I am trying to apply the Chinese remainder theorem to solve the time required for all of the events to occur simultaneously. I am ignoring the GIF timing bug.
1. Normalize times to integers.
2. Assume congruence at x = t mod (t+1).
3. Solve congruence system.
4. Denormalize result.
Not super related to the content, but I love the "Show Code" button at the bottom of the article. So often sites either show code inline and break up my reading, or just dump the whole thing into a github repo, which loses context. That button is awesome, because I can read the whole thing to understand the problem, then review the code the next time through with better context.
The todos.js one was generated by a tool called Docco, created by Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of Backbone, Underscore, and CoffeeScript). I agree that it looks really good and more people should use it for their projects!
Actually I was originally going to add "so that is why you will see it frequently on projects related to those technologies," just to give some background and link it all together (e.g. the cited example is hosted on the backbone site).
But yeah, it also gives it some star power and instant credibility, and I wanted to highlight jashkenas for his significant contributions. (As a side note I don't currently use any of them, I prefer Angular and vanilla JS syntax.)
I'd say yes. If you took the time to independently evaluate every tool that was ever produced, you wouldn't have time for anything else. So instead, people rely on crude, biased, but effective heuristics, the author's past achievements being one of them.
It's the same thing with novel authors - I'm much more likely to purchase a book by Stephen King than an unknown author's debut album if that's all I know about the books.
I just tested out a new tutorial layout on my blog that utilized two columns.. It still has the code in the main column, but the examples get pushed to the side..
I was going to bring up the IPython notebook functionality, in part because it was used as a follow-up to another xkcd strip ("Regex Golf", http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.... ), but I gotta say that one looks nicer :) The use-cases are slightly different, though.
It would be nice to have Show Code at the top, along with a note that some of the code has been hidden. I like seeing code examples as I'm reading through.
I'm the guy who built that, and I agree. I tinkered with having another "Show Code" button at the top, but my attempts looked bulky and distracting. Still trying to figure out a better way.
As a note of feedback, I didn't notice the button at all. (Only knowing about its existence after looking at HN comments.) You do need to take a little bit a the viewer's attention for them to know about the feature.
I like it a lot, too. It's a concept I've toyed with, with JavaScript and tutorials. The particular example I used was a tutorial on Genetic Algorithms, and the form was a playground for being able to quickly edit fitness functions on the fly. Having tutorials that can execute their own code is awesome.
Ah thanks, I completely missed that button. I just typed 'gif' in to my terminal and hit tab to see what I had installed, then read the manpage for the most favourable looking binary
Awesome, this is one of my favorite XKCDs. I've been mulling over a plan in my mind to make a physical version of it, looking similar to a deep picture frame or display case. It would use white acrylic with the text somehow printed or transferred on, backlit by white LEDs (maybe incandescent lamps would look nicer?). Each cell would be separated by thin black wood or plastic strips. It should be pretty easy to control the whole thing with an arduino, and I think it would make an awesome wall display.
What I found interesting was the format of the gifs themselves. They were mostly or completely uncompressed, totaling 8MB. I can only think of one possible reason to do this, which would be to take advantage of HTTP compression to go inter-frame instead of using the builtin intra-frame that gifs have (.5MB vs 4MB). But HTTP compression was turned off too.
Didn't get the "A european resident has their first kiss" though. Wouldn't it make more sense to divide the frequency by two and state "Two european residents have their first kiss"?
roma1n said "Two european residents have their first kiss", not "Two european residents each have their first kiss". It would definitely be their first kiss. Do I win pedant fight? :)
To me the most interesting thing in this article were the urls of the inlined images, <img src="data:image/png;base64,...> I had no idea you could do that.
IE 7 doesn't support it, and IE 8 limits you to 32 KB data uri's. IE also only supports images, stylesheets and javascript, while other browsers let you be a bit more creative with things like generating pdf's and excel files client-side.
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