xom
Joined 16 years ago
Karma
61
Submissions
42
Member since
Jun 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
You might like the anime film Time of Eve. It's been described as the best Three Laws work that isn't Asimov or an adaptation.
Comment · 9 years ago
And yet the company still can't afford walls.
Comment · 9 years ago
Cardery is my weekend project.
It's a script that uses dom-to-image to render PNG images from card data in CSV and card template in HTML/CSS/JS. Work in your favorite text editor or spreadsheet editor, while refreshing your browser for instant WYSIWYG feedback.
Cardery's main advantage over http://www.nand.it/nandeck/ is that you write templates in HTML/JS/CSS instead of some obscure language.
Cardery's main disadvantage is that, because it relies on your browser and OS to do the heavy lifting, what you write may not be portable between computers. For example, in writing the demo I was in the peculiar situation of needing it to look good everywhere, but not necessarily look the same everywhere. The demo specifies "font-family: sans-serif" and lets the browser choose the exact font. I did try specifying "font-family: Verdana", which is my default font in Chrome, but in Firefox the kerning became hideous when Cardery applied CSS scale(). (Thankfully the issue is font-specific, and it looks fine with my default font Open Sans.) I will try Cardery in a Linux VM and see if the rendering looks reasonable. If so, then that becomes one answer to the portability issue.
Comment · 9 years ago
The [WTO] said in a statement that it would allow a 300 percent import duty on turkey tail imports and a domestic prohibition on sales during the transition period to allow the country to “develop and implement a nationwide program promoting healthier diet and lifestyle choices.”
Reminds me of the planet Norstrilia in Cordwainer Smith's fiction, which exports an astronomically precious immortality drug, yet maintains its archaic culture (resembling Australian ranchers with a British cultural inheritance) with import taxes of over 20000000%.
Comment · 9 years ago
Pigs use mud to avoid sunburn.
« Some people have gone so far, especially with show pigs, as to slather sun screen onto their pigs when they know that they will be out in the sun for a considerable time and they don't want them to get dirty with mud. » -- http://petcaretips.net/pigs-sunburn.html
You could also just keep your pet pig indoors all the time.
Comment · 10 years ago
While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?
Comment · 10 years ago
A WarCraft III commentator told the story of how he once saw a pro, during the opening, send his Demon Hunter to the healing fountain on a certain map, and he started doing the same with the same timing on that map. One day he met the pro in person and asked why he'd done it, and the pro said, To see if the opponent's Blademaster was there.
Comment · 10 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne "tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum"
Comment · 10 years ago
quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954918 :
> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
Comment · 10 years ago
I learned Go several years ago at the age of 20, and tracked how much time I spent on it. Comparing my progress with that of a certain strong amateur who started at age 14 and estimated how many games he played throughout his progression, I think I reached my current strength of 1-kyuu after roughly the same amount of practice that he had when he was 1-kyuu. This anecdatum of mine agrees with children's extra synaptic density leveling out around age 12. I would guess that it doesn't matter whether the writer was 40, 20, or 14; hypothetically, it might matter if the writer were 4 (or 7).
Comment · 10 years ago
quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954918 :
> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
Comment · 11 years ago
Explanatory note: Most humans have three types of color receptive cones; a few have four. Mantis shrimp have sixteen.
Comment · 11 years ago
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;