apricot

25 ms·

271.
by apricot 6y ago
> NK Jemisin...who? Boy are you in for a treat.
272.
by apricot 6y ago
greatideainthesameveinivedecidedtoforgospacesandpunctuationaswellbecauseitsavesspaceaswellaswearandtearonthekeyboard
273.
by apricot 6y ago
Dad bought an Apple II when I was a kid, and the A2-FS1 flight simulator simply blew my mind. And then I discovered A2-3D1, subLOGIC's 3D graphics library, on which their flight simulator was based, which started a lifelong interest in
274.
by apricot 6y ago
Some characters have more than one stroke order, and some characters are commonly written in a wrong order. I remember a Japanese TV program asking people on the street to write 馬 (horse), and making fun of people writing it in the wrong or
275.
by apricot 6y ago
Stroke order is very important when writing kanji, for good reason: it helps memorize the characters and also makes them look well-balanced. Also, trying to read cursive Japanese or Chinese is a futile endeavor if you don't know the st
276.
by apricot 6y ago
I would add "do not use fancy ligatures or loud typography". I just read the web page and you know what stuck in my mind the most? The fancy R's and K's. Also I kept waiting for a Q.
277.
by apricot 6y ago
> Yes, obviously the president is held to a different standard In a sane world, this would mean that the President is held to a higher standard because of his position. Now you're using it to mean the opposite.
278.
by apricot 6y ago
Neil Konzen's P.L.E. (Program Line Editor) helped make my early days of Apple II programming bearable. It later was expanded into GPLE and published by Beagle Bros.
279.
by apricot 6y ago
Pretty sure this was done at the behest of someone who was afraid that calculator could lose its exam certification, something which is a Big Deal for them.
280.
by apricot 6y ago
A "Lone Elon", if you will.
281.
by apricot 6y ago
I guess I'm showing my age, but "Boris" without any qualifiers defaults to Badenov.
282.
by apricot 6y ago
Thank you! I was getting really strong "you've read this before" vibes from the article but couldn't place the source.
283.
by apricot 6y ago
Yes. Your average user knows nothing of file types. They know about pictures. Ask your average iPhone users whether their pictures are stored as JPEG, HEIC or TIFF files and you'll get a blank stare most of the time.
284.
by apricot 6y ago
When I took my first calculus class, in the 1980s, we spent the first few weeks of the course just computing limits. No reason was given, and no context, just techniques. I remember having to compute the limit of 2x+1 as x goes to 3 by writ
285.
by apricot 6y ago
I always did very well on tests at school, but I wasn't really learning anything, or more precisely, I wasn't learning how to learn. I was learning how to pass tests, but that's a rather useless skill to have. I had to learn
286.
by apricot 6y ago
I know a German professor with two Ph.D.s who calls himself "Professor Doktor Doktor So-and-so". He doesn't introduce himself like that, mind you, but he uses it in his .signature file (is it still called that nowadays? the t
287.
by apricot 6y ago
Ah, a kindred spirit. I do pretty much the same thing, and also use Terminus 9 in the terminal, where I spend most of my time these days. I might eventually adopt antialiased fonts when I get a monitor with high enough resolution. For now,
288.
by apricot 6y ago
Isn't that the normal way to do things? Every teacher, every textbook has always told me that multiplication and division have the same priority, as do addition and subtraction.
289.
by apricot 6y ago
I sometimes teach programming to beginners who have some knowledge of math. A common mistake they make is to write compound conditionals like this: if a == 2 or 3: do stuff because that's how they would write it in mat
290.
by apricot 7y ago
Damn, even his .rc files are a joy to read.
291.
by apricot 7y ago
APL was designed to be executable math notation. I think of APL programs as math formulas. You don't expect to read an unfamiliar formula and immediately understand it. You decipher it, little by little, until it clicks and you underst
292.
by apricot 7y ago
> Ok. How should they communicate this? "We've gone back to where we were three years ago after a mistake, sorry." Yes. We expect adults to own up to their mistakes, so why don't we hold corporations to the same stand
293.
by apricot 7y ago
To be completely honest, they should describe the keyboard as "a lot less bad than the previous keyboards, but not quite as good as the ones before them".
294.
by apricot 7y ago
You could take a normal calculator, put it in scientific notation, and stick a piece of cardboard over the exponent.
295.
by apricot 7y ago
Well, you don't call the company whose software you pirated and ask them for tech support...
296.
by apricot 7y ago
I remember reading a book describing the Alpha architecture as an undergrad. It was so much cleaner than x86. I was sad to see it fail in the marketplace, but sadly it's a common story in tech.
297.
by apricot 7y ago
Turbo Pascal, Wordstar, and dBase were the three killer apps that justified by buying a Z80 card for my Apple II back in the mid-80s.
298.
by apricot 7y ago
As I clicked the link, I wondered what strange Forth construct was dubbed a "Margaret Thatcher". Turns out I had the wrong Charles Moore.
299.
by apricot 7y ago
Same here. Found it in high school and was blown away by the cleverness of the dialogues. Didn't understand everything else, but the chapter on TNT opened my eyes to how simple rewriting rules could be used to perform computation, and
300.
by apricot 7y ago
Nice. It's the most lucid explanation I've seen of what Hungarian notation really is, what it can do, and how different it is from sticking "ul" in front of every unsigned long variable.

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