CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-24 05:08:17 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Creating Nanotechnology for a Utopia. 

2013-05-22 14:43:34 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Am I being dense, or does http://brackets.io only support one indentation mode, which is not my preferred indentation mode?  [Update: yes, I was being dense, the setting is in the status bar] That would seem to make it useless, but for such a frustratingly small reason.

2013-05-21 16:50:33 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

I just posted a manifesto for an extensible web architecture: Extend the Web Forward!

2013-05-17 16:44:12 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 11 +1s)

Gmail introduces limited form elements embedded directly in email. Why did they not do this years ago? I feel like I'm going to find reasons to do this just for my own personal management.

2013-05-15 16:36:00 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-14 21:46:56 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

A video of the proposed stadium design.

2013-05-14 22:07:40 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Is MooTools firmly committed to being a rude Javascript framework?  Are there any other notable frameworks still extending Object.prototype?  (Note: I was wrong, MooTools doesn't touch Object.prototype, but it does add to prototypes that it doesn't own.)

2013-05-12 03:57:04 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Listening to this podcast, it clarifies a lot of the paradox of affordable housing efforts in the city.  The paradox being that it appears economically impossible to build affordable housing, so really it's subsidized housing.

But why?  It's not that it's economically impossible to build housing that is affordable on a per-occupant basis, but it's not legal.  3, 4, even 5 bedroom apartments are affordable.  But of course the whole point is that you have roommates, with affordability because of shared facilities.  Not only can't you typically build such properties (because everyone needs variances, at which point you are subject to the whims of a bunch of interest groups), but even if you could build them you couldn't legally rent them because of unrelated occupant restrictions.

2013-05-09 05:51:22 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 7 +1s)

Most notably it has options for a bunch of Mozilla extensions, though that would only be of interest to a small group.  And a bunch of ES6 support.

2013-05-08 19:33:36 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

Some more details on the Unreal ASM.js demo.

"If you can launch the application direct from the command line, using SDL and OpenGL ES 2.0 for video, OpenAL for audio, and otherwise using pure C libraries, you should see quick results on the Web."

Also includes actual game play in the video.  He notes the lack of stutter, which is something I noticed too.  Remember: ASM.js is not garbage collected!

2013-05-08 06:29:12 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

+Tim O'Reilly re: Google Glasses (https://plus.google.com/u/0/107033731246200681024/posts/chUt8kcDGGP):

"I agree that the anti-Google-Glass hype is way over the top, especially given how few of the people opining on the subject have tried them.  What's really interesting to see is how accepting people are of public surveillance cameras, while up in arms about cameras in the hands of individuals.  I'd rather have empowered individuals with cameras than laws that let corporations and government track us any time with video, while individuals have that right taken away!"

I think most people are worried about privacy to the degree they see actionable and negative consequences by their loss of privacy.  And this seems like a very rational way to analyze threats.  With this in mind it's understandable that people are concerned not with "individuals"as a... more »

2013-05-08 05:21:12 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Pretty neat. I like that they form a mesh network, and I like that it's all running on an open source OS with a REST API.

2013-05-06 20:33:56 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

The HTML5 browser Unreal Engine Epic Citadel, there for anyone to try.  On Firefox Nightly (and you kind of need to use Firefox Nightly) I got 40fps on my Mac Air.

This is C++ compiled to LLVM compiled to Javascript/ASM.js, using OpenGL.  Kind of incredible.

2013-05-05 07:06:23 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

http://www.redditp.com/r/imaginarylandscapes

2013-05-04 04:39:46 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

A teeny-tiny bit of history that makes me wish a) computers still filled large rooms and b) keyboards still had circle keys...

2013-05-03 21:48:45 (8 comments, 2 reshares, 3 +1s)

I both agree and disagree with this, as far as I can actually understand the subtleties of the argument through its slides.

It does feature another mention of Woonerf and coding ;) http://blog.ianbicking.org/2009/01/16/woonerf-and-python/

I think the reaction against strong opinions can get to be too much.  There's value in establishing community norms, and we can only do that through community discussion and debate.  I think the religiosity of the arguments is a more a strawman than a real thing.  But there is a difference between code that feels comfortable and uncomfortable, which is why the pursuit of norms is important – so that developers can move more comfortably between codebases.

2013-05-03 20:03:49 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

Another article on TowTruck, and a Q&A with myself

2013-05-02 19:41:24 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Anyone tried or otherwise formed opinions on the Intern JS testing stack?

2013-05-02 05:06:43 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

A poetic defense of independent, rather than collective, experiences as empowered by technology.

2013-05-02 03:24:10 (11 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

This is one the unusual cases where the Hacker News comments on the article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639109) were of substantially lower quality than the comments on the post itself.

But that's an aside.  Why isn't there a glut?  People are more eager to have a secure job than ever, no?  Or is the perception of the job field just a matter of what filter you place on it, that the only shortage is of people who know exactly what the employer wants them to know, are above average at what they do, and will accept the pay that is offered to them.  Do employers have different expectations about software engineers than other professions?  On reflection I feel like most of the people I know well enough to know what a job search is like for them (and not counting programmers), are on the edges of the formal economy, or in situations that feel like they don't reflect anygene... more »

2013-05-01 23:31:40 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

This sounds really interesting, maybe somewhat more versatile than the RaspberryPi for interfacing with other hardware devices?

These things need on-board WiFi though, USB and Ethernet aren't cool enough.

2013-05-01 16:45:00 (13 comments, 12 reshares, 11 +1s)

2013-05-01 16:24:19 (4 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

A transit map for the cities that includes all the planned (and I think some pretty speculative) rail and BRT lines.

2013-05-01 00:30:41 (8 comments, 9 reshares, 22 +1s)

I never really thought of using SQLite as a file format for an application, but it makes a heckuva lot of sense.

2013-04-30 05:12:07 (5 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

A blog post!  On Javascript and the "new" operator.

2013-04-30 03:05:41 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Important info for the apocalypse: "black start": the complex process of restarting an electric plant from cold, perhaps without the assistance of another power plant.

2013-04-30 02:51:15 (4 comments, 4 reshares, 7 +1s)

This is interesting: a university is offering credentials based on what you know/can do, rather than the classes you've taken.  This is what online courses keep alluding to as an end-goal, but it always seems well over the horizon.  And while competency-based credentials are kind of a prerequisite for MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses), the opposite is not true, there's no reason you have to have an online component to this kind of evaluation.

The question though is how to do this kind of very serious evaluation.  Tests don't cut it.

This does offer the possibility that you could separate instruction from evaluation.  Right now we all know that the evaluation is poor and incomplete, so we rely on other cues to get an idea of a graduate's ability.  GPA, peer group, making it through a program, these all suggest something about a graduate's ability, andtogeth... more »

2013-04-29 21:43:09 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I can't decide if this is a good or bad idea for dealing with promises:

  name = getName(); // returns a promise
  name.then(function (name) {...});

That is, specifically shadowing the variable when you resolve the promise.  (I just took an inordinate amount of time debugging a problem where I confused the resolved value with the promise.)

On the other hand, it's unclear what the type of the variable is, you have to pay attention to the scope.  But I've yet to figure out quite how to name promise values.

2013-04-26 20:03:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

assertions are great.  Decent assert() functions in Javascript seem scarce, and in unit test contexts they seem generally to be deeply intertwined with the runner.  Here's the assert() I'm using: https://gist.github.com/ianb/5470043

It accepts multiple arguments, unlike most implementations, and also prints to the console, which means you get to inspect the objects you put in as the description.  E.g., assert(foo==bar, foo, "!=", bar)

2013-04-26 18:09:43 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Another nice feature of promises over callbacks: if you don't care about completion, you just ignore the promise.  And unlike accepting a callback, with promises you don't have to guard against someone not caring about the callback.

2013-04-25 18:26:27 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The usual way people try to draw in contributors to a project is to find and advertise some simple tasks that a person can get involved with, to build up success.  I'm thinking about another approach for TowTruck, and curious what people think.  I want to create a label for issues, like "contribution desired".  These issues would not be easy, rather they would be hard, especially hard for the team.  Stuff we don't understand, stuff we haven't figured out, stuff outside our expertise.  But stuff that is within other people's expertise.

For instance, I'd like if TowTruck could determine the position of a video, and offer the other collaborator to go to the same location (https://github.com/mozilla/towtruck/issues/80).  I don't know how to do that.  Someone else probably does.  A useful contribution in this case doesn't have to be a pull request – ahelpful c... more »

2013-04-25 16:31:59 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Yet another take on a STEM shortage: 

"To point out that the current supply of STEM workers stands in proper proportion to the other inputs suggests only that we are at a local optimum, not a global optimum.  Similarly, it could have been pointed out that, before the rise of Hyundai, South Korea had just the right number of auto workers (not many) for their factories (also not many)"

Well, that's the counter.  But this is probably the more important point:

"The core claim is that STEM sectors will be those which produce the future social increasing returns for the economies which house them ... that means we should invest in both more STEM workers and more complementary inputs, whether that be particle colliders, NIH funding, the right broadband infrastructure, legalizing driverless cars, better IP law, tougher schools, or whatever."

2013-04-25 16:29:04 (19 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Another take on the STEM shortage.  To paraphrase, there is demand for workers at current wages, but an employer loses the net benefit of an employee at higher wages, so wages are stuck.  But these employers believe that there are competent potential candidates, that would be willing to self-invest in the necessary skills, if they were aware of the opportunity, and if the infrastructure was there to support them (e.g., the educational institutions were prepared to educate them properly).

And really, when we expect that higher wages will bring in more people, it's because we think that people and the rest of the economy will respond to those higher wages.  We expect more educational opportunities to happen, more people to choose a career path towards higher wages, etc.  The economy doesn't just happen, lots of people put a lot of planning into making it happen.  And these employersbeli... more »

2013-04-25 04:02:07 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

"A great illustration comes today from an Economic Policy Institute study ... that shows pretty persuasively that there's no real "shortage" of STEM workers in the American economy. They look at this through a variety of lenses, but the key one is simply that you're not seeing big wage gains for STEM workers of the sort that a shortage would cause."

You could also turn this on its head.  There is a shortage of STEM workers because the economy is not increasing wages in accordance with value.  As long as STEM workers are underpaid the field won't draw in the talent that it should, the talent that would be drawn to STEM in a rational employment market.

I think this interpretation makes more sense; I don't think it's just everyone's imagination that it's hard to find qualified candidates for positions in these fields.  The retort is: thenwh... more »

2013-04-24 18:32:29 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

"The ant Myrmelachista schumanni creates devil's gardens by systematically poisoning all plants in the vicinity except D. hirsuta, the tree in which it nests. The ant poisons the plants by injecting formic acid into the base of the leaf. By killing other plants, the ant promotes the growth and reproduction of D. hirsuta which has hollow stems that provide nest sites for the ants; A single ant colony might have more than 3 million workers and 15,000 queens, and may persist for more than 800 years."

2013-04-23 06:29:52 (11 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Listening to a critique of Facebook.  There's a peculiar understanding underlying the interpretation of why Facebook is what it is.  To paraphrase: Facebook is this tool designed to draw you and your information in so it can be monetized.  There's lots of similar critiques, especially of the large social networks.

But this seems like a bizarre interpretation of why Facebook is the way it is.  Facebook isn't the way it is because that's how Facebook wanted it to be, it's the way it is because we wanted it to be that way.  A thousand companies proposed a thousand designs for a social network, we chose Facebook, and Twitter (and I still don't know about G+) – to say that Facebook is designed to do anything its founders and designers may or may not want it to do is to get causation all wrong.

At least I apply this to the quintessential aspects of thesenetwor... more »

2013-04-23 06:14:10 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 8 +1s)

There's all sorts of digital dysfunctions we worry about: are we too distracted, spending too much time in front of the screen, more polarized, more obsessive, are we worse off because of technology?

This is the standard romantic perspective on modern problems, and the romantic interpretation is also the standard interpretation – it's ubiquitous enough that the interpretation goes without saying.

The opposite approach, I think, is to view problems as explorations.  When you finally make your way through the wilderness and across a ridge, you see only more struggle before you: yet another ridge, yet more brush.  But you don't weep because that is why you are exploring, to find the next challenge.

The digital era is to say the era when we looked creatively and explored intensely the idea of knowledge, truth, connection.  (And where those explorations haveland... more »

2013-04-23 06:09:04 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

It just occurs to me that other social networks (like G+) don't have the equivalent of the Facebook Wall Post.  That is, directed personal communication held in the open.  By posting to someone's wall you don't presume to be doing something of interest to everyone, but you also don't presume that it is not of interest.

It also occurs to me that I can't think of an analog social equivalent of the kind of passive communication that takes place on social networks.  A post for instance is passively telling people something: no one is coerced, or even asked, to read what we each write, every statement is like talking out loud with no particular expectation that anyone is listening, but no offense taking if someone is.  Like mingling at a party where you don't wait to enter in a conversation with anyone, but just start talking and hope someone finds you interesting enough tohan... more »

2013-04-22 17:35:59 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

It would be a nice bit of polish on some categories of applications to use different flavors of favicon based on where you are on the site.  E.g., the favicon for github issues should be distinct from the repository main page or wiki; or perhaps the issue list page distinct from an issue detail page.

2013-04-22 16:48:58 (0 comments, 6 reshares, 8 +1s)

simple...cool.

2013-04-22 04:26:39 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Can anyone help me figure out why my attempt at responsive design on my homepage (http://www.ianbicking.org) doesn't work?  I have a media query for "max-width: 768px" and it works when I size down a desktop browser window, but not on a phone...?

(CSS: http://www.ianbicking.org/theme/css/style.min.css)

2013-04-22 02:33:45 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Setting CSS ::selection on a site gives me more satisfaction than is at all reasonable.

2013-04-19 18:33:42 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

More dumb reactions to people discussing who might have placed the bomb in Boston.

Note that only real primary source material is fuzzy screencaps from Reddit.  If you click through it's idle speculation, that appears to have been extracted from deep in threads (e.g., short comments with no votes).

The quoting is terrible.  For instance, from the article:  from ridiculous total certainty (“The facial structure is almost exactly the same”) – extracted from a post: The facial structure is almost exactly the same. And my hair can go from short to long like that in a month. It's probably a stretch; bur Sunil can't even be found by the FBI. he's just disappeared. They may have their guy in this photo. (emphasis mine; and at least he links to the actual post).

If the author of this commentary wanted to make something "clear" he should haveinvestig... more »

2013-04-19 02:19:50 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

A quite in-depth article about TowTruck: http://www.noupe.com/javascript/mozilla-labs-towtruck-brand-new-real-time-collaboration-tool-tested-76010.html (and the writer put some effort in to really try it out)

2013-04-18 22:53:45 (12 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

This sort of thing is why I don't get Arduino.  Look at the specs of this super-cheap phone and compare it to the Arduino.  I'm sure there are important differences, but the computational power of the Arduino just seems insane – there's no constraint I can figure out that would justify such underpowered hardware.

2013-04-18 16:36:52 (12 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Check out the PDF, pretty awesome photo retouching to get everyone smiling in a group picture.

2013-04-18 15:55:46 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

An intro to Web Activities Firefox (maybe still just on Firefox OS, but should be coming to Android).

Web Activities and Web Intents have been really slow going, but progress is being made...

2013-04-18 04:31:04 (27 comments, 2 reshares, 22 +1s)

The "what's popular" stuff on Google+ does nothing to improve my opinion of the service.  I guess it's like Trending Topics on Twitter, which usually just serves to decrease my opinion of the general populace.

2013-04-18 03:03:09 (10 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

2013-04-17 21:49:37 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 17 +1s)

"So, vigilantes have organized themselves on Reddit for a manhunt. They want justice served. And they're openly debating suspects on the site. They're gonna solve the case! Like real cops on television.

"But they are not real cops. They are well-meaning people who have not considered the moral weight of what they're doing. This is vigilantism..."

IMHO this is comparing the vision of the perfect cop against the vision of a vigilante.  Because the police are opaque we can imagine them to be great or bad at their jobs or whatever.

Then the article goes on to confuse investigation with prosecution, over and over and over again.  These people investigating pictures aren't even vigilantes.  They aren't going to track some dude down and lynch him.  When journalists jump to conclusions it can get bad(htt... more »