Traffic everywhere slows down over the weekends. I get some of my best work done over the weekend though.
None of my competitors and potential competitors work. People are nicely surprised to find a new feature or two working when they come back on Monday. Gives your site a sense of momentum.
Japanese executives often have desintoxication "cures" when they come back from Europe or the US, so that they don't become addicted to "the good life". The culture of work is insane over there, this is the last industrialized country where I'd want to work. Calling them a "slacker" nation shows a deep ignorance about the nature of Japanese society.
if it's any consolation, Prasher can take a page out of Garrett Lisi's playbook and get grants from new institutions who would be willing to fund someone like him now that his name is out.
I like to make some time for myself on the weekends, even if I have a lot of work to be doing. It's necessary to have a mental and physical recharge period.
Similar to the T-Mobile G1, which currently has a cost somewhere between £180 and £720* despite the handset being 'free'.
Nevertheless there are times when finance can be a great deal. Anyone who took out a cellphone contract in Zimbabwe just before the huge deflation must be enjoying their fixed price (now costing ~0.0000000001% in real terms) right now.
*Depending on how you value the cost of the supplied services - the £180 is for someone who fully utilises the bundled minutes/data valued at the lowest cost I can find of obtaining the same plan elsewhere.
It's a shame he didn't get some official recognition, but he willingly sent his work to these guys.
He's obviously one of the few people around who cares more about helping people than money. He's got the respect of his peers, which in academia is probably one of the main things you strive for.
I'm sure he would have been greatful for few quid though!
You have evidence of blacks being laid off in and around Palo Alto, and then committing crimes?
I think you should know by now that HN is a place that prides itself on data driven debate. If you have the data, please present it and allow us to determine for ourselves the meaning of it.
I'm betting that, having been challenged, you will quietly go away. But, I REALLY wish that you would respond with some contrived data so that I can point out the logical fallacies in it! :D
BTW - I didn't mod you down. I want people to see this conversation!
An exciting effect is the possibility of new algorithms to take advantage of this different set of performance characteristics (and vindication of neglected, maligned crackpot schemes). There are avenues that intelligent people simply don't explore, because they wouldn't help solve the problems they face, given the fundamental nature of hardware.
The headline is somewhat off... the initial cost will be $99 but if it comes along with a contract with any North American mobile carrier then there's no doubt they'll make that money back and more.
that works out to about €600-700. Stand-alone netbooks go for around €350-400 typically, so you'll have to use about €200-350 worth of the data plan over the course of 2 years. Unless this is their only connection to the internet, I very much doubt most people will use it that much.
Perhaps this misunderstanding of the goals for TeX is what makes your posts sound trollish. Most people who write documents don't need anything but the simplest of typesetting. The web is a collection of millions of documents, but it is built off about 6 fonts, using a very limited character set.
Most people who need good typesetting for technical documents use TeX, particularly if they want to typeset mathematical notation. Wikipedia requires minimal typesetting for the majority of its content, but the maths is set using TeX.
Why no TeX viewer? The goal for TeX was to typeset printed documents, books. PDFs work fine online, you could easily send someone a resume on paper or in a PDF, typeset using TeX.
Why no bundled TeX GUI? TeX didn't set out to be a text editor, it just handles typesetting for people who don't own printing presses. If it had tried to be a text editor, it would probably have been much less successful, and would be probably be forgotten by now.
Writing a WYSIWYG text editor is a very different challenge to writing a typesetting program. For example, TeX will try and lay out a paragraph so that there is no trailing single word on the last line. (And will produce warning messages if it can't find a way to make it look good.) To do that, you need to have access for the whole paragraph of text. However, in a WYSIWYG editor, as soon as the type hits the page, you want it to stay there. You don't want it moving about as you add text to the end of a paragraph, as this leads to a poor user experience. Which is exactly the behaviour you do want in a typesetting application.
Typesetting formulae graphically has similar problems, but they are even worse. The few GUIs for TeX that do exist are largely unremarkable, but notably they are GUIs which use TeX, it isn't a goal for TeX itself to provide one.
TeX's goal is beautifully typeset books, a goal it achieves.
(Specifically the typesetting of The Art of Computer Programming series of books, though obviously it is used in a much wider context.)
