alecdbrooks

12 ms·

61.
by alecdbrooks 12y ago
>A big annoyance is it's interaction with git. If you regenerate the output, git interprets that as a big file change, and the repository gets polluted with nonsense commits. There are workarounds, but none are perfect. This is prob
62.
by alecdbrooks 12y ago
Note that a number of these seem to be from people including Python itself within their project [0]. (Arguably, this could also be considered a mistake.) Python 2 defines the input() built-in, which is documented as: >input([prompt]) -&g
63.
by alecdbrooks 12y ago
I understand the advantages of higher single-core performance and the difficulties in parallelization. And yes, higher clock speeds mean better performance, all other things being equal. But originally, you said 10 GHz, a record-breaking cl
64.
by alecdbrooks 12y ago
In what special domain do you envision such a high clock rate helping? Performance is only loosely connected to GHz[0]. If there is a case where clock rate trumps performance, I'm genuinely curious to know. As processor architects are
65.
by alecdbrooks 12y ago
It was open-sourced at least two years ago[0]. I believe it hasn't been since to prevent gaming of the system, but I don't remember where I heard that. [0] Based on this handy Github repository: https://github.com/
66.
Brendan Eich and Mozilla(whatever.scalzi.com)
28 points by alecdbrooks 13y ago|51 comments
67.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Whenever something looks odd on Gwern's site, you can check his A/B testing article[0] to see if it's intentional. In this case, it's BeeLine Reader, his newest experiment[1]. The coloring or shading is supposed to help
68.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
While I might take a similar stand against the hypothetical coffee shop, I believe your analogy misses an additional point. Opposing gay marriage is favoring discrimination against gay people. It's detrimental to the organization and t
69.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
>A world without Firefox and without Firefox OS and without our approach to putting the user at the center of cloud services instead of having users get pulled into walled gardens -- I think that would be a pretty dark world. What Eich f
70.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Programming tools like Logo and HyperCard give children a chance to be creative, like writing and drawing do. Beyond self-expression, children could learn the basics of * interaction design ("'Click here' doesn't explain
71.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
From what I've heard of HyperCard and learning programming languages, children definitely could create a small game, short animation or interactive story. At nine years old, it would probably be rudimentary, but they could learn the ba
72.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
As a professor emeritus at MIT, he doesn't. [0] It isn't clear how much faculty salaries contribute to the problem anyway, so I don't think it's hypocritical for professors critiquing tuition increases to accept a salary
73.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
As the article describes Snowden's decision to leak to journalists rather than directly to the public, this isn't a coherent argument. If we had "more Snowdens" we'd potentially need more journalists to cover the le
74.
I Am Tired of Hearing Programmers Defend Gender Essentialism(meloukhia.net)
7 points by alecdbrooks 13y ago|11 comments
75.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
It can't be that either, one person's account is 12 days old. Googling around, one source [0] suggested it counts only active days. [0]: http://www.quora.com/Hacker-News/What-does-the-green-usernam...
76.
Noob comments on HN(news.ycombinator.com)
71 points by alecdbrooks 13y ago|23 comments
77.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
I don't think I've ever done, that, actually. More often I realize I'm not sure enough of what I'm saying or I'm not sure it hasn't been covered by other commenters. Maybe it's a personal quirk, but I find
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by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Sure, but I think it's useful to show that, even taking them at their word, metadata alone is dangerous.
79.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
I would imagine hosting vast amounts of crawl data and email would give them plenty of experience building inexpensive storage at scale. Giving people vast amounts of space for email also gives them plenty of data on how much space people a
80.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
>At least in the U.S., lying by itself cannot be made illegal, as a violation of the First Amendment. This isn't true. False statements of fact are a major exception to the First Amendment [0]. Besides perjury, you can prosecute peo
81.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
> Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "ov
82.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
>If Plus was an independent startup people would be crowning it the next Facebook and saying that Facebook better watch its back. People have higher expectations for Google than for an unknown startup. Google has an audience of 425 milli
83.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
> Who do you think portrays them on tv and in movies? Fake women? Give me a break. Oh, I had forgotten actresses write their own roles and pick their own wardrobes. And since most producers are women [0], most directors are women, most w
84.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Criticizing how fictional women are dressed is not the same as criticizing how real-life women are dressed. When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male
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by alecdbrooks 13y ago
You've moved the goalposts. Neither ancestor comments nor the article were talking about founding a startup. But having conceded that programmers who start late are not necessarily at a disadvantage in terms of technical skill, you&#x
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by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Well, did you read the article? It describes manual memory management, which is probably the most obvious reason C is lower level. It also talks about how strings are stored directly as arrays of characters as opposed to objects wrapping ch
87.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on downtime of a Google Labs product in 2004, you'd see an accelerated response, b
88.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
Crude fuzzing can be done on the command line using dd. The command "dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1000 count=1" will spit out 1 KB of psuedorandom data you can pipe, POST or otherwise send to your application. (GNU's imple
89.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
The reasons I wrote "he's acting as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator " are because none of his suggested solutions are about sexism at YC and this line: "More thoughtful people were willing to concede YC
90.
by alecdbrooks 13y ago
"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community." I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as th

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