Obliquity #
Obliquity: an essay about making money, being happy, and achieving your goals.
Number Spirals #
NumberSpiral shows some fascinating patterns achieved by arranging natural numbers on a spiral. I have’t tried to verify these patterns myself though.
Writing Scanners in Python #
If I ever work on Yapps again, I should take a look at using this “undocumented” feature of the SRE engine. I’m currently going through a list of regular expressions and trying to match each one. For example, I might have a list r'if', r'\w+', r'\d+'. With this new feature, I can combine all the regular expressions into one with alternation (r'(if)|(\w+)|(\d+)') and then the regexp engine will tell me which one of them matched. This should speed up the scanner greatly.
Blog about naming #
SnarkHunting is a blog about naming products. It sounds like it’d be corporate and boring, but it’s actually quite fascinating.
Labels: future
The Internet could give consumers more power #
It’d be nice if everyone posted product & service ratings online. Unfortunately they’re much more likely to post something if it’s negative. For example, take a look at Apartment Ratings.com. Most of the comments are negative. Most people who had a positive experience didn’t post. (And some of the positive posts seem to be from employees of the company being rated...) If everyone posted ratings, they’d be much more useful. (As you might guess, I’m looking for a place to live...)
I find that I too am guilty of not posting enough ratings. I’m far more likely to post negative ratings than positive ones, even though I have a positive experience with most products I use (like this Thinkpad T40 I’m using right now). I’m not sure what the solution to this problem is. It needs to be much easier to post reviews in a way that can be aggregated.
Labels: future