Dialing 911 in the EU can redirect you to 112, though I don't know how that redirection works. It's worth knowing the local emergency numbers in any case
I think Pinboard is more likely to buy Twitter. And honestly this might not be the worst thing that could happen to it. Not sure if Maciej will be keen however.
Organizations (mostly) don't self-perpetuate through sexual reproduction. It's perfectly possible for the VHEMT to expand if they manage to convince enough people.
I thought it would have been obvious to anyone that this is satire, but then again I know that it was explicitly presented as such the first time I read this text so I'm probably biased.
It used to be the most common lie was "I have read the EULA".
Nowadays the most common lie is "we care about your privacy" or possibly "we get it, you hate ads".
It's never more about money than when "It's not about the money anymore".
I think that with a stock whose worth at this point is the result of pure dutch-tulip-like speculation, the question is where is the tipping point where money just becomes too good to ignore and when people start collectively selling, making the stock inevitably plummet.
The one valid definition of success for a programming language is that it looks pretty and thus the most successful programming language is Piet ( http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html )
I mean, joking aside, it's always fascinating when people can't wrap their minds around the idea that their criteria for success or quality or goodness are subjective and not universal.
This is a rather bad article because it completely misses the real complexity of a spell checker.
A spell checker is not simply a list of words, it's a way to check mistakes according to a standard and to point towards ways to fix these mistakes. This not reducible to a look-up in a hashtable. It requires taking into account some complicated things about the definition of a word and the context in which it is written.
You might think that's grammar checking but the boundary is not clear and in any case, any language processing application starts with tokenizing and deciding what counts as words and on what basis.
What is a word even ? Is "CIA" a word ? What about "C.I.A." ? What about C (as in the language) ? What about c (as in the speed of light) ? 2,4-Dinitrophenylhydrazine ?
How does the spellchecker handle dashes and apostrophes ? What about proper nouns ?
This article quotes Perlis' famous saying that "a programming language is low-level when it calls attention to the irrelevant", and I am reminded of another Perlis aphorism :
« Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. »
There's plenty of small online stores selling all kinds of stuff. Recently I had ordered smoked paprika from Amazon UK because I can't find any where I live (France). I got regular paprika. So I ordered from a specialized online spice store, got my paprika and vowed never to order anything from Amazon ever again.
Here's an idea : do the 0.1 version by crawling and indexing the web in a perfectly standard way, apply the usual, run-of-the-mill search algorithms, then diff it against the Bing/Google/etc first results which will be biased towards commercial stuff. The higher a page is among their results, the higher the probability that it's commercial in some sense.