aaronem

123 ms·

1. 1081.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   I've seen a good one -- actually got asked it in a phone screen I did last year: "How would you recursively delete all files with extension 'mp3' in a given directory tree?" The (simplest) correct answer (I know) is
2. 1082.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   It looks to me like what happens is exactly what you'd expect, i.e., you end up with a function defined under the name "func", just as you would with any other function name. Is there something I'm missing?
3. 1083.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   I'm not a mathematician, but it looks to me like we know E(x,z) is false. The transitive property gives us E(x,y) & E(y,z) => E(x,z) but since we know !E(y,z), we can infer !E(x,z). (I'm not a logician, either, so
4. 1084.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   The impression I have is that bzr is just another roadblock between a potentially interested novice and a patch accepted into the Emacs source. (It's not by far the largest one, though, and while I think esr has a point, I also think i
5. 1085.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   Civilians also tend to have a lot more clocks handy, even absent mobile phones. I'll grant, though, that wristwatches would've stuck around, as an acceptably convenient means of carrying around a timepiece, had not mobile phones w
6. 1086.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   Oh, come now, I thought it was pretty impressive, on the whole.
7. 1087.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   I doubt it; wristwatches have origin in the military need for a readily accessible chronometer for coordination among forces in different locations, and I tend to think that their having become popular in civilian life is an accident of his
8. 1088.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   Build your leveller's idea of Stack Overflow, then, and let it compete on its merits against the one which already exists. I'll be interested to see the result.
9. 1089.▲
   by aaronem 13y ago

   Some languages are better supported and have broader ecosystems than others, and for a given language this tends to be self-perpetuating as a result of its effect on the languages which people choose to learn and use. This you blame on Stac
10. 1090.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    The green check mark is worth 25 points, one time, and an asker can reassign it (and the points) if a later answer proves more worthwhile than one already accepted. Every upvote is worth 10 points, and an answer can get upvoted for as long
11. 1091.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Speaking as a contributor and reviewer on Super User and Stack Overflow, your opinion of what should happen is shared by more or less everyone who is an established member of the community. The trouble is that there are a lot of newbies,
12. 1092.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook
13. 1093.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    This is an excellent point. Is the Stack Exchange model perfect? No. Does it reward what the article's author calls "obsessive twerps" more strongly than it does anyone else? Arguably yes. Can it be substantially improved upo
14. 1094.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    I made much the same arguments before I bought my first smartphone. Turns out they're a lot more useful than you notice when you're only looking for reasons to dislike the whole concept. For an example from my own experience, I us
15. 1095.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    You might find it helps to mentally (or programmatically) replace every instance of NSA , and its various expansions, with the name of that agency's direct lineal predecessor, which existed in a time when bureaucratic circumlocution w
16. 1096.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    > droid strikes Next on the NSA revelations list: A backdoor software "implant" capable of exploiting holes in everything from Froyo to KitKat, and which subverts the device's power management circuitry, such that a remote
17. 1097.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Would you rather use a piece of communications software which purported to be cryptographically secure, but wasn't, and not know it because no security researchers spent any effort attempting to prove that its crypto implementation was
18. 1098.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Thanks to last night's unpredictable behavior on the part of my ISP (thanks, Comcast!), I can confirm that the gaps I was hearing are latency-bound. Thanks again for a nifty service!
19. 1099.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    I fail to see how questioning the validity of the technique constitutes "goal-post movement". I requested citations and you supplied them, which I appreciate. I fail to see how said exchange requires that I respond "oh, hey,
20. 1100.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Citizen, surely you need no reminding that so-called "gender neutrality" is merely a sexist excuse for the ongoing structural oppression of women and gender-fluid individuals.
21. 1101.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Literature review and meta-analysis seemed out of scope, considering the comment to which I replied. (And I seem to've fallen into the HN trap of being too straight-faced about a smart-assed comment.)
22. 1102.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    You confuse respect with reverence, and pseudo-intellectualism with lively intellect; I can't imagine why. Incidentally, your malaprop is showing.
23. 1103.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    There are two definitions. The first describes one who believes himself to be both intelligent and thoughtful, but fails to recognize his deficiency in at least one of those two habits. The second describes one who is both intelligent and
24. 1104.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    I'm a programmer, not a psychologist. I have, however, some slight familiarity with IATs as a purported measure of unconscious bias; they have never impressed me as being particularly reliable as such, given what seems to be their ques
25. 1105.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    > I had high hopes for The Information that their business model would lead to better quality reporting The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the
26. 1106.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    You seem perfectly willing to stand in loco auctoris for the poster to whom I replied in such fashion as to draw your ire, so I don't really find your latest plaint particularly compelling; given your clear failure to recognize the p
27. 1107.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    The "reply" link is also hidden on comments posted less than some (0 < n < 9) number of minutes prior to page load, but the same trick works in that case as well.
28. 1108.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    I seem to remember hearing that the final score in Salem being nineteen women and one man. Given this data, trivial statistical analysis tells us that the use of "witch hunt" in this context is 95% sexist, a value well within the
29. 1109.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    Perhaps you would prefer that I say something like this: "You assert that these studies exist, but you don't bother to identify them for those of us who are not au courant with the journals in which they presumably appear. Would
30. 1110.▲
    by aaronem 13y ago

    I've found @jacobian's statement on the matter [1] eminently reasonable and even-handed. As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism? "The [tech