Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99 - humbledMBA

Solving what I consider really to be an attitude problem in the easiest way possible, i.e. with gadgets! Still, I installed f.lux and it does seem to be easier on the eyes.

Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf

It's the complete text of Mrs. Dalloway in ebook form!

Vegan London : Vegan and Vegetarian Restaurants in London

There are a lot of vegan restaurants in London, it turns out. (I'm not vegan, but 1: vegan is a subset of my diet; 2: vegan restaurant staff will have a good understanding of what "vegetarian" means; 3: vegan food can be quite delicious.)

Abandon the Web!: Is hi-tech timeless?

Argues that high tech will eventually become good enough such that advances in any particular direction won't matter. He uses an analogy to clocks, for which quartz (= good enough precision) revolutionised the industry and sent many companies bankrupt. I can't see this happening in high tech, because we have many constantly-shifting criteria for good enough. Right now processor speeds are good enough most of the time, but battery life is not. 20 years ago processor speeds weren't good enough and battery life wasn't even an issue. Via hacker news.

Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript

Many JavaScript tutorials are written by someone who can't actually write, doesn't know anything about JavaScript, or can't actually write and doesn't know anything about JavaScript. This seems to be an exception in that it is readable and the examples it gives are not insane.

Hacker News | Logarithmic calendar view

I'm writing a calendar. This idea, particularly the mockup by minus1, is what I'm after UI wise.

What to Know Before Debating Type Systems

Strong typing: A type system that I like and feel comfortable with; Weak typing: A type system that worries me, or makes me feel uncomfortable. (Hacker News)

A simple web application in Clojure using ring and enlive « LShift Ltd.

Also a quick lein tutorial and intro to Clojure. Ver' nice.

Using Prolog in Windows NT Network Configuration

Windows NT uses a Prolog interpreter to configure its network interfaces.

Pianola Museum

According to a guy on Hacker News there is a one-of-a-kinda pianola which plays Rachmaninov in such a perfectly-reproduced way that it sounds exactly like Rachmaninov.

Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science: A rare blend of monster raving egomania and batshit insanity

"[Wolfram claims his Universal Turing Machine equivalent] is as complex as anything in the universe, and all intelligent life, including, perhaps, the gods must have much in common. This, to put it mildly, does not follow. Wolfram even goes on to refute post-modernism on this basis; I won't touch that except to say that I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one."

Implementation of dynamic binary translation for NES code

Nice introduction. Covers the usual stuff but goes into interesting detail. (hacker news)

Ludic fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The false belief that your model is an accurate predictor of reality. It is a fallacy because the simplifications made to generate the model exclude important information that would change the results of the model, were they incorporated. Due to Taleb, who loves this kind of thing.

Open Day at Nunhead Cemetery at Nunhead Cemetery - Festivals - Time Out London

vigenerecypherposter.jpg (500×750)

I love everything about this -- indie movie poster stylings, Spy vs Spy reference, Babbage's delighted expression...

Joel Franusic / Online-REPs-and-REPLs

This is cute. A giant list of REPLs, i.e. programming language CLIs.

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

This is a really good idea. I learned BASIC from a book that took the same sort of approach, and (language aside [fuck you Dijkstra]) it was a great motivation.

Startup Trekking: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

Country roads were created during the car era. But the iCar era is about a very comfortable user experience, reliability and durability, all areas where country roads fall short.

WikiAnswers - What is the difference between a duck

Surreal humor as exemplified by the "duck joke" is most frequently favored by college students, a particular subset of professional comedy writers, and voracious readers of Douglas Adams novels.

MS Paint Adventures

SunPlus: The biggest chip company you’ve never heard of

Dude reverse-engineered instruction set *and wrote an emulator* based on a ROM dump.

Volumetric heat diffusion skinning - Wolfire Games Blog

In a 3D model, assign vertex weights (= amount of influence a bone has on the model's vertices, for each bone, for each vertex) based on a "heat diffusion" model. Simple, looks nice.

The Trouble with the Segway

The article referenced in the previous bookmark.

The Electric Unicycle

Paul Graham comments that while people have a negative reaction to Segway riders, they don't have a negative reaction to this self-balancing unicycle. He thinks it's because the sitting-astride, feet-on-pedals aspect makes it look like the rider is actually doing more work. EDIT: Thinking about this some more, I suspect that part of the appeal of, say, motorcycles vs Segways is the fact that bikes are dangerous. Riding a motorcycle is courting death. Segways probably won't kill you. "Solution": Make Segways go ten times faster.

Making the Food Taste Like The Food « Tea Leaves

It's a long-winded article to make a single point, which is "pre-cook your aromatics", but it also includes a daal recipe.

iPhone/Touch Platform

Graham Nelson (author of Inform, lecturer in pure mathematics) on the importance of making a stand re Apple's no-translation-layers clause: "it matters because App Store-like cultures are here to stay, and we need to establish some community norms for them."

Skulpt

Python implemented in JavaScript

LLVM Project Blog: Amazing feats of Clang Error Recovery

Clang's helpful error messages. I haven't seen all the GCC ones presented here, but it was fun to go through the ones I knew to see how used I had become to pattern-matching GCC errors. "Two or more data types in de..." "Aha! Forgot a semi-colon above!" "non-class type" "Aha! Used . instead of ->!"

Welcome to Venmo | Private Beta.

"When people trust you, you can pull money from their accounts at will." Words to live by! Similar to African pay-by-phone-credit schemes. (hacker news)

open sword - pixen

Pixel art image editor for OS X. I'm using it at the moment, and it's very nice. Update: It's also quite buggy.

Hacker News | Ask HN: got any food hacks?

Quick recipes. Most are vegetarian or vegetarianisable.

Lorem iPad

Duis aute irure dolor iPad in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse CEO Steve Jobs dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Windows 7 ha ha ha.

#795944 - Pastie

Geohot's PS3 exploit relies on the PS3 failing to invalidate a memory region. He ensures that it fails by glitching the memory bus of his PS3 with an FPGA programmed to pull (one or more?) lines low for 40 nanoseconds. Pretty damn cool.

Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions

Title sums up article. Bookmarking because it seems to be indicative of a trend in tech reporting (and possibly also reality) towards less privacy and less expectation of privacy by default. (But just to be clear: the interesting part is not whether or not this is true, but that the Internet hivemind has convinced itself that it is true) (hacker news)

Spoiler alert: TV medical dramas 'rife' with bioethical issues and professional misconduct

"Informed consent was the most frequently observed bioethical issue. Of 49 total incidents, 43 percent involved "exemplary" consent discussions, while the remaining instances were "inadequate." In general, exemplary depictions portrayed "compassionate, knowledgeable physicians participating in a balanced discussion with a patient about possible treatment options." Conversely, inadequate depictions were "marked by hurried and one-sided discussions, refusal by physicians to answer questions" and "even an entire lack of informed consent for risky procedures," the authors state."

3 Simple Rules That Will Make You a ‘Superstar’ Developer « yield thought

1. Write lots of crap. 2. Introduce subtle bugs. 3. Don't document anything. Sad: a) "This is satire" postscript; b) comments indicating why the postscript was necessary.

The Selfish Gene as Philosophical Essay

Daniel Dennett on why "philosophical" isn't a criticism of Dawkin's writing.

Schneier on Security: Schneier Blogging Template

If there's one thing I like more than recursion, it's... well.

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » How to Get Into Stanford with B's on Your Transcript: Failed Simulations & the Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness

Interesting take on the "psychology of impressiveness": the harder it is for people to imagine themselves accomplishing a task, the more impressive that task is (regardless of how much perseverance or talent was actually required) (hackernews)

What is an HTML 5 WebSocket - KAAZING.ORG - Home - Kaazing Gateway

XMLHTTPRequest, you have served me well, but now it's time to learn something new.

Stewart Brand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The hippie, writer, and environmentalist who, among many other things, founded the Whole Earth Catalog, started the WELL, and coined the phrase "Information wants to be free", is a strong advocate for nuclear power -- on the basis that it is one of few viable green power technologies.

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions | Video on TED.com

I avoided this for a while because I felt I'd disagree with it. Actually it's very good. Fascinating to see his unpreparedness under questioning afterwards.

My Lai Massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

Bookmarklet that reformats any "article-style" page and removes all the crap. Seems to work! (Edit: works best on things with one big column of text)

19 equal temperament - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alternate scale consisting of 19 tones rather than the normal 12. I like the music that I've so far heard for this tuning.

Conjuring Slydini (Part 2) - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

Conjuring Slydini - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

Sevish - Golden Hour album at Split Notes Microtonal Netlabel

Published on the world's first netlabel for freely-available, microtonal songs with recognisable beats! And this kind of niche is why the Internet is so great. Let's hold hands, Internet.

Conal Elliott » The C language is purely functional

"“C programmers” really program not in C, but in the purely functional language cpp. As with any purely functional language, cpp consists only of (nestable) expressions, not statements. Now here’s the clever part: when evaluated (not executed), a cpp expression yields a (pure) value of type C, which is an ADT (abstract type) that represents imperative programs." Teehee, language nerds!

Why Mark Shuttleworth is right - Ubuntu is not a democracy and nor should it be | OMG! Ubuntu!

Amazing example of the echo-chamber effect of the internet. The root cause of this discussion is that the fucking minimise and close buttons on window borders changed positions. That's. It. Truly stunning. I'm almost impressed.