Almaviva

15 ms·

121.
by Almaviva 15y ago
What's the lowest integer that will never have any hits on Google? It must exist by induction, I think.
122.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Being an extremely effective professional programmer (as opposed to a competent one) requires you to learn and do some things that you won't learn in school, and also that no sensible person would pay you for. This is just fact and people w
123.
by Almaviva 15y ago
I'm exactly the intuitive thinker you describe, with only an undergrad degree in math. I have not a clue what a Cech-Stone compactification construction based on ultrafilters is. But... I think that whatever it is, you decide on some fairly
124.
by Almaviva 15y ago
I don't think the word "invented" is much better an analogy for real numbers than "position" is for "where" the Mandelbrot Set is. This goes beyond what is strictly math, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that properties of the real
125.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Math is out there. I don't understand how anyone can say that the Mandelbrot set was created or is formed from arbitrary axioms. It was discovered full stop.
126.
by Almaviva 15y ago
You add a bunch of stuff and you get a total. You add nothing and 0 is the total because it's the identity and starting point for addition. You multiply a bunch of stuff and you get a product. You multiply nothing and you get 1 because that
127.
by Almaviva 15y ago
If someone likes x over y, it means they must like the most extreme thing possible that is different from y in the way x is!! Why make that point? It has absolutely no intellectual content.
128.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Is this different than for men somehow? I don't remember seeing math and chess teams having the most romantically desirable boys at my high school. Yet I (for instance) did these things as well as programming just because I needed to and li
129.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Yes, his silly "hands up if you find this more readable" breaks down if you now have two checks at the beginning, and the "rest()" part carries on for more than one line. Then you're carrying around two extra levels of indentation and cogni
130.
by Almaviva 15y ago
"Over a year"? Given that the canvas element was introduced in 2004, I suppose this is accurate. I agree, I am also mystified by how people are consistently impressed with game demos that say little more than "See, we can now do some of the
131.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Yes, Einstein was right even about things he thought he was wrong about, e.g. the cosmological constant.
132.
by Almaviva 15y ago
A lot of things about today weren't obvious in 1990, but they're not on that list. These would have been amazing predictions then: 1. Searching the internet will become perhaps the most profitable and one of the most important businesses in
133.
by Almaviva 15y ago
I've never understood why you can't write secure code using string concatenation. It seems to me like all it takes is a reliable "quote" method (with proper escaping of course), and the discipline to use it on _all_ variables that go into a
134.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Weren't all of those just obvious in 1990? Seriously, I don't think this is the benefit of hindsight speaking.
135.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Maybe consider hovering over Zed's point about industrial autism? We have dictionaries, we have Wikipedia, we have Google.
136.
by Almaviva 15y ago
One benefit is that you can replace the singleton instance with a mock or subclass for testing if you need to.
137.
by Almaviva 15y ago
There's a principled point about aesthetics and removing unnecessary redundancy. But that shouldn't be confused with whether semicolons affect your ability to think about code. Really I can't imagine how someone could be significantly distr
138.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Do semicolons really distract people from thinking about the behaviour of their code? Really? Would these people like their novels and articles decompiled so that every sentence is on a new line, and thus periods wouldn't distract them so m
139.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Another interesting one is that if you remove everything but the prime numbers, it still diverges. So there are more primes than numbers without a 9 in them.
140.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Better hurry, only 94 years left.
141.
by Almaviva 15y ago
That crushed me until I discovered the secret where you could go back in time and bring her back to life.
142.
by Almaviva 15y ago
I haven't seen much indication that I should stake my life on fringe AI pioneers estimating accurate timelines.
143.
by Almaviva 15y ago
What doesn't seem to be very well appreciated is that starch is chained-together sugar, and has the same effects on the body, yet doesn't have anything like the same stigma attached. The body breaks it down into glucose extremely quickly, s
144.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Connecting this with the article about the person who smelted his own sword, I wonder if it's possible for one person to single-handedly build a computer starting from Stone Age technology and raw materials?
145.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Ok, now suppose that you'd like to spend developer resources customizing your video player. If you do this in Flash you support the entire modern PC universe, and can fall back to HTML5 for iPad kind of as an afterthought ("mobile version")
146.
by Almaviva 15y ago
What high quality codec can I encode into such that all common browsers will be able to view HTML5 video right now? Also, YouTube doesn't default to HTML5 video for browsers that support Flash. Why is this?
147.
by Almaviva 15y ago
The problem is that encoding in multiple codecs is prohibitively expensive, and it's an ongoing cost that businesses smaller than Youtube don't want to pay. Therefore the most cost effective solution is to use Flash since you can't deliver
148.
by Almaviva 15y ago
I'll ask the question that nobody else is crass enough to: Assuming I order and pay, what are the chances that I get a pill delivered to me that gives me an erection?
149.
by Almaviva 15y ago
Credit card numbers were lost? Do they know that you can "take" data from computers without destroying it?
150.
by Almaviva 15y ago
>> 17. There are few joys that equal a good book, a good walk, a good hug, or a good friend. All are free. > True. Let me add to the list decimating an opponent @ Starcraft2. Nice! Especially if it's a cannon rushing Protoss and

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