colomon

46 ms·

391.
by colomon 14y ago
Isn't Factor (at some level of abstraction) basically Lisp/Scheme with more minimal syntax? It replaces prefix notation and parentheses with postfix notation and a stack. All the benefits Lisps get from minimal syntax, Factor gets too.
392.
by colomon 14y ago
By this standard probably something like 30% of the music ever written has the wrong key signature -- and I've never seen a piece of non-major music with a correctly notated key signature!
393.
by colomon 14y ago
That's only if the tonic is G. I play tunes all the time with one sharp, but a tonic of D. (ie D mixolydian.)
394.
by colomon 14y ago
What you're describing (not counting dual monitors, which is a complete non-sequitur IMO) is just basic competence. When people are talking about 10x, it is more a matter of knowing what to do and how to do it. As a simple example, conside
395.
by colomon 14y ago
That's kind of exactly it, I think. I don't know anything about the Infancy Gospel other than what I just read in that Wikipedia article, but I'm familiar with two old ballads that are right along the same lines: "Cherry Tree Carol": Joseph
396.
by colomon 14y ago
Interesting... my reaction to the OP was "Duh, everyone knows that!" But my reaction to your sivers.org link was "Great story!" Not sure if that says something about me or about the relative writing skills of the two posts.
397.
by colomon 14y ago
Well, yay for you. As I posted in the Firefox thread, when I checked this morning I had 16 tabs open using 2.6GiB of memory, and that without the using websites like Facebook and Twitter that I've found to be memory pigs in the past. I us
398.
by colomon 14y ago
For what it's worth, I've got 16 tabs open in Chrome at the moment -- the process has been running for days -- and it's taking 2.6 gigs of RAM. This is without tabs like Facebook and Twitter, which I will not leave open any more because
399.
by colomon 14y ago
The one significant use case I'd have is we're on a long road trip and my wife is driving the car. But it's not such a significant case for me that I've ever actually spent $10 a month to turn my phone's tethering on.
400.
by colomon 14y ago
Two thoughts: I can recall the lightest wrestler on my high school wrestling team getting bullied by his teammates several times. I didn't do anything to help him. I was one of those sporty geeks in high school, but I was completely unspor
401.
by colomon 14y ago
In my mind the interesting/curious transition is from music that "anybody" can play to music that requires the very very best players in the world. (I mean seriously, if the Kronos Quartet can't handle playing your string quartet...) I mea
402.
by colomon 14y ago
As I understood the article, the bubble collapses at the speed of light. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that since we've had 15 billion years so far with no collapse, then odds are great that we've got billions more to g
403.
by colomon 14y ago
So you imagine that the more text there is in a law, the less likely there is to be a loophole? Do you also think that longer programs have fewer bugs?
404.
by colomon 14y ago
I found it very odd that the article seemed to insist we certainly had billions of years left -- how do we know the collapse didn't start billions of years ago?
405.
by colomon 14y ago
You can get all the generic Lego blocks you would ever want. The "problem" is kids want all the fancy sets. For instance: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Bricks-More-Builders-Tomorrow/dp/...
406.
by colomon 14y ago
So you're saying that every time I find a STEP file written in an invalid fashion, I should convene an ISO 10303 committee and wait for years to find out how everyone should handle it? That's doubly insane, because it would take many bugs
407.
by colomon 14y ago
As jbert pointed out, if your program's main job is to say whether or not something is safe, and it liberally says "Oh yeah, I think that's safe", that's pretty much the exact opposite of "be conservative in what you do".
408.
by colomon 14y ago
Maybe I'm missing something here, but a valid STEP string can already encode any arbitrary Unicode code point. It just does it using 7-bit ASCII. If your code is somehow executing these strings without examining their content, then you ar
409.
by colomon 14y ago
But this is where "be conservative in what you do" comes into play. The STEP format has formal rules for exporting all ASCII, Unicode, and ISO-8859 characters. A well-written STEP string exporter should handle them all without difficulty,
410.
by colomon 14y ago
It seems to me it is a very valid principle in many areas. For instance, the STEP file standard very clearly states that all input files must be 7-bit ASCII. Many of the programs that generate these files (including earlier versions of my
411.
by colomon 14y ago
You know, it's funny. I said the exact same thing you did, then a friend convinced me to try iTerm2 about a year ago. I still couldn't put my finger on what's better about it, exactly, but I've never considered going back after the first
412.
by colomon 14y ago
For a long time they weren't just provided by the phone company, they were owned by the phone company. The theory (at least as presented to the public) was you couldn't let ordinary people hook anything they wanted to the phone lines -- th
413.
by colomon 14y ago
Thank you for conceding they do indeed still exist. Of course they don't exist in the same way. This is 2013. What you're describing is some sort of semi-mythical pre-WWII world. Technology changes everything. TV killed small movie the
414.
by colomon 14y ago
Interesting. I certainly know what you mean by the Tomb of Horrors style, but I think of that as a particular style of older module, not the norm. Possibly just because I cut my teeth on the Against the Giants modules, which I seem to rec
415.
by colomon 14y ago
Don't know where you live, but we still have boatloads of small towns here in Michigan. Farms and rural townships too. As far as I can tell from my travels, the same goes for the state of New York, too. (And Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana...)
416.
by colomon 14y ago
'Mearls feels that players should appreciate the older game products, which allowed for more varied, less predictable styles of play. "Older style adventures, there is no script," he said, adding that players enjoy the "uncertainty" of the
417.
by colomon 14y ago
For what it's worth, our neighborhood isn't walkable enough to allow you to function without a car, but it does have plenty of space for kids to roam including elementary and middle schools about four blocks away and lots of businesses with
418.
by colomon 14y ago
Apparently nothing, since they've just added a load of albums I bought to give away as Christmas presents to my Cloud Player account...
419.
by colomon 14y ago
I think that's the wrong way of looking at what happened, at least with CDs. When CDs first came out, the music industry had decades of experience mastering for LPs and cassettes, and no experience at all mastering for CDs. It took some t
420.
by colomon 14y ago
I used LISP for several AI classes in the early 90s. My final big class project could do things that were impressive compared to my (non-AI) programs in C++ -- but debugging was absolute hell, because relatively trivial changes would cause

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