arnsholt

22 ms·

211.
by arnsholt 12y ago
Good luck convincing a serious Lisp afficionado that his preferred syntax schema isn't some kind of Platonic ideal though.
212.
by arnsholt 12y ago
Another problem with teaching introductory programming in a Real Language, I think, is the temptation to also teach more software engineering-like things as well. When you start measuring your experience with programming in decades rather t
213.
by arnsholt 12y ago
That's a block eval, not a string eval. Block evals are the equivalent of a catch block in Java or the like, so this is perfectly safe (modulo correct exception checking and such, of course..
214.
When the French clock off at 6pm, they really mean it(theguardian.com)
5 points by arnsholt 13y ago|0 comments
215.
by arnsholt 13y ago
That's what I do currently. My slides are very sparse, but on the screen of my laptop I have my notes about what's going on at that point in the lecture. Once the lecture's done I upload the whole shebang (double-wide PDF pag
216.
by arnsholt 13y ago
The title is a bit misleading. While it is true that Norwegian PhD students don't have to pay tuition, they're also salaried employees of the university. My PhD position pays at the lower end of what an engineer can expect to be p
217.
by arnsholt 13y ago
An important factor is simply time. Handwriting styles change over time, and the cursive styles used in the past are especially hard to read for modern readers, since as we write less and less by hand, cursive writing (which is optimised fo
218.
by arnsholt 13y ago
An interesting corollary to concept 5 (the fact that everything in Tcl is a string) is that this means that Tcl is actually homoiconic. It does it completely differently from Lisp, but still ends up in the same place: code and data have the
219.
by arnsholt 13y ago
In my research group, there's a story that one of their collaborators once tweaked the interline spacing to get under the page limit. Apparently the end result was that you could riffle through the printed proceeding and tell where his
220.
by arnsholt 13y ago
What happens in other parts of the code doesn't have the same impact on your code it does in Perl 5, though. In Perl 5 it's very easy to globally change the behaviour of code, while in Perl 6 it's a lot since harder since alm
221.
by arnsholt 13y ago
It means that whatever you put into the ssh process's STDIN gets sent to the STDIN of the remote process. For example you can do this: tar cj $bigdir | ssh host 'tar xj' That creates a tar.bz2 archive on your machine
222.
by arnsholt 13y ago
You might be thinking of Carl Sagan's _Contact_. There a set of construction instructions are constructed from first principles using mathematical notation.
223.
by arnsholt 13y ago
Your view of Sanskrit is probably skewed by a few things. First of all, nearly the entire corpus of Sanskrit literature was written after (and in many cases long, long after) it was used as a day-to-day language. It was probably already los
224.
by arnsholt 13y ago
Logistics is hard in general, is my impression. In fact, most of the interesting problems logistics seem to reduce to NP-complete problems, which has some unfortunate consequences for finding optimal solutions.
225.
by arnsholt 13y ago
Sure it would. But the down-stream savings of preventative medicine don't show up in a balance sheet. There all you can see is money spent on people who don't really need it right now (or some variation on that general theme). That's a big
226.
by arnsholt 13y ago
I love that about ACL. Not only is open-access good and nice and all that, but it also means I don't have to screw around with VPNs and such when I need to get an article while I'm at home.
227.
by arnsholt 14y ago
2 times 120 is 240. Which at 7px each clocks in at 1680. It'll work on a desktop monitor, but probably not on a laptop.
228.
Reconstructing 2000 year old hairdos(online.wsj.com)
2 points by arnsholt 14y ago|0 comments
229.
Stabilizer: Statistically Rigorous Performance Evaluation(github.com)
1 points by arnsholt 14y ago|0 comments
230.
by arnsholt 14y ago
That's assuming you know the magical position. If you need to test all positions, it's 256 to the power of the number of bytes in the message.
231.
by arnsholt 14y ago
It'd probably be better if it used a better measure than raw term frequency in the articles. For example, most of Europe is "War". If it used something like inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to rank the terms, it might get more distinct w
232.
by arnsholt 14y ago
The ARC algorithm is patented (by IBM according to Wikipedia), so that might be why it's not used at least.
233.
by arnsholt 14y ago
I'm quite happy you reposted as well. I'll be teaching a course (first time teaching full course) next semester, and rereading that post was quite timely, since I'm starting to plan the whole thing.
234.
by arnsholt 14y ago
Writing prose is actually quite similar to writing code. I don't think any author writes in linear, unidirectional process. Just like coding, you solve some subproblems (chapters, sections, etc.) before moving on to somewhere else, you go b
235.
by arnsholt 14y ago
I think you're right about the magnetic fields. I'm pretty sure the interactions between the metronomes in the video can be modelled as message passing between nodes in a square lattice of variables, with stronger association potentials in
236.
by arnsholt 14y ago
The most fundamental problem is that perfect anti-virus is impossible. According to Rice's theorem, you cannot in the general case prove any run-time property of a program solely by looking at its code, which means that can't 100% reliably
237.
by arnsholt 14y ago
Quicklisp is still just a layer on top of ASDF. It's still there, you just don't have to deal with it as much.
238.
by arnsholt 14y ago
Despite Unicode being something like 20 years old, people still expect strings to be byte arrays and other assorted lunacy, like reading from file not requiring stuff like encodings. "How hard can it be" to just figure out which encoding th
239.
by arnsholt 14y ago
Demographics and such, probably. The people watching TV Saturday evening aren't the same as on Sunday evening, IIRC.
240.
by arnsholt 14y ago
It's a braino, I think. Instead of the right thing, which would be what mathgladiator posted below, this is a guaranteed null pointer exception when obj actually is null.

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