Fixnum

16 ms·

31.
by Fixnum 15y ago
I think Scheme comes the closest to being an ideal teaching language. It has all the same advantages adduced (great books, simplicity, power) in even greater measure. For instance, there's no 'funcall, 'apply, and sharp-quoting everywhere
32.
by Fixnum 15y ago
> tail-call recursion is almost inconsequential---this is a very introductory course, just an overview of CS, so performance isn't important. > What is important are the big ideas. Go back and read section 1.2 ("Procedures and the p
33.
by Fixnum 15y ago
The infix operations are mostly syntactic sugar - [3 4 5] is the same as (list 3 4 5), [A|B] is (cons A B), and so on. I don't know about '->' for pattern matching and '<-' for backtracking (maybe others), but you can of course rep
34.
by Fixnum 15y ago
Not so subtle, but user CANWorkSmart seems to have created a bunch of shills to comment on his (now dead) post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3010356 . Might be worth it for a mod to kill them off... edit: the '-----' appears in p
35.
by Fixnum 15y ago
Unjust. The Khan video fails to clearly distinguish definitions and derived results, so his formulae are effectively God-given from a student's perspective. However, the writer's attack on this video is wrong as well. Presenting slope from
36.
by Fixnum 15y ago
> College and Personal Projects At the risk of stating the obvious, I'd strongly recommend against putting school projects in a public repo. You might disagree with the ethics of it, but if someone submits your code to your own school,
37.
Mini flash crashes worry traders(usatoday.com)
2 points by Fixnum 15y ago|0 comments
38.
by Fixnum 16y ago
Also regarding the resume: 1) I'd separate "Languages" and "Computer skills" 2) A couple of English spelling/punctuation errors 3) Write something concrete like "started with Slackware in 200x" instead of "interested in computers for as lon
39.
by Fixnum 16y ago
(setf * print-circle* t)
40.
by Fixnum 16y ago
I think you're confusing the "reliability" of a source (in the peer-reviewed article sense) with its reliability as an indicator of the notability of some subject X. The peer-review system basically establishes (a) the reviewers believe the
41.
by Fixnum 16y ago
http://pastebin.com/LR8Gjkki
42.
by Fixnum 16y ago
J7 source code: http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/apl_archives/j/early_j/src/
43.
by Fixnum 16y ago
This topic on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava... The Smalltalk library linked from that page: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html O'Reilly open books: http://oreilly.com/openbook/
44.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Emacs has pretty good/massive documentation: for help, just press "C-h t" (Control-h, then t ...) for a tutorial. Or, type "M-x info" to get into info mode and then scroll down to the Emacs section. Type 'h' in info mode for a tutorial on
45.
by Fixnum 17y ago
"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." In particular, this Applies to Eval.
46.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Moreover, http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=miriam . Flagging this story so people don't have to waste their time.
47.
by Fixnum 17y ago
The author is a crackpot. See for instance http://www.rebelscience.org/Seraphim/Physics.htm ("Abstract: Most people never think of the Bible as a source of scientific knowledge. In these pages, I argue that the Bible contains powerful se
48.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Yeah -- if a native English-speaking adult hasn't acquired a grade ten level of literacy (understanding rules of punctuation, grammar, spelling, composition, semantics, cogent argument), what chance do they have at reading/writing code? Suc
49.
by Fixnum 17y ago
My awareness of Opera comes mostly from the fact that their people are always the ones complaining to the European Commission about Microsoft. "Not that Microsoft isn't loathsome ...", but that's not the sort of publicity that's given me a
50.
Building a better teacher [not about robots](nytimes.com)
14 points by Fixnum 17y ago|0 comments
51.
by Fixnum 17y ago
So, 27 out of the top 30 were were written in C++, including all the top 10. What's the lesson from this?
52.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Perhaps this is Microsoft, or someone who works there, thumbing their nose(s) at the EU - after all, what monopolistic corporation wouldn't be bitter at not having been able to buy out such an influential quasi-government organization [edit
53.
by Fixnum 17y ago
From http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-ne... (appeared several times at news.yc): "Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry. According to Princeton’s career
54.
by Fixnum 17y ago
The idea is that a compiler is, loosely, a self-reproducing program and is therefore in a position to propagate malware in a very subtle way - by modifying the binary version of future versions of itself. From a security perspective, this i
55.
by Fixnum 17y ago
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800693 and associated link. Summary: To mitigate, either (a) tell your browser not to save any history, or (b) in Firefox, go to about:config and turn off layout.css.visited_links_enabled. (Chrome
56.
by Fixnum 17y ago
No, it's for checking whether the compiler used to compile the compiler that produced the binaries on your system was compromised. Intuitively, let's say I write a very early version of a (say) gcc, but insert code so that if the compiler d
57.
by Fixnum 17y ago
"According to many developers, it is the most original new face in computer languages since Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in the early 1980's." Uh, isn't F# mostly a derivative of OCaml (and Haskell)?
58.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Your front page is missing two "."s, which is ironic considering that you use "Period" as a sentence. Hope this helps.
59.
by Fixnum 17y ago
Here's another important function of universities: they don't merely provide a good environment for but legitimize taking 4 years out of the workforce and immersing oneself in philosophy, English, mathematics, alcohol, or whatnot. This i
60.
by Fixnum 17y ago
I haven't really investigated, but I suspect that in the introductory math/phys/chem courses you'll find that variable names/values also change in various ways. So in keeping track of what's "different or new", you end up not needing just

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