January 2011
10 posts
“Still one thing more, fellow citizens, a wise and frugal government, which shall...”
– Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
“It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.”
– Jeff Croft, On the Term “HTML5”
2 tags
Ruby's Enumerable#each_cons
Today’s Ruby tidbit is for grabbing consecutive elements in an array, n at a time, by using the Enumerable#each_cons method:
>> [15,46,8,12,8].each_cons(2) {|a| p a}
[15, 46]
[46, 8]
[8, 12]
[12, 8]
I came across this when trying to solve the problem: given a list of 10 places in order, tell me if at least one of them is more than 100 meters from the previous one. I solved it...
“In giving away free accounts to Sifter, there’s a chance that we’ll end up with...”
– Garrett Dimon, “Decisions”, on avoiding the “freemium” payment model
Censorship, Rights and The Republic
It’s interesting to look at issues of censorship from a non-American perspective, in order to appreciate the stark difference in the structure of the United States. Canada, for instance, doesn’t have “freedom of speech” enshrined as the US does. My understanding of Canada’s and Australia’s (as well as China’s, Saudi Arabia’s, etc.) position is rather simple: these...
21st Century Hacker Exceptionalism
The lack of individual rights during US border searches is a particularly egregious problem. I really can’t quite believe that the ACLU—a well-respected and generally not a petty-alarmist organization—has labeled a “constitution-free zone” including over 60% of the US population. When that happens, it’s something worth paying attention to. That also reminds me of similar troubles to be...
“People like William Galston believe that every time there is a violent or tragic...”
– Glenn Greenwald
Facebook Friends
I recently went through my Facebook friends and categorized them, curious as to how many people I actually keep up with out of my ~260 total friends. Here’s the breakdown:
36% whom I keep up with (30% of whom are directly related to my current job)
33% whom I don’t keep up with, but consider friends
30% whom I could unfriend without major consequence—acquaintances
I never...