BruceIV

26 ms·

241.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Keep in mind that these are undergrad projects, so a few hundred LOC tops. But you'll see something like: bool noMoreElves() { return elfCount == 0; } void fireAllReindeer() { for (int i = 0; i < reindeerCount; ++i) {
242.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Hear, hear - I've been marking undergrad coding assignments all term, and the ones where they make a new method for absolutely every block of their code are nearly as unreadable as the ones that don't know how to indent or pick good variabl
243.
by BruceIV 14y ago
That's not always an advantage. I consider one "political social network" I've seen, the comments section on the political articles the CBC puts up - they're dreadful, nearly as bad as YouTube, because it makes it ridiculously easy to sound
244.
by BruceIV 14y ago
It strikes me that one aspect of the "get 100,000 people on the legislature's front lawn" mode of political speech is that it also proves that each and every one of those 100,000 people cares enough to spend hours arranging transport and
245.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Purely anecdotally, my great-grandmother (who lived through the majority of the technological advances of the 20th century) rated indoor plumbing as the best of them. I think we tend to get caught up in a definition of "innovation" which is
246.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Fair enough. But that gives Intel at least another decade at the top. A lot can happen in that time.
247.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Agreed. They've also got a big process-node lead on everyone else in the market; I find it hard to believe they can't leverage that to optimize whatever processor design parameters they need to.
248.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Fair. I know just enough AI to realize that this is a hard problem, so the whole news-friendly "genius self-taught teenager builds awesome app in his spare time" seemed a bit incredible - I still wouldn't want to be competing against this k
249.
by BruceIV 14y ago
It looks like the 17-year-old got enough funding to hire a proper AI/NLP lab to do his algorithm - reading between the lines, it's difficult to say how much input the founder had on the new product: my guess would be concept, maybe design,
250.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Very interesting. I'm on Android, so I can't actually try out the app, but I'd be interested to see what kind of compression ratio they get, how understandable it is, and if they hit all the major points. I'm also curious if they can create
251.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I've got Windows 8 on my laptop, by the way, and the Metro apps available right now tend to be slow, buggy, under-featured, and ad-ridden. The Metro ecosystem might take off, but given that the Microsoft built-ins are some of the worst of t
252.
by BruceIV 14y ago
So, the Surface is going to do well because it's the third competitor against two well-established players, and a three-player market is better for consumers? This must finally be the year of the Linux desktop as well.
253.
by BruceIV 14y ago
A lot of the Metro apps are a bit broken (even the Microsoft-provided ones) - a big problem is them trying to go to websites that have moved since whenever they were released.
254.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I installed Windows 8 this weekend on my primary machine (my school has an MSDN subscription). My initial impression is that it's actually an upgrade on the desktop - the Start screen really is better as an app launcher, and the app search
255.
by BruceIV 14y ago
What about Chrome/Chromium?
256.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Good to know.
257.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Fair - but too often the bugs are driver-related. I realize that this is kind of unavoidable for open-source software in our economic system, but it doesn't make it any less annoying. It was the driver bugs that drove me back to Windows - d
258.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a
259.
by BruceIV 14y ago
If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).
260.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I'll second that recommendation for nano as a CLI text editor - it does have syntax highlighting, and it's available by default on most relatively modern Linux distros. (But, yeah, for new programming students, Geany is a great choice, as i
261.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Agreed. And, not to start the great text editor holy war, but some variant of vi will be pre-installed on almost any *NIX system (although it's been replaced by nano in a lot of newer Linux distros)
262.
by BruceIV 14y ago
They're orthogonal skills though - new programmers have a hard enough time with the concepts of arrays and variables, and won't be productive until they get those straight, no matter how leet their text editor skillz are. I think the OP is
263.
by BruceIV 14y ago
This. The kids mentioned in the article are all doing something with their gap year, and that's all well and good, but far too many of the kids I went to high school with just got part time jobs at Mickey D's and grumbled about how much t
264.
by BruceIV 14y ago
Of course, if the documents don't need to be edited by their recipients, PDF is even more of a de facto standard than .doc{,x}
265.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I've been using TeXstudio as a LaTeX editor - it's a fork of TeXmaker with more features (notably a user-editable spelling dictionary). The UI is Qt, and it's available cross-platform.
266.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I was under the impression that Canadian telcos were worse than American ones, but a landline here usually doesn't cost more than $25/mo ...
267.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I did this for a while, but I found out that listening to the radio in bed was pleasant, and I really wasn't incentivised to get up.
268.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I thought I should post this video here too - Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers has made a little known protest song about the plight of the information worker, which the article put me in mind of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsDkmVo2fg4
269.
by BruceIV 14y ago
But worse off in what way? My dad took pay cuts so he wouldn't have to uproot his family and move to a different province - we never noticed that there was less money, we did notice that Dad was home more. Still, that's his priorities (and
270.
by BruceIV 14y ago
I'm a grad student, I've been a university student for the better part of the last decade, and let me tell you this: the most universally disliked piece of software on campus is always whatever dreck they make us use for Web services. Admit

More ›