button to your interface for images and documents respectively.. you’ll build up a personalised interface and ‘own’ it, rather than being presented with a sea of unknown buttons/menu-items.

My night time wakings have a very clear and strong association with those periods of time when I’m working on my side-project/startup. The bbc article mentions ‘meditating on your dreams’ as an activity for this time, however I’m likely to have a mind racing with all permutations of technical problems that I’ve evidently not managed to clear from my brain. Does anyone have experience-based advice on whether it’s better to try to do a few hours work at 3am vs. getting out of the bed and e.g. reading fiction (which I believe is the best advice to break the cycle of negative association that can build up if you are lying in bed awake and annoyed)

None of the comments so far seem to have picked up on the mention of caffeine. For me this was the revelation; paying attention to how a strong cup of coffee alters my posture and increases tension from my back through to my wrists. I also notice myself long-pressing shift/ctrl/alt keys in a state which I can only describe as 'over-determination'. (Funnily enough, a large pot of green tea delivers a steadier dose of caffeine and doesn't seem to produce these negative effects)

Not everyone is affected this way and I believe the root cause that caffeine exacerbates is the particular kind of stress you feel when you want to get something done already, a typical state of mind to be in running a startup. Stress and psychological factors feed directly into bad posture and this is why taking regular breaks only upped my stress levels as now I needed to work even faster.

Lastly on the level of equipment fixes, ensure your elbows are supported by arm rests.

Although only tangentially related to this article, the big thing I see missing from discussions of voting systems in the US (and UK) is the fact that you are only allowed to express a single top preference for one candidate.

What is the Buchanan supporter to do in 2000? Vote for their top preference in the knowledge that they have no chance of getting elected (given that he is well behind in third or worse place in the polls), or vote for their least worst candidate from the two front runners.

If instead, the voter was allowed rank their candidates in order of preference, with their vote going to their #2 preference after Buchanan is eliminated, their voting intent could be clearly recorded.

Imagine if there was no need for republican or democrat primaries, as each party could field multiple candidates, as e.g. all republican votes would still end up going to the top republican candidate after less popular (to the public) republican candidates are eliminated.

The system I'm most familiar with which implements this is Single Transferrable Vote [1] and isn't a pipe dream but is used effectively in multiple countries (albeit not in a presidential vote that I know of).

If such a system were in place in the US I believe it would reduce the extreme polarisation that is obvious to me in U.S politics and also I think could enable a third major party to grow slowly over the course of multiple election cycles, or indeed make it conceivable that e.g. (current election) a major pro-immigration faction within the Republican Party could split to form a new party without the prospect of electoral annihilation, which I believe is why that is inconceivable.

There are degrees of democracy and for me the STV system is just vastly more democratic, more akin to how people initially express their ideal position at the start of a debate, but then still get a say as the debate progresses and they realise they need to compromise and support the next best outcome of their first preference is untenable to a majority of others.

[edit] To get back to the point of the article, I think that entering '1', '2', '3' beside candidates names is a lot clearer than the traditional tick or 'X' (which could be reasonably interpreted to mean NOT this candidate!). Filling up every space with a number is a great way to ensure someone can't easily modify/spoil your vote by e.g. adding an extra 'x' in one of the remaining empty spaces.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

I thought the big risk with salt was strokes, not heart attacks:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2782060/

"Results There were 19 independent cohort samples from 13 studies, with 177 025 participants (follow-up 3.5-19 years) and over 11 000 vascular events. Higher salt intake was associated with greater risk of stroke (pooled relative risk 1.23, 95% confidence interval 1.06 to 1.43; P=0.007) and cardiovascular disease (1.14, 0.99 to 1.32; P=0.07), with no significant evidence of publication bias. ... The associations observed were greater the larger the difference in sodium intake and the longer the follow-up."

There's also the tag place=city_block [1] which may be useful depending on its coverage but which has the advantage of being explicitly assigned by a human.

I've always thought of city blocks as an anti-pattern in urban layout e.g. exploring New York on foot for the first time I tried 'using my nose' to find interesting places but had the problem that I got zero incremental information until the next intersection at which point the large block size meant it was too far to turn back.

I prefer to live in cities for which the concept of a 'block' has less relevance, and I'd caution against trying to 'blockify' cities worldwide.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place

Am I the only one who thinks that primary keys should be derived from the actual data? That way it's impossible for two processes to accidentally create the same conceptual piece of data (which is still possible with uuids). It also makes it much easier to recover from situations when you have to quickly promote a slave to a master role without first verifying that the slave is up to date. The main bonus though is that the database is much more comprehensible, e.g. foreign keys are legible without having to join back to the primary table. The relational model for data is pretty cool and breaks down when e.g. UNION doesn't work if 2 rows differ only in an arbitrary integer primary key.

Suggestion: don't shade alternate weeks (whether a week is odd or even is meaningless). Instead, shade the weekends, to allow you to easily identify days of the week even when day labels aren't visible.

My Keyboard 11 years ago

Good to see the link to the Mind Body approach — I tried all the variations on swapping out gadgets but eventually traced it back to excess caffeine causing me to work at a much higher level of stress. As an RSI sufferer I needed to relax and realize that I'm not going to get all my goals done today, but that that's ok. It's more of a mind problem than a body problem (I know lots of computer users who spend countless hours in ergonomically catastrophic positions).

[dead] 11 years ago

Calc still doesn't understand the euro symbol as a currency.

Try pasting in the following:

  €85.00
  €56.00
  €52.00
  €44.00
If you change the cell format to 'currency', it silently quotes the entries making them literal values (the leading tick mark is only visible in the formula box):
  '€85.00
  '€56.00
  '€52.00
  '€44.00
Now it's impossible to treat them as numeric values without doing a weird regex find/replace [1]. This doesn't happen with sterling or pound.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/25764467/6691

I've an efficiency fantasy of them piggybacking on the roofs of trucks going in the right direction in order to save fuel, then hopping off when the truck starts to head in a different direction. Techno parasitism.

"comprise" would be currently going through a transposition of meaning if English was an oral language. This should be perfectly fine and English would be the richer for it, i.e. we'd have a new useful way of 'aggrandizing a sentence' (as he mentions as a negative in his 6,000 word essay). Instead the 'hero' of this article is contributing to the fossilization and stagnation of the English language, making his case by appealing to etymology and notions of logicity [1] and precision more suited to a formal grammar. He specifically calls out its' novel usage (post 1970!) as being a negative.

I think his efforts are generally good, in so far as the phrase 'comprised of' might be a good signal that a new wikipedia contributer is trying to aggrandize their contributions over and above their knowledge, but I think he is misguided in dictating how language aught to be used.

[1] made up word, perfectly understandable

The copy/cut/paste paradigm is ubiquitous, but I've always thought that a better model would be mark/duplicate/move.

Where copy+paste is achievable by mark+duplicate and cut+paste by mark+move.

That way you don't have the danger of losing cut content if you forget to paste.

Well executed, original, emergent and possibly highly addictive!

I imagine you'd get the rotational equivalent of Tetris Syndrome after playing this for too long!

The gravity mechanism is cool and the number of colors appears to be about right.

Tweaks:

- I reached a point where the circle was almost full and then I got a lucky cascade whereby most of the circle was cleared. Unfortunately this must have levelled-me-up as the difficulty (speed and frequency of ball entry) suddenly increased and it was game over pretty soon. Maybe you could implement a limit on the maximum rate of increase of difficulty, so that it eventually reaches the same level of hardness, but at a slower rate.

- I had no inkling of what the 'special' balls did, I imagine they cause something of a cascade. Could you implement a 'slow-mo' effect when they explode, whereby the action is paused and it can become clear what the hell is going on. This would also give welcome breathing room as the action can be quite unrelenting.

- add a cascading popping, bubble wrap effect (sound + appearance) to the balls for some additional addictiveness

Intervals (like June 12-13) I wrote a Python library to do things like

    >>> r = Recurrence('June-July 2014').intersect(Recurrence('Monday to Friday'))
    >>> datetime.date(2014, 6, 13) in r
    True
    >>> datetime.date(2014, 6, 14) in r
    False
If anyone is interested in hacking on it with me, send me an email and I'll try to get it up on github.

The handles on inward opening doors are a vector for bacteria because there is no way of physically interacting with them without using your hands and touching the same place as everyone else. This product does not solve this problem, but instead tries to insert itself into the users' task flow at precisely the time when their goals are focused elsewhere (on opening the door). This is a rude interruption and will likely annoy rather than encourage more sanitization. In the video (0:59), a woman sanitizes her hands then must immediately compromise them again to actually open the door.

I'd prefer to see a handle designed for safe operation by the elbows or feet so that the hands don't need to be compromised. Think of how a surgeon enters an operating room by pushing the door with their shoulder and their hands held up out of the way.