btrask

32 ms·

361.
by btrask 15y ago
This past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then. I used to have a philoso
362.
by btrask 15y ago
Cocoa (and CoreFoundation) actually make it pretty trivial to write HTTP servers already. I was completely surprised by how painless it was when I did it recently. Not quite as easy as Node.js, but on the same order of magnitude, IMHO. (Edi
363.
by btrask 15y ago
Perhaps if more programmers took some time to learn the history of the field before jumping in and trying to leave their mark, we'd have more progress and less reinventing of the wheel. "In computer science, we stand on each others' feet."
364.
by btrask 15y ago
CJK input don't seem to work right (although it displays fine once entered). There are special steps you have to take because of the way input works for those languages. Here is the cached version of an old article I read describing how to
365.
by btrask 15y ago
Once in a while non-technical friends come to me and ask me to help them implement ideas they've come up with. Often enough, I think the idea is bad for one reason or another. That puts me in an awkward situation. I don't want to work on an
366.
by btrask 15y ago
Given Apple's App Store restrictions, the choice is often between cloned UI in web apps or no iOS support at all.
367.
by btrask 16y ago
Yes, it requires a sorted list, but so does the naïve implementation. The performance is equivalent to binary search to find the entry, although you then have to scan backwards to make sure you have the first entry with the same value. Sinc
368.
by btrask 16y ago
For what it's worth, this is quite easy to compute in a way that works with any number of ties, and doesn't require computing the whole list in order. Your rank is the number of people above you plus one.
369.
by btrask 16y ago
"C++ is a powerful language with flexible solutions to problems that other languages don't have."
370.
by btrask 16y ago
You'd probably be better than most other basketball players. If you want to be the best in the world, it's true that factors outside of your control come into play. If you can "settle" for being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000, instead
371.
by btrask 16y ago
On the contrary, I think the decompiled output highlights the difference between C and assembly, because it looks nothing like typical C code.
372.
by btrask 16y ago
If you have a library class or function that is not explicitly marked as thread safe, do not assume it is, regardless of whether or not it "should" be under any system of logic or reason. Why not? Because you have no idea what it might be d
373.
by btrask 16y ago
It's unfortunate that they've jumped on the fixed positioning bandwagon. Non-scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work, because the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area. Luckily there's a user s
374.
by btrask 16y ago
Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.
375.
by btrask 16y ago
This is an example of bad terminology (or arguably a defective class library) clouding one's understanding. If you change the title to "MUTABLE arrays considered somewhat harmful", all of his complaints ring true. Merely changing the way ar