Friday, January 30, 2009

Robot rights

"The point isn't whether it's an issue for the creature. It's what does it do to us."

Yes, but regulating one particular type of action that affects the perception of torture doesn't necessarily make the world less violent. Especially when you can't enforce it.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Mona Lisa

Nice. I definitely agree about the lack of sample code out there for clojure.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Internet population by country

This gives a good idea of what languages are nice to learn (assuming you do web development): chinese, japanese, german, french, russian, portuguese, korean, spanish and dutch.

Interesting that there are more europeans online than north americans.

Paros security scanner

This looks really helpful.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

My first impressions of Clojure

I was playing with Clojure last night, it looks like a pretty interesting platform, since it has tight integration with the JVM, and seems to have solid native collections.

My first negative impression about the whole lisp thing was that it seems that pretty much everyone that does it recommends emacs or vi or an maybe eclipse plugin and that other editors get no love. I installed emacs only to find out that that the shortcut for undo is bizarre (ctrl+x, then u, or alternatively, ctrl+shift+-). I'm not sure how similar vi is to vim, but I find vim hard to use as well. Eclipse was something a friend of mine suggested, but that turned out to be too slow for my taste. So I'm trying it with good ol' notepad++. Is fighting with editor shortcuts and/or indentation supposed to make me more productive? Bla.

My second negative impression was Clojure's documentation. Almost nothing in the docs has usage examples. The stuff that does is not very easy to understand either. What's a #^{}? What's "k v & more"? What's a valid attr-map for defmacro? Double bla.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Crayon Physics

A co-worker just showed this. I've gotta say it looks really cool.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Online child safety

Looks like a very extensive and down-to-earth report. At the moment, I'm more inclined to think critics are driven by fear rather than by facts.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

CMS in PHP tutorial

This sort of shit scares the hell out of me. And the Digg comments.

Grass

This guy makes a mention of Buddhism at the beginning of the post. I took a cursory look at the comments just to verify one suspicion I had: that there wouldn't be criticism towards Buddhism the way you'd see snarky remarks about "religion" when Christianity is mentioned.

Maybe I'm stupid and Buddhism is not really a religion, like I'd normally think.

Or maybe it's just that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Laws

<rant>What's with everything being a "law" nowadays? In science, "theories" are usually only considered worthy when there's hard data and standard deviations, so "opinion" or "anecdote" sounds like a more proper term when people want to say how they think the world works in a catchy way.</rant>

zappos

This is a very clever way of recruiting.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Twitter password

Pretty much everyone is talking about the twitter breach that happened this week and how twitter could've prevented it. One thing that I noticed about the whole ordeal was how the username wasn't secret (in fact they can even be farmed with a bot).

It's a well known fact that hackers use dictionary attacks to find passwords, so shouldn't we be making usernames secret too? I mean, a hacker doesn't necessarily care who they hacked, if it was a celebrity, that's just brownie points.

I don't see what's the big deal with having an extra column on the db (one for username and one for display name), since having the two separated also gives us the benefit of being able to use our favorite display name, even if someone we'll never talk to has the same display name.

Friday, January 2, 2009

Probabilities

More than statistics, people discussing statistics amuse me.