cpressey

17 ms·

31.
by cpressey 14y ago
I guess the only way to know for sure is to try it and see.
32.
by cpressey 14y ago
It's interesting that you can give away your copyright to another entity (if it's a "work made for hire") but you can't give up your copyright completely to place a work irrevocably into the public domain. What if I create a legal entit
33.
by cpressey 14y ago
Even if they were making local changes, I personally couldn't fault them, really; they're playing by the rules. If they want to give up the intangible benefits they would get from sharing those changes (at least the non-business-strategic o
34.
by cpressey 14y ago
I agree. Local forks are often valuable. And a project can't be expected to accommodate everyone's vision for how the software should be used. The pain comes in when the upstream project decides to refactor the code in a way which forces
35.
by cpressey 14y ago
I completely agree. I'm kind of surprised more readers don't seem to have this sort of reaction to the article.
36.
by cpressey 14y ago
I build little things without a plan or theory (or at least, without a coherent one) fairly regularly, to see what I can learn from them (and because it's fun.) But building something big ? Without a plan or theory, it's hard to justify
37.
by cpressey 14y ago
I don't have enough karma to downvote this comment, so I'm going to upvote every comment underneath it.
38.
by cpressey 14y ago
This (and several other comments in this discussion) make the hackathon held last year by the company I work for, look like a wild success. * held on a weekday (so it wasn't asking salaried employees to come in and "work for free" on a week
39.
by cpressey 14y ago
Lisp is a huge success, not because people have built "commercially significant applications" in it, but because it has expanded how generations of programmers think about programming. I'm not defending Lisp specifically (in fact I don't
40.
by cpressey 14y ago
I think that's why I don't find it a very interesting article. The capability to build isn't very useful unless you have a theory that informs it.
41.
by cpressey 14y ago
I think you see more homeless on the west coast because it's a little easier to make it through the winter without consistent shelter there. (Compared to, say, Minneapolis.) I haven't actually compared against other places on the continent
42.
by cpressey 14y ago
He came into the room and sat on the arm of a chair with his feet resting on the seat. I have to assume that wasn't a typical conference-room chair -- or it was really well engineered.
43.
by cpressey 14y ago
OT, but would you like some constructive criticism on usability of the article? The lack of contrast made it difficult to read for me; clicking on a footnote scrolls in such a way that the footnote text is hidden by the header; and having
44.
by cpressey 14y ago
To be precise, the best known solutions to the problem grow exponentially with the number of students. The P ?= NP question is (very roughly speaking) asking if better than exponential solutions exist.
45.
by cpressey 14y ago
I tried in Chromium on Ubuntu, and Firefox and IE on Windows. It looks trainwreck-y on all of them for me. By the process of elimination, I believe it's because I'm using a T-mobile wireless dongle. The upstream proxy attempts to reduce b
46.
by cpressey 14y ago
I'm struggling to see much innovation that directly addresses fundamental problems. Mostly I see gadgets. Your examples are mostly gadgets.
47.
by cpressey 14y ago
There is certainly a perceived lack of software engineers. (And, I think, a perception that coding is the most important thing a software engineer does. I'd question both of these perceptions.)
48.
by cpressey 14y ago
Apologies if "absolute trainwreck" came off as harsh or unspecific. My specific, actionable feedback is: Check how your site looks in multiple common browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome...) while you develop it. Check how your site looks on scre
49.
by cpressey 14y ago
Meanwhile, the kid who likes programming will probably be drawn to it naturally, as well. I know I was, a long time ago. I can appreciate wanting to lower the barrier to entry for such kids, but I honestly don't think it's excessively hig
50.
by cpressey 14y ago
OT and I don't know if you'll find this useful but http://codehs.com/ looks like an absolute trainwreck to me, layout-wise. I'm using Firefox 19 on Ubuntu.
51.
by cpressey 14y ago
I had a really hard time figuring out their value proposition, too. In fact I'm still not exactly sure what it is. I've given up and moved on.
52.
by cpressey 14y ago
I would barely call this a hack at all; it's only a hack under the view that it feels icky to evolve a programming convention into a language construct. Languages have been treating (parts of) variable names as part of the type system for
53.
by cpressey 14y ago
I would be fascinated to hear if subvocalization (either motor signals or internal monologue) has ever been studied in the context of reading code or mathematics, if anyone happens to know. I know I basically need to translate mathematical
54.
by cpressey 14y ago
As noted in many of the comments, make sucks, and the article is not promoting make per se. But make seems to be the topic of conversation, so: To me, make is a cruddy low-level declarative language that gets abused as a pseudo-imperative
55.
by cpressey 14y ago
Lest we forget "computer" and "compiler" were once job descriptions, and (if I'm not mistaken) the "coder" was the person who punched the cards while the "programmer" was the person who fed those cards into the card reader. Timesharing sys
56.
by cpressey 14y ago
If they never use it, then a better solution is for browsers to ship with applets disabled. Or without an applet plugin at all -- if you need it, go install it at your own risk.
57.
by cpressey 14y ago
That's true, there are good use cases for it, and similar technologies, in this domain. If the commenter to whom I was replying prefaced their excitement by explaining they were elderly or bedridden, I likely wouldn't have asked that (not-
58.
by cpressey 14y ago
The scrollbar (which I assume what is you meant by "sidebar"), as a UI element in general, seems to be getting increasingly less coherent. Like several other sites I've seen recently that are getting "creative" with scrolling, the top head
59.
by cpressey 14y ago
When you are continually assisted like this, won't your own ability to do these things go unexercised and start to atrophy? As another commenter mentioned -- police, yes. Good use case. Firefighters as well. (I assume the military alread
60.
by cpressey 14y ago
Why do your find the idea of turning on your kettle from across the room by looking at it, exciting? It is because it makes you feel like you've gained a new, awesome, magical power? But all you did was turn a kettle on. I wouldn't exact

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