xkcd

Mat

I recently finished the Remembrance of Earth's past series by Liu Cixin, which is incredible. Hard scifi where everything goes wrong for humanity. The first book feels more grounded as it's set in the 20th/21st century (starting with the cultural revolution), while the other two skip further and fur...

Mat

bigglesworth wrote:
speising wrote:why the fuck is this called "hoverboard", and why the reference to McFly, except because of the date?
You might prefer the other name "swegway".

sweg == swag? I am more confused than ever.

Mat

apparently awesome modes of transport are illegal in the UK :( http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/12/hoverboards-illegal-pavements-roads-scooters Bad news if you like gliding down the street like a low-rent Marty McFly: “hoverboards” (also known as self-balancing scooters) are illegal to...

Mat

I'd also be interested to hear about more podcasts. I listen to a lot, but not so many that are coding related. A couple I can recommend are Hanselminutes and Software Engineering Radio. Hanselminutes covers a very broad range of subjects and is quite light and accessible. SE radio tends to be more ...

Mat

I stumbled upon an AI the other day that looks interesting: https://github.com/pasky/michi Michi aims to be a minimalistic but full-fledged Computer Go program based on state-of-art methods (Monte Carlo Tree Search) and written in Python. Our goal is to make it easier for new people to enter the dom...

Mat

Another approach could be to aim for something less than winning full games (such as capture go), and then evaluate each position based on the local area instead of thinking about global strategy or reading out branches. It'll still suck against humans, but could still be interesting if you just wan...

Mat

On Korrasami: http://bryankonietzko.tumblr.com/post/105916338157/korrasami-is-canon-you-can-celebrate-it-embrace Personally I don't find the ending at all ambiguous, but I agree with the sentiment. I think kiss or no kiss, the final scene made sense in the context of the rest of the season, but thei...

Mat

I skipped over most of the thread because it is quite long

Mat

patzer wrote:Hi Pinkie!

Hi Twilight!

Mat

Drawing

Spoiler:

Mat

I loved the ending. The only time I thought the writing was bad was the first half of season 2, where they rushed over the civil war and the motivations of the main characters just made no sense. I agree there is a lot about the technology and the wider world that didn't make sense, but I could forg...

Mat

Something like $select . $from . $order doesn't work well when your queries get more complex, especially if you are supporting more than one database. For example, one query might need to be compiled to any of these: ⋅ select top 10 ... ⋅ select first 10 ... ⋅ select .....

Mat

What did you find difficult to customise with XFCE? I the settings menu is quite well organised and there's plenty of information out there if you google what you're interested in. For example changing the colours - https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/install_new_themes - which explains the difference betwe...

Mat

Have you looked at their API? You should be able to get all that information without needing to scrape the HTML.

They have client libraries for a bunch of languages but you could use Lua and parse the JSON yourself if that's easier.

Mat

I made a thing: http://online-go.com/group/185 - please join and start games!

I'm about 10kyu at the moment but I'm still provisionally ranked on there so I've probably missed my chance to be top of all the ladders

Mat

For music, have a look at http://musicbrainz.org/

The Picard tagger software does most of what you want out of the box, and if you can't easily automate that there are c/c++ libraries available http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Developer_Resources

Mat

(although Luna's banishment still makes no sense) How so? Cuz that's one part of this show that I'm REEEEEEAAAAAALLLLLLY into. The sudden switches between 100% good/evil is what bothers me. They didn't give any reason for her becoming Nightmare Moon, she just did. The flashbacks in ...

Mat

Anyone fancy a game on http://online-go.com/ ?

I've just started playing correspondence games on there and it seems pretty good. If people are interested we could start an XKCD group and get a ladder going?

Mat

After princessgate I was kind of horrified to watch the new episode, but I actually enjoyed the premiere. The super alicorn backstory potion was pretty ridiculous but I liked how they fleshed out the mythology (although Luna's banishment still makes no sense) and set up the rest of the s...

Mat

pygame and mutagen don't support it yet I've been using Pygame with Python 3 for ages now. You can download Pygame for Python 3 here . Maybe it works for you, but those releases don't appear to exist anywhere outside that page, and they're windows only. The latest versions on pypi are python2 only ...

Mat

Huh, I thought I'd have a hard time coming up with 10, but apparently I've seen at least 12. In order of awesomeness: ⋅ Moonrise Kingdom ⋅ 21 Jump Street ⋅ Cabin in the Woods ⋅ Cloud Atlas ⋅ Django Unchained ⋅ Avengers ⋅ Iron Sky ...

Mat

Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely try and follow that next time. These connectors have been the most fiddly part of the whole build.

After finally getting the power ones sorted I managed to ~~screw up usb 3~~ get it working \o/

Mat

So I'm attempting to a build a new PC. It has lots of little cables from the case: the power switch, reset switch, and some LEDs. My motherboard (MSI H87-G43) has a 9 pin JFP1 connector which these are supposed to go into. The problem I'm having is the cables don't want to actually stay on the conne...

Mat

Spoiler:

Mat

By "different levels of explanation and depth" do you mean none? I'm not a huge fan of the old movies but I don't think the new ones stand up that well even on their own. I don't care so much about changing the rules, it's their black and white morality, shallow villains, and contrived plo...

Mat

Awesome video

Now I want to attempt a geohash again...

Mat

Yaay pony music ^_^

Some of my favourites:
Sunshine & Celery Stalks + awesome acoustic cover
Hardware Store
She didn't put those in her BAHG
Appleside
MLP Intro Glitch Remix
Want it need it
Vicious Lies
Rainbow Dash Picked Me
Twilights New Stockings

Mat

Yeah, Tyrion didn't really need to be in the episode, and it was a bit exposition-y in places, but overall it was a pretty good episode. That scene with Sansa and the Tyrells was wonderful. I still feel like they try to cram too many characters into an episode though sometimes. I would much rather t...

Mat

Spoiler:

Mat

The songs were decent enough, I think it's more that they didn't tie into the episodes very well, rather than the music itself. The songs in this episode could have been part of the first episode of season 1 and would still have made sense. It was just a distraction rather than aiding the story as &...

Mat

Oh hell yes. I loved those games.

Also this Machine Of Death Board Game looks awesome.

Mat

Only annoying in that you have to unlearn stuff. Pretty much all the backwards incompatible changes fix stuff that was stupid before: ⋅ for i in range() is the obvious way to build a loop, but it creates a useless list, so you really want xrange() ⋅ 'bla' and str() is how you c...

Mat

I'm not familiar with what you're trying to do, but what's wrong with bytes exactly? Isn't it essentially as the same as regular strings in python2?

Mat

Spoiler:

Mat

"Stuff" is insufficiently descriptive. There are different kinds of documentation that need to be considered. If you make a product that does [x], and in order to do so, it make use of a Foo, Bar, and a Baz then your [x] is a feature/product level documentation. There hopefully is a high ...

Mat

I don't subscribe to the idea that comments should be avoided because they will inevitably become inaccurate - I think this kind of attitude leads to very change-averse coding, No, people who are not confident that the software works leads to change-averse coding. If you have sufficient tests (not ...

Mat

I guess I lean more towards commenting than most. I don't subscribe to the idea that comments should be avoided because they will inevitably become inaccurate - I think this kind of attitude leads to very change-averse coding, hurting the long term maintainability of your software for the sake of av...

Mat

Sure, a bunch of random returns scattered throughout the body of a long rambling function can be confusing, but that problem is caused by having a long, rambling function, not having multiple returns. This. I think the main issue is # of branches. Multiple returns is just an indicator that your fun...

Mat

NumPy includes several functions for IO: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/referen ... es.io.html

Mat

Yup. Printing is not the same as returning a value from a function. It is just a side effect that calling the function has. If x is 0 or below, there are no return statements, so the return value is None. A more pythonic way would be to handle your bad input using exceptions , like this def power():...

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