anonjon

15 ms·

61.
by anonjon 17y ago
"..they may be Earth's second smartest creature (next to humans, of course)." This should read 'next to lab mice'
62.
by anonjon 17y ago
That doesn't necessarily mean that she is lying, it could very well be that someone else is lying, (I thought PR was all about lying to people?). It could also be that no one is lying and the story simply was misremembered or garbled in tra
63.
by anonjon 17y ago
Why do you assume that she is lying?
64.
by anonjon 17y ago
Honestly, that doesn't really look too bad to me. Meghan told us how it went down from her point of view. Its refreshing to see a response that doesn't contain loads of obfuscated spin.
65.
by anonjon 17y ago
Corollary (on second thought, Axiom): Heisenbugs do not exist, computers are deterministic. Things that do exist: Pieces of code that I do not understand. Pieces of code that I have not read. Pieces of code that interact in ways which I do
66.
by anonjon 17y ago
This accurately explains why I don't like twitter.
67.
by anonjon 17y ago
Why? Your reaction seems sort of knee-jerk to me. Most people are perfectly ok with advertisements on web pages. I would guess that it wouldn't sap your resources more than downloading an advertisement or two. In fact, for the average user,
68.
by anonjon 17y ago
"if there's something interesting, just go hack it up and ask for forgiveness later." This is probably the best advice given on hacker news today.
69.
by anonjon 17y ago
Yes? I do care about this stuff. The first reason is that I'm kind of a wonk for this stuff. I like reading about the different languages and learning them. I have fun doing it; (I also program because I think it is fun, I could probably m
70.
by anonjon 17y ago
That just seems like a stupid way to grade anything. /happy he's got a degree in philosophy and didn't do CS at Stanford.
71.
by anonjon 17y ago
This makes me wonder what the conversion efficiency and price per watt for a tree is. Trees (plants in general) already do photosynthesis really well, so why can't we genetically engineer a tree that produces electricity?
72.
by anonjon 17y ago
I think that I type similar to the way that you do. I don't make my individual fingers move, instead I arrange my fingers into different patterns (repositioning my hands if needed) and then kind of execute the key sequence. It is weird and
73.
by anonjon 17y ago
"Have I just hit a bad corner of the Lisp world?" Sort of. The real problem is that it is difficult to know what the current 'best' implementations of different libraries are, and what versions of common lisp they are intended to build unde
74.
by anonjon 17y ago
The biggest thing I learned from world of warcraft: If you quit wow and spend all of that time that you would have been playing WoW on other tasks, you can actually accomplish some pretty amazing stuff. (Get in shape, become a hacker, learn
75.
by anonjon 17y ago
It is a definite must if you want to be a really famous developer. I think if you want to be a really great developer you should write code.
76.
by anonjon 17y ago
In that article, a programmer still had to input tests, I believe. So you could end up with fully-test driven development (requirements oriented?). I kind of doubt genetic programming is a way to fully automated development. Someone will al
77.
by anonjon 17y ago
That's what I did to learn Clojure. The only problem with starting off doing GUI is that you will be in javadoc hell learning swing (or whatever) at the same time as Clojure. But it is nice having GUI essentially baked into the language.
78.
by anonjon 17y ago
That is true presupposing that the technology behind lisp is sufficiently inscrutable to make it magic-like. Fortunately for us, lisp is probably the exact opposite of a magic-like programming language. All you are doing is composing lists
79.
by anonjon 17y ago
I'm glad you will be doing something more interesting for the second half. I understand that the sqrt function is done for teaching purposes, but there is no point in showing people how to write an abs function, all it does is give the impr
80.
by anonjon 17y ago
"When we write lisp, we have magic powers, and the reason is that our code is in a form that is easy to manipulate programmatically." Yet there isn't a single macro or piece of code writing code implemented in this example. Also, it isn't m
81.
by anonjon 17y ago
"When building a big system you need uninterrupted hacking time to make sure you can keep all that state in your head." I think that this is wrong. Or at least it should be wrong. I used to think it was true. State is another way of sayin
82.
by anonjon 17y ago
A couple of notes: 1.) A simple square macro will be faster than the expt function, because expt does special calculations for dealing with decimal exponents. All you really need to do is multiply it by itself. I think something like this:
83.
by anonjon 17y ago
ynterestingly, Fujitsu already have this particular product name trademark and apple has been trying to wrestle yt away from them for a while now. yt ys an ynteresting feat of branding that apple has been able to establish president that th
84.
by anonjon 17y ago
Are you indicating that my belief that Ubuntu is close to the usability of Mac or Windows is false, or that being easy to use is a problem? Ubuntu certainly is very easy to use, Linux as a whole is not.
85.
by anonjon 17y ago
I guess my point was that the fast languages are generally not the ones that are good for developing the fast algorithms. It is harder to experiment in a language like C than it is in a language like lisp or perl. The other thing to point o
86.
by anonjon 17y ago
Chances are that the majority of developers won't find the most efficient algorithm to solve the problem. (vs. the most efficient implementation of that algorithm... which is clearly going to be in a combination of C and assembly anyway). A
87.
by anonjon 17y ago
I think that the predominance of 'tech savvy' users in Linux (especially ubuntu) will change soon. This is only an anecdote, but when I whip out my ubuntu laptop, people don't say 'what's that' anymore, they say 'cool ubuntu, how is it?' Up
88.
by anonjon 17y ago
Perhaps part of it is that you will no longer feel the need for methodologies? When programming lisp, the syntax is so regular that the patterns in your code become very obvious. When I see patterns I pull them out into macros or high-order
89.
by anonjon 17y ago
Do nothing? This isn't worth it. Spend your time/money making an application that isn't so easily duplicated. You said it yourself that you weren't planning to make a mint on this. No point in dealing with the hassle of lawyers, paying the
90.
by anonjon 17y ago
"(I've resolved that if any of my children ever want to be vegetarians, I'm OK with that, but a critical precondition is that they demonstrate that they have done their homework and understand the nutritional implications. I believe it can

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