catpolice

11 ms·

31.
by catpolice 8y ago
That's interesting - I didn't know Notepad++ still ranked so high. Oddly enough, I'm actually pretty acutely aware of how much performance matters in this space - at my last job, I spent a year developing an IDE for a custom
32.
by catpolice 8y ago
I didn't mean to imply that, if I did. That said, Atom and VS Code did gain a big market share of the text editor/IDE space pretty quickly, and the author called out Atom as something built on a web platform that was slow and bad
33.
by catpolice 8y ago
I'm sympathetic to some of the conclusions here but jeez, this is a really bad argument. A lot of other commenters point out ways that it's bad, and they're mostly right. The crux of the issue is that the argument really reli
34.
by catpolice 8y ago
I've noticed that a lot of cat behavior can be explained by realizing that they have an incredibly short attention span and any change in their sensory environment can distract them for the half second required to drop their entire men
35.
by catpolice 8y ago
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/08/02/parsing-expressions... Precedence climbing is also (intimately) related to Pratt parsing, and there's a useful series of articles about the two here: https:&#x2F
36.
by catpolice 8y ago
Who are you talking to here?
37.
by catpolice 8y ago
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18676680 Not breaking an API is one of the few cases where they make sense, but it's sort of a hack that you have to settle for because of back-compatibility.
38.
by catpolice 8y ago
I've been using languages with getters and setters for long enough to be familiar with them. There was a time that I thought they were useful and used them in my own code. But I've been burned enough, and thought enough about lang
39.
by catpolice 8y ago
First, like the other commenters, I'm not in love with the perlish # syntax. I'm not sure why it was wise/necessary to add a previously illegal character as a prefix, rather than adding a "private" keyword, but I&#x
40.
by catpolice 8y ago
I tend to use the "model" and "view" concepts a lot when discussing architecture, but in my experience it's almost always a mistake to try and reference any specific MV* pattern for explanatory purposes - it does no
41.
by catpolice 8y ago
There's a lot of misinformation in this space, so be careful who you listen to. I hope to say as few false things as possible, but I can offer no guarantees. One source of confusion is that there are different types of proposed quantum
42.
by catpolice 8y ago
The core argument here, concerning the number of variables that need to be manipulated, isn't very clear to me - I can't tell if that's because it's an unclear argument in general, or if the author tried to simplify it f
43.
by catpolice 8y ago
Anybody have any insight into what kind of trickery goes into this? I know a decent amount about both of the compression algorithms, but I've forgotten the structure of the file formats so I can't tell if this required any really
44.
by catpolice 8y ago
I agree with the general point here (though I think some of the dynamic patterns, e.g. reflection and exceptions, are more often anti-patterns than they are necessary and useful). In particular, I feel like statically typed languages force
45.
by catpolice 8y ago
You don't get any information if the probability of the beam balancing is either 1 or 0. If you put everyone on the scale, the probability that it will be balanced is 0 - you don't learn anything. So the trick is to exclude some o
46.
by catpolice 8y ago
Yeah, the reason I suspect it tends to thwart programmers (if I recall correctly) is that there's a solution that looks a lot like binary search that _almost_ works, but the actual solution looks very different from it at every step. S
47.
by catpolice 8y ago
Traditionally binary search involves recursively dividing the options into two roughly equal sized groups and then using a measurement to rule out every member of one of the groups (and thus half of the search space) with every step. The so
48.
by catpolice 8y ago
Hoo, that's one of my favorite puzzles - there was a version of it on Brooklyn Nine-Nine with no solution given, which ruined my sleep that night. I have a theory that it's actually a little harder for programmers than for other t
49.
by catpolice 8y ago
Certainly the bulk of the blame falls on Second Life and the printer manufacturers for not validating inputs. But there's another valuable lesson about interpreting binary/string blobs: don't make guesses about the format of
50.
by catpolice 8y ago
Same. I actually use FF for most browsing and I haven't really noticed a huge problem with the occasional youtube video. But I watch a lot of twitch streams on the box hooked up to my TV at home and Chrome seems to be the only option f
51.
by catpolice 8y ago
Yeah - I think good design should be as simple as it can while respecting the complexity of the task. Designers forget that not everyone is building search engine front pages or like, the kind of simple objects with no moving parts that ten
52.
by catpolice 8y ago
My company still uses a Symbolics Lisp machine! Granted, they use it as a coffee table in the lobby.
53.
by catpolice 8y ago
Yeah, it's odd that they make stronger claims in the middle of the paper (e.g. "This clearly indicates that the “thrust” is not coming from the EMDrive but from some electromagnetic interaction.") than in the c
54.
by catpolice 8y ago
Sorry, I'm from a philosophy background so I think of anything published in the last ~100 years as "fairly recent" ;) All I meant was that that many ideas and methods developed originally for linguistics were taken up and exp
55.
by catpolice 8y ago
Yeah, that's pretty similar to what I ended up doing - it comes pretty natural with recursive descent to just store enough of the parser state on relevant nodes that you can restart it at natural breaks. For my application, I end up ha
56.
by catpolice 8y ago
Fast re-parsing is tricky. I'm building a JS IDE for a simple language, and it needs to only re-parse the part of the syntax tree that an edit affects (and only update the minimal number of affected DOM nodes). Writing the (recursive d
57.
by catpolice 8y ago
This is because the two subjects were largely indistinguishable until fairly recently. Most of the theory for language parsing came from efforts to describe natural languages in terms of formal grammars, and until ALGOL, most programming la
58.
by catpolice 9y ago
I like the 100% Rich Hickey link rate in the comments so far
59.
by catpolice 9y ago
Rick Hickey's Simple Made Easy permanently made me a better programmer: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy Also his talks on transducers in clojure changed the way I think about functional progra
60.
by catpolice 9y ago
When I read this article initially, I got the impression that here "stable" actually means that it's not sensitive to small perturbations - the orbital pattern is a local attactor and is thus sort of "self-correcting&quo

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