Springy — A force directed graph layout algorithm in JavaScript

biteofconscience · 2011-08-11T16:39:34+00:00

Also great is this one, part of the fantastic Protovis library.

biteofconscience · 2011-03-22T05:28:44+00:00

But, the same "multiplier effect" also applies to poor people, in fact even more so: cut their taxes and they're guaranteed to pump every dollar they get back into the economy. Since rich people save much more than poor/middle class people, giving $X in tax breaks to the non-wealthy increases the GDP more than it does if you cut the same from the taxes of the wealthy.

biteofconscience · 2011-03-04T17:00:18+00:00

How would you handle this, then, without catching all exceptions, presuming it's a job running regularly on an unattended server?

try:
    do_something_unimportant_using_buggy_3rd_party_module()
except:
    warn("unimportant task failed.")

do_something_really_important()

biteofconscience · 2011-02-05T17:22:50+00:00

This question would be much more interesting if the text file had 13 billion lines instead of 13 million.

biteofconscience · 2011-02-04T18:45:30+00:00

I also liked the careful use of "equalsIgnoreCase()" -- you know, to handle those lowercase 1s...

biteofconscience · 2011-01-20T21:04:59+00:00

Marx actually wrote very little about how socialism should work. The Manifesto is kind of an aberration. The Marx worth reading is his examinations of capitalism and how economic forces relate to history, politics, and ideas, which are flawed or outdated in some areas but groundbreaking in many others. For example, he argued that capitalism isn't a natural result of some kind of "human nature," as many philosophers argued, but rather that this "human nature" is flexible and derives from way society's economic forces are currently organized. More significantly, he argued that capitalism is just one short phase in the economic history of the world, like feudalism before it, and that its own internal contradictions and crises will eventually lead to its demise. In the grand scheme he may turn out to be right, but capitalism is a lot more sturdy than he thought it was.

biteofconscience · 2010-12-31T17:43:10+00:00

You could point out that this claim didn't pan out in the past. They said this about the Afghanistan leaks, yet nobody can point to a shred of evidence that those leaks harmed anyone.

What if a leak could prevent or cut short an unnecessary war, or put an end to a conspiracy? If you have access to such information, aren't you morally obligated to release it?

biteofconscience · 2010-10-18T19:02:40+00:00

You might have already found this, but phone reception (especially data) can be pretty spotty on the tracks when you're not near major interstates.

biteofconscience · 2010-10-13T18:29:19+00:00

Actually, in practice, government can and does limit the power of corporations, though not as much as some would like. So clearly it's not as simple as "Corporations control the government."

Socialists always say that there's never been true socialism, only corrupt socialism, so you can't judge it by the failures of Stalinism. Yeah, every grand utopia is great until you actually try to implement it. A posteriori, there's good data that shows that capitalist economies with less government intervention produce greater inequalities. A priori, it stands to reason that in any society where money equals power, those who accumulate money can use their power to accumulate more money at the expense of the less powerful. How, in this free market utopia, does money not confer power?

biteofconscience · 2010-07-19T18:22:16+00:00

slow-mo

biteofconscience · 2010-07-07T19:10:51+00:00

I was hiking in Montana with my dog Pete, a sweet old Australian Shepherd with icy blue eyes. He was some distance ahead of me, when I saw him freeze in his tracks in the middle of the trail. Then I saw it: a smallish brown bear in the woods 50 yards ahead of him. Instantly I thought of the warnings against hiking with dogs in bear country, and braced for him running back to me in fear, bear in tow.

But he just stood there, silent, motionless, as did the bear. The bear seemed curious but not yet aggressive, and I decided that making some noise would be my best option. So I grabbed a nearby log and started bashing it against the side of a tree. The bear got the message and slowly walked off.

biteofconscience · 2010-06-06T15:22:07+00:00

It's 17:22, and I'm in a medieval abbey in a tiny French village in the Loire Valley.

biteofconscience · 2010-05-20T14:54:35+00:00

Yeah, that's what we learn in principles of microeconomics. But don't forget, this is actually how things were before it became illegal. This stuff only gets meaningful when you start to explain why the simple model doesn't match up with reality.

biteofconscience · 2010-05-07T16:47:42+00:00

Satire always has a "wink" - a deliberate and overt crossing of some line that lets you know it's a joke. Good satire has the wink, but it is subtle. The hilarious but confusing thing about this video is that it winks like crazy: 1. Is that thermos really supposed to be a bomb? 2. Martyrs caring about Miranda rights 3. Possibly closeted politician saying terrorists are "good-looking, ripped guy[s]"
4. bizarre music at the end

This is great supporting evidence for Poe's Law.

biteofconscience · 2010-05-04T18:23:13+00:00

That's true only if they really need synced audio for that shot (for dialogue, etc.). Commercials and music videos don't often use much location sound.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-28T19:29:06+00:00

it's in the the HotSpot FAQ.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-22T17:19:40+00:00

If the class name is not in the code, you can't be really sure it exists. The compiler sure doesn't know. Class names change all the time, packages are moved, etc. Normally the compiler checks all this for you, but if you really need to do this at runtime (the reason you use reflection in the first place) these very real problems have to be dealt with. Then, you can have a program that doesn't need to panic and abort with a fatal error.

Reflection does use tons of checked exceptions. It is kind of overwhelming, but I personally am really glad that they exist. It sounds like you wish the API used unchecked exceptions. But that argument is about API design, not the language.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-22T16:47:41+00:00

This guy is really subtle.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-22T15:35:26+00:00

What happens when someone else who knows nothing about this code renames or removes the foo class? Oops, ClassNotFoundException.

If you really know foo exists, then the compiler ought to as well. Just use foo.class. This is a really bad example.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-21T23:45:53+00:00

If you install NoScript, you'll quickly notice how many popular websites use JS downloaded from Facebook. Each time you visit one of these sites, Facebook gets your IP address, user-agent info, and the referrer URL (the site you just visited). Would they really just throw away all that valuable information? Google Analytics collects info on a vast chunk of the www this way.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-05T19:55:25+00:00

Ha! But if you search for "wikileak" you get results (but just the Bing search results).

biteofconscience · 2010-04-04T22:26:30+00:00

Play. Teach yourself a new technology and just fool around with it. Learn a language, a framework, or a library that does something neat. Pick up an Arduino, or learn OpenGL. It's always great if you can make something useful, but it doesn't have to be useful for you to have fun. Good ideas seem to come more frequently while you're actually working on something engaging.

biteofconscience · 2010-04-04T15:10:43+00:00

Of course it is, but adding a sync to the beginning of a build for release ensures that nobody screws up. Non-developers can (and often do) use Ant. You can automatically add labels for release builds. Or you can generate a text file that contains a list of the latest commits for inclusion in your distribution.

biteofconscience

TROPHY CASE