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I used to have this problem with my Plugable dock and managed to permanently fix it by changing the orientation of the USB-C cable. The pins are not perfectly symmetric, and some devices don't handle one orientation correctly. You might have luck experimenting with the rotation.


One that I heard last week: There is an 8x8 checkerboard in a room with a coin placed on each square. Each coin is either facing heads or tails up, and the face is determined randomly. Before you can inspect the board, a "master" comes in, picks a square of interest, and must make a manipulation to the board by flipping one of the 64 coins. He then exits the room. You are now allowed to enter, and must read out which square of interest the master chose by inspecting the state of the board. There is a strategy that is guaranteed to work for all possible configurations of the board.


I think you're referring to this puzzle: http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html

The version you gave is missing information and so can't be solved as stated.


Thank you for posting this. I read the parent several times trying to figure out if they were mistaken or I was dense.


I had to read that like 11 times before I started to get the underlying principle. That's amazing.


In a very similar vein, try this one: https://youtu.be/N5vJSNXPEwA


Either I'm somehow missing some critical piece of this puzzle or your description is. The master could pick a square at random, leaving you with a board (and likelihood of success) that is still completely random.

Are you supposed to be collaborating with the "master"?


I have the same gripe. Think about giving Switch (https://github.com/numist/Switch) a try. Cmd+Tab still functions as normal, but Opt+Tab (you can change the default keybinding) will allow you to cycle through all available windows on a single desktop.

Not a perfect solution, but it's a big improvement imo over Cmd+`.


you might want to try out http://contextsformac.com/ i think it's a little better than switch, though not free.


Thank you for that recommendation. I'm giving it a try, so far it looks like it might be an invaluable tool!


Only tangentially related to the article, but I have to commend this guy on his design chops. The new Quizlet site is fantastic. Great job Anand!


I'm pretty sure it has to do with local laws covering disclosure of viewing records. The reason this is now possible in the US is that Netflix just managed to get Congress pass an amendment to the VPPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act). This feature disappeared three years ago because someone sued them over an alleged violation of this law.


Really glad you find it useful, and you're completely right that I need a section on compatibility. The nice thing is that for browsers that don't support Blobs, Amazon allows you to just upload the file as one giant chunk with the same multipart API. I'm not absolutely sure yet (I still need to do some testing), but this should mean that browsers versions as far back as IE 5 will work - only basic XHR compatibility will be required to function. I'm planning on covering as many browsers as possible, I just haven't found a great way to go about this yet. Is there a better option than http://spoon.net/browsers/?


I would also look at http://testling.com/ and https://saucelabs.com/. Not sure which is best for this kind of testing, but those are two more I'm aware of.


This is what turns me off so much from academia. Is this really that typical at most universities? I know that there's always been a large emphasis placed on publishing in high-impact journals (and often), but isn't the open publishing movement beginning to have an effect, albiet rather small?


Not that I have seen. In fact, in my experience, even publications are not all that important! In the UK and Germany both it seems to be 30% of what you know, 60% of who you know and 10% luck.


I think this is more a comment on how the system is broken. Researchers should be notified of new libraries in their area. At the very least, they should be able to consult a single site that everyone uploads their code to (think Github for science with more emphasis on exploration). Academic journals are not the only channels carrying useful information.


It's not the discoverability of the libraries that's the problem, it's that the utility of these libraries is generally not that great for anyone except the authors. One common type of library handles data transformation, normalization, and maybe even workflows. These abound. But they are rarely useful in other people's hands, because to extend them and actually get any work done, you need to spend as much time learning them as it would take to write it from scratch. And the advantage of writing it from scratch is that you know it intimately, and all of its assumptions and flaws, which you don't know about somebody else's code, even if it's extremely well documented. Take something like Taverna [1], which is probably very useful to some people, and had been recommended enthusiastically to me by many people, but after spending three hours reading documents and searching the web, I could not get it to do what I needed to do, so I wrote a simple one-off bash script that interfaced with our cluster system. Alternatively I could try to hack in loops, but that's going to take me 10x as long, will require me to interact with many other people who obviously don't understand my problem since they did not consider it a fundamental need, and may not even be accepted back into the mainline, at which point I'm off on my own fork and lose the benefit of using a common code base. Waiting 1-10 hours to hear back from the dev mailing list is unacceptable when you're trying to get work done.

Is it more important to get the result, or to use other people's code? Reinventing the wheel is a minor sin compared to not getting results.

[1] http://www.taverna.org.uk


I just think that very much depends on the field and the problem domain. Taverna seems like it's more targeted towards academics that don't know how to code, and that most people that use it are comfortable staying within its limits. I mean, you definitely are going to have a level of project specificity that is much higher than say, that found in the web development world. In science, many people are searching for the existence of new problems, not just the answers. Why build a gem for email integration if the next best method of communication will likely come out next week? The problem with this thinking is that it perpetuates itself. I don't write the library that only you would find useful because I don't think it's worth my time. In return, I never receive anything useful because everyone else has adopted that same mindset. As some others pointed out, I think the problem rests in the lack of best practices and poor comp sci education among researchers. Teach proper library construction and test-driven philosophy, and I think you'll see a lot more people become comfortable writing and publishing libraries. Cobble together some basic documentation, keep an eye on its use, and contribute more accordingly. You're never going to escape writing custom scripts, but there are more well-defined problems out there that could use standard solutions.


Really like the concept and the product feels great. I'm curious as to why voice chat was not included though. Is that planned in an upcoming release, because it seems like a pretty big setback. You may not be fighting over a single cursor anymore, but you're still fighting for control, and it's hard to coordinate that without talking to one another. I don't want to have to use up additional resources by entering a Skype chat either.


I'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone agrees that Voice chat is a must have it'll definitely be there in the general release!


Have a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis.

It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.


Yup - we are actually using webRTC under the covers for video/audio RTP and webRTC itself uses Opus (or recommends) so we'll probably be switching to that for audio chat when we go that route. Thanks!


Do you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!


Additional resource would go to their homebrew implementation as well.

Not worth developing for an MVP, in my opinion.


I'd guess that voice chat is a completely different expertise than this.


I think what's so great about Dropbox is that they don't really have a focus. They do synchronization, and they're superb at it.

It seems to me that Dropbox is trying to change how customers perceive them and that managing photos is just the first step. Until recently, I think they've largely been viewed as a handy service to share files quickly between friends and across devices. There are a certainly a lot of exotic use cases for their product, and some other commenters have touched on specific ones, but the average person doesn't take advantage of them (or have them). If Dropbox can position itself as a base to store and share photos, videos, music, etc (notice the range of sharing options in the top right of the iPad in the blog post) they can give users peace of mind and easy access to content that is now strewn across several services and not carefully curated in other storage solutions.


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