"For safety, Swift requires the variables to be initialized before being passed with &. This is because it cannot know whether the method being called tries to read from a pointer before writing to it."
I've not written any Swift code yet, so can someone enlighten me -- is this actually true? This seems unnecessarily restrictive (and absurd -- Swift can't tell if a pointer's being read?)
See, my problem with this idea is the inaccuracy of Google Translate's translations. For Romance languages, the results are questionable enough (I'm also learning French at the moment, and anything more than simple sentences can be hit-or-miss); for non-Romance languages, the sentences are just hilariously bad. A sentence as simple as "Hey, cowboy where is your horse?" is translated into Chinese as the slightly mangled 嘿，牛仔是你的马在哪里？ according to the project's README. (To non-readers of Chinese, that 是 should be replaced by a comma.)
(As an aside, I got the strangely reordered and even more ungrammatical "哎牛仔哪里是你的马？" when I tested it myself in-browser. Talk about unreliable.)
I'm very confused about the purpose of this. If it's just taking advantage of the Translate API so you don't have to use the browser app, I can see the convenience of being able to, say, write a local script without having to munge through API docs and get a Google account and so on. However, I'm confused about it being branded as a language learning tool...
The mechanical efficiency of the the mass killings, for one, is fairly unique. Also, the stories of the Holocaust are more widely heard because many of the people that were alive when it happened are still alive today. Genocide is genocide, but if the victims are alive to tell their stories it gives a particular event more focus. And finally, the fact that we were inundated with propaganda prior to entering in conflict against the Germans solidified the war in out collective conscience as "the US coming in to save the persecuted Jews."
I mean, one could make the same arguments about other genocidal leaders. Why isn't Mao in out textbooks? What about Pol Pot? Well, we didn't have the same level of propaganda regarding those leaders, and there aren't as many survivors that tell their stories in the U.S.
In regard to the first tip, I use `git add -i` even more often, because it gives you an interactive prompt that asks you which files you want to add to a commit (i.e. you don't have to type out the whole filename(s) each time).
Define stable. Do you mean it crashes? or that it drops out once in a while? Because I use Facebook over XMPP and I've never actually experienced any problems.
According to some comments above, GIMP does support PSD files, and I know for a fact that GIMP supports scripting, so you could just write a script to export the layers for you.
Not all progress is gradual. Sometimes we need a complete overhaul. In this case, I don't see the need, but if there is something that much better than current notation, then I would hope that it does supplant this.
It has 201 digits (it's on the order of 10^200), so it would be about 9.167 googol googol. Yeah, that's incomprehensible. Not the biggest integer I can think of (see Graham's Number) but I'd say it's big enough.
Anyway, the point isn't that she's faster than a computer (I mean, my laptop can conjure up that answer with PARI/GP in under a millisecond). The point is a) she pushed the limits of human achievement and showed that such feats were, in fact, possible, particularly for an adult beyond their twenties, and b) her passion for math inspired so many others. I mean, who wouldn't be impressed by someone who could calculate that? I doubt I could even keep track of all those digits given all the time in the world, much less give any answer better than an order of magnitude estimation in 50 seconds. Her intention was to show people (generally kids) that math is not this impossible, unconquerable monster of a subject, even though it may seem that way when you first encounter it, and even afterwards, as long as you treat it that way.
Sure, these are generally valid points, but Hummingbird doesn't really solve them. I'd love to see a solution to those problems, though. >12-pitch solutions exist, but they're just cumbersome.
I'd disagree about the precision of note lengths and tempi being a problem, though, simply because humans aren't very good at keeping exact time. I mean, ask someone to count off exactly 60 beats evenly divided over the course of a minute. What about 80? 100? 133? The speed at which you count off is highly dependent on your heart rate (and possibly state of mind). So assuming we have an exact tempo, what's the likelihood a note length within it is going to be played with that same amount of precision? Well, it's all up to the musician's ability to interpret the composer's intentions, which is much the same as what we have now. In fact, there are ways even now to specify exact bpm (even if we can't exactly express slight tempo changes). The notes themselves are estimates, but fairly good ones at that, and they're effective enough to get the point across to the musician.