Dove

162 ms·

1201.
by Dove 17y ago
So long as the kids learn their three Rs, why is it anyone's business but theirs and their parents' what else they learn? Or how they get it done? Seems to me designing laws allowing some to discourage access to theological/scientific/ideo
1202.
by Dove 17y ago
Yeah. It's the same way with auto insurance and warranties. The dealer covers the costs of any catastrophic maintainence for the first few years, so the consumer tends to skip out on routine maintainence like oil changes. And at those re
1203.
by Dove 17y ago
There's nothing wrong with thinking of the real numbers as infinite decimals. But you probably already do. Learning to think of them as the limits of cauchy sequences is good exercise for learning to think like a mathematician.
1204.
by Dove 17y ago
This result fills me with visceral glee, for it is very much the way of perl.
1205.
by Dove 17y ago
It is useful writing one-shot programs on the command line. Perl's idioms can allow very powerful programs to be written very quickly in very small spaces. But any code that is saved to a file and run more than once should lean a bit more
1206.
by Dove 17y ago
It depends on where you hang out. Some places are better than others, and some are even dominated by women. But in general, I agree. After a disturbing experience or two, I decided anonymity was simply easier than hassle. I suspect a lo
1207.
by Dove 17y ago
A good method. The skills required to create or navigate a codebase of 100, 5000, or 100,000 lines are different not only in degree but in kind. Behaviors optimal in the first case can be brutally maladaptive in the last, and vice versa.
1208.
by Dove 17y ago
Interesting. I'd expect that sort of thing to mainly be an issue with multinational platforms, like JSF, but the DARPA writeup makes it sound like a more widespread problem. The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations are looser about it t
1209.
by Dove 17y ago
Mouse gestures. The "graphics off" key. Admittedly less of an issue on broadband, but still. Fast page loads. Just generally spare and coherent design. IE is a behemoth and Firefox is a grab bag. It's rare for Opera to do something I don'
1210.
by Dove 17y ago
Doesn't sound like you're competing against your peers so much as you're competing against the market. Outperform the market, do fine. That doesn't sound too tough to me; talented, motivated people are always in short supply. Makes me wis
1211.
by Dove 17y ago
I think it's pretty sustainable. You should approach it as a lifestyle change, though, not a diet. That means don't make any tradeoffs in the process you're not willing to live with for the rest of your life. For me, that means find the
1212.
by Dove 17y ago
It was for me. In high school and most of college, I refused to make myself pretty. It was a symbolic rejection of that whole social strategy, and I did think it was a dichotomy. I was going to be smart, and that was all. It wasn't unt
1213.
by Dove 17y ago
Actually, it works very well. The approach outlined here is pretty similar to what Weight Watchers uses. Theirs is a little looser, tracking calories on a weekly basis and offering incentives to eat filling foods. But it's basically the s
1214.
by Dove 17y ago
Yeah. I love how they ask a professor to tack a completely spurious evolutionary explanation on there. You know, a speculation coming from a professor on the basis of a sound scientific theory is still just a speculation. On the whole,
1215.
by Dove 17y ago
There are none in the Bible. The closest you get are exhortations about work, or warnings about pursuing money. Some folks extrapolate from there, but the arguments against it are always indirect. More often than not, they're not scriptu
1216.
by Dove 17y ago
Seems the best solution is to just throw an exception . . . . . . er, crap. This is C, isn't it?
1217.
by Dove 17y ago
Pardon my (likely striking) ignorance of hardware, but I remember a discussion from way back in college about pipelines and branches. The gist of it was, you may as well guess at branches, since if you're wrong (and careful), you don't was
1218.
by Dove 17y ago
I could not disagree more with the article. Work is not evil. Oppression is evil, sometimes the way people treat each other in the context of work is evil. But work itself, especially hard work, is good for the soul. It's not the drudger
1219.
by Dove 17y ago
Two things about the numbers in this article don't work for me. First, Bill makes $23,505 after college? What's his degree, basket-weaving? Shoulda gone into engineering. Second, Bill and Ernie each save exactly 5% of their income--even t
1220.
by Dove 17y ago
The article works from the assumption that government funding defines retirement. This seems silly to me. Even if governments stopped paying old people entirely (unlikely), many would still retire. You're supposed to save for it. I'm ce
1221.
by Dove 17y ago
I agree. If the cost of labor rises, robots or software will appear in the marginal cases--expensive at first, but not ultimately--and supply, demand, and price will reach equilibrium again. The world is a complex place. It's very silly t
1222.
by Dove 17y ago
Reminds me of discussions which purported to prove, not that a particular number was prime, but that there was a 1 in BigNum probability that it was not prime. The mathematicians in the audience seemed to consider that unacceptable to the
1223.
by Dove 17y ago
Great communication is first and foremost about clear thought, as is great programming. True, a final piece of code shouldn't repeat an idea. Then again, neither should a final essay. Repetition is for ideas half-formed and ill-explained.
1224.
by Dove 17y ago
Some folks think so, but I don't. For two different reasons. The first, rational. Some folks think science will overturn religion because (they so casually assume) religion is false, irrational, and inflexible. Well, that's a touch easie
1225.
by Dove 18y ago
When I was forced to learn Ada for my current job, I was skeptical that it would be a good experience. But I must admit, I like being able to declare things in feet and meters and have the compiler complain when I try to add them. But it's