djacobs

14 ms·

121.
by djacobs 15y ago
An artificial environment would be ideal, but it's currently impossible. The issue is: how do we recreate the environment with the right organisms? How do we know that they're all growing like they would in their natural environment? I reme
122.
by djacobs 15y ago
This is correct. Why isn't the question "Have you had unprotected sex in the last 3 months? Can we give you a blood test today?" This seems a lot more sane than "There's this group that we used to consider high risk for HIV. We're not willi
123.
by djacobs 15y ago
Having paired with many people who have loaded Emacs keybindings into Vim, this made me laugh. But serious talk: Unless someone has loaded Emacs keybindings, shouldn't <C-a> be used to increment a number (even a hexadecimal one)? Ho
124.
by djacobs 15y ago
Honest question: Why would I use this over Sass?
125.
Mapping America: Every city, every block(projects.nytimes.com)
2 points by djacobs 15y ago|0 comments
126.
by djacobs 15y ago
I'll be happy to do that. If you mail me your contact info, I'll ping you when the class is over.
127.
by djacobs 15y ago
I used Colt. I'd be interested to see if Clojure parallelization and under-the-hood optimizations could match vectorization performance. Note, I haven't run official benchmarks yet. My comparisons have been more like "back propagation and g
128.
by djacobs 15y ago
We're using Matlab/Octave in the Stanford ML course, and it's certainly elegant but not necessarily comfortable for functional programmers. I'm reimplementing our assignments with Clojure/Incanter and am finding my code just as performant a
129.
by djacobs 15y ago
I'm a big fan of The Quick Python Book[0] and Dive into Python [1]. The former is especially good if you're coming from a similar dynamic language. [0]: http://www.manning.com/ceder/ [1]: http://www.diveintopython.net/
130.
by djacobs 15y ago
I've found this to be a little simple for anyone who's programmed before. Maybe it's gotten better since I last checked it out.
131.
by djacobs 15y ago
Any suggestion where I can get a solid overview of what it takes to hack the Kinect on non-Windows machines? Forums haven't cut it for me, and I don't want to go out and buy a Kinect if the language/toolkit isn't great.
132.
by djacobs 15y ago
Just look at the trade-offs: - With non-modal editing, you get precise control of what's happening for every character that you type. In some ways, that kind of granularity is powerful. But what's the cost of that fine-grained control? The
133.
by djacobs 15y ago
I'll be in touch this week. This could be exciting. More than anything, I think this will give statistics a home on the Web and will give a new face to statistics for non-engineers. Maybe we can do for statistics what Rails did for Web deve
134.
by djacobs 15y ago
I'm glad to see this project is coming back. I'm in the middle of writing a Stats library for Ruby[0]. Maybe we can join forces? [0] https://github.com/davejacobs/stats
135.
by djacobs 15y ago
s/git/dig/
136.
by djacobs 15y ago
I'm increasingly not a fan of OOP. If I wrote this article again, one of the things that would change is this sentence.
137.
by djacobs 15y ago
I think if you read the followup article, you'll see it's not flame bait. I'm legitimately trying to foster a discussion here.
138.
by djacobs 15y ago
I wrote this article almost a year ago as a tribute to my favorite language at the time. (That title now belongs to Clojure.) It feels like if you want to do scientific computing in Ruby, you're met with obstacles at every turn, but with Py
139.
by djacobs 15y ago
I did, sorry that messed up the HN dupe filter. I git three-letter domains much more than ones inspired by sentences :)
140.
by djacobs 15y ago
A very good point, and I don't disagree with you. I used RPGEditor and GameEditor when I was a kid and couldn't figure out how to use plain C++ to build a game. The authors of this software have done a really amazing job, that's undeniable.
141.
by djacobs 15y ago
I bought the iPad 2 the day it came out and was thrilled to use it for about two months. But over the last four, I've realized: the reason I keep coming back to computers is that I enjoy computers. Learning more about their internals, harne
142.
by djacobs 15y ago
I agree. No correction would've been necessary if the article had been titled "Don't drink sea water (supported by scientifically inaccurate, but fancy-sounding facts)".
143.
by djacobs 15y ago
Wait, but that's not true. It has a full-fledged class definition, instantiation, and method call.
144.
by djacobs 15y ago
The next language on my "Languages to learn" list is Haskell. I'm a big Clojure & Lisp fan, and Haskell seems like it would be an amazing study in contrast with the Lisp family I'm thrilled by. However, this makes me cringe a little:
145.
by djacobs 15y ago
The internal Google+ network is huge and bustling. My Google friends who use it say that comparatively, the public version is very dead.
146.
by djacobs 15y ago
Well said. After four years of gearing up to go to medical school, I dropped that goal and went into software engineering. I wrote about this choice pretty extensively, as it was not an excruciating decision [0]. In spite of how much I real
147.
by djacobs 15y ago
I've been eyeing Seaside for a year or so but have never found a really compelling reason to take the plunge. It would've been nice for the article to give pros and cons of both, instead of simply pointing out that it exists and what it's w
148.
by djacobs 15y ago
I switched from a Dell laptop to a PowerBook G4 in 2005 as I was going off to college. I remember very clearly the initial confusion I had dealing with the radically different file setup ("What, you mean I have to distribute my Jar files in
149.
by djacobs 15y ago
So I'm not the only pre-med who's ever read books on Lisp? Awesome, for a while I thought I was alone.
150.
by djacobs 15y ago
I don't see how most of the changes help the end user. I only see how it simplifies and constrains the user interface. Those two metrics are orthogonal.

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