Posts in the “technology” category

Dear Amazon: If the Kindle Paperwhite supported ePub books I would buy one, but without that support it’s kind of useless to me.

Markdown FAQ: How do I create comments in Markdown? Especially comments that won’t appear in the generated output.

Part 1 of my answer is that technically there is no way — or at least no standard way — to create comments in Markdown documents, other than to use HTML comments like this:

<!--
    this is a an html comment.
    the bad part of this is that it will appear in
    any document you generate from this markdown, such as if
    you convert this markdown to HTML with MacDown or Pandoc.
-->

The bad part about using an HTML comment is that most Markdown-to-HTML conversion tools keep those comments in the output you generate. I know that Pandoc and MacDown will both include your comments in the HTML output they generate.

Solution: A trick to create Markdown comments

Part 2 of the answer is that a user on Stack Overflow came up with this way to create Markdown comments that won’t appear in generated output:

[//]: # (This syntax works like a comment, and won't appear in any output.)
[//]: # (It’s a little bizarre, but it works with MacDown and Pandoc.)

As they note on that SO page, this approach uses an “unintended side effect of the use of YAML for metadata, but it works.”

This syntax is ugly and I’ll never remember it, but I guess that’s what macros are for. I’ve read that some people have no idea why someone would want to create comments in Markdown text, and to that I reply, “Try writing a book.”

As a summary, I can confirm that this fake Markdown comment syntax works with both MacDown and Pandoc. When I put comments like this in my Markdown source, they do not end up in my generated HTML or LaTeX output, which is what I want.

I haven’t read this article yet, but it comes highly recommended: Quantum computing for the very curious.

“I realize that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can’t get them to work, but because the timing is wrong‍ — not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.”

~ Ray Kurzweil

I used to use wunderground.com all the time. Then, over time, I noticed that it kept getting slower and slower. Out of frustration I looked around for other good weather websites. Today I use accuweather.com.

On the web and with apps, performance — or lack of performance — is important to acquiring and retaining customers.

This article on When to use Web Workers had this good chart that shows that smartphone CPUs aren’t hitting a performance wall in the same way that PC CPUs did in 2005.

TechCrunch has a nice, full quote from Bill Gates on what he considers his greatest mistake. I include part of the quote in this image because his “winner-take-all” comment is so important.

I was writing with a friend about Facebook, and realized how much I dislike facebook.com because (a) they don’t let me control my own timeline — not surprisingly, humans don’t like to be controlled by algorithms — and (b) you definitely get the feeling that you’re a piece of meat and they’re trying to sell you. If they were perceived as a kind, benevolent company that didn’t constantly force their version of “what’s important” on people, people might use it more.

Per the Technical University of Munich, Bitcoin is causing CO2 emissions comparable to Hamburg.

Ben Evans has an interesting article from 2015 titled, Mobile is not a neutral platform. Here’s a good quote:

“Of course, all this sort of stuff is a big reason why Google bought Android in the first place — Google was afraid that Microsoft (it was that long ago) would dominate mobile operating systems and shut it out. The obvious fear was around things like preloads, and the justice of that fear was proven right with Maps, where Apple Maps now has 2-3x more users on iOS than does Google Maps, despite being a weaker product — the ‘good enough’ default wins and the platform owner chooses what that is.”

ExtremeTech has a good first article on the Nvidia Jetson Nano developer kit. (The image shown is from their article)

The person who was Employee #2 at Pinterest (and then left) wrote a good article titled, Reflecting On My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company.

I don’t know if it was just coincidence, but I went to Lowe’s yesterday for the first time in seven months, then I had a Lowe’s ad on Twitter first thing this morning. So “Allow some” is now “Off.” (See the Location and Personalization settings in the images.)

airtable.com has put together a cool collection of startup “Pitch Decks.”

Microsoft has a nice interview with FP researcher and Haskell co-creator Simon Peyton Jones.

I'm in the process of publishing my second eBook for the Amazon Kindle, and one thing that's currently hard to find on the Amazon website is what the eBook cover height and width size specifications are. You can currently only find this information when you get ready to publish your book.

So, as a brief public service, as of May, 2012, here are the Amazon Kindle eBook cover height and width specifications, courtesy of the Amazon KDP book publication website:

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m told that Cats, Cubits, and Teleportation is a clear description of quantum computing.

Here are three nice diagrams drawn by Mariko Kosaka that explain HTTP and HTTP2.

When asked, “If you could give one tip for reaching heights in tech today, what would it be?”, this was the initial response from Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka:

• Work hard at minimizing your ego & attachment to identity
• Learn deliberately, seek out weaknesses & work hard at them
• Eliminate bad habits, replace them with good, one at a time
• Read a lot, foundational stuff, not just latest hyped thing

While it’s old news (March, 2018), I’ve often wondered why Siri seems to be getting worse, and how/why Amazon and Google beat Apple to the market for Alexa-like assistants. MacRumors has this article where they report several of the problems related to Siri’s development. (Their article is based on an article written by The Information, which requires a subscription.)