drblast

62 ms·

541.
by drblast 16y ago
I was taught in CS101, as I think just about everyone is, that the & operator means "the address of." So parsing &x + 1 into English becomes: "The address of x plus one." Except that, more explicitly, we should say: "The address of
542.
by drblast 16y ago
But computers aren't confusing; the idea of a block of N bytes memory containing M-byte sized elements is dead-simple, and the same whether it's statically or dynamically allocated. The semantics associated with accessing those elements in
543.
by drblast 16y ago
"Address of" is confusing, and is what confused me as a beginner, because there is no notion of type associated with an address. If (&x) returns "the address of x," you'd be inclined to say that ((&x) + 1) is one byte higher than &#
544.
by drblast 16y ago
I wonder if pointers confuse people because C's syntax for pointers is confusing. The confusing examples always involve arrays, where a statically allocated array's behavior is different from one that's dynamically allocated and not necess
545.
by drblast 16y ago
I remember this phenomenon from high school English class. The teacher would ask an obvious question, and inevitably someone would reflexively provide the non-obvious wrong answer. I assumed the thought process was this: a teacher hardly e
546.
by drblast 16y ago
One of the coolest programs I ever made was a tic-tac-toe with an AI that learned the optimal strategy by playing itself over and over. I wrote that in the process of learning Lisp, which made writing the program easy, and I got to exercis
547.
by drblast 16y ago
I love Chrome because it uses the screen real-estate so efficiently. It's essential on a netbook. The only thing I miss is "/" starting search. There's an extension for it, but it interferes with other things often enough I had to turn it
548.
by drblast 16y ago
Ditto, however I can say that 10.04 was the very first time I've installed Linux where everything worked without tweaking. It's a dream come true.
549.
by drblast 16y ago
Anything that is an instrument of creativity. For me, this includes musical instruments, computers, and conventional building tools. These things are priced all over the map. At the very low end, you get crap that ends up limiting your cr
550.
by drblast 16y ago
I'm not a hash function expert, but I did sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. This is a horrible hash function for a number of reasons. You want your hash function to use every bit of information from the data you're keying on becau
551.
by drblast 16y ago
The survivor bias is the most important point here. Many, many, business books fail on this important misunderstanding. I went to a military school where we had monthly mandatory lectures by inspirational and successful people. In hindsig
552.
by drblast 16y ago
It certainly does need a lot of work before it's ready for prime time. Most of the work has been making sure the basics work and that the design is easily extensible. I started working on it based on this post here: http://news.ycombinat
553.
Javascript vi clone for Google Docs(vianedit.appspot.com)
14 points by drblast 16y ago|2 comments
554.
by drblast 16y ago
For what it's worth, I love the design for the most part, but there are a couple of problems that are bad enough people might reject the whole thing as "too minimal." The content frame in the middle has a scrollbar but no border, which is o
555.
by drblast 16y ago
I can't understand the motivations for this. Several state attorney generals find out there is are people going to a web site, and for all intents and purposes advertising they are going to commit criminal acts. The public is outraged. A r
556.
by drblast 16y ago
I guess so. I'm not really opposed to features; they're cheap and they add value for some people. My beef is that the most common operation (heating something up quickly) should be really simple to do. I thought this was a fundamental ide
557.
by drblast 16y ago
Uggh. I have a microwave that must be designed by the Koreans in this article. If I want to heat something up for thirty seconds, I have to wade through four menus and sub-menus: Express cook (ha ha)-> 30 seconds-> OK-> Start P
558.
by drblast 16y ago
Or coffee and tea mixed. My favorite.
559.
by drblast 16y ago
Viper mode gives you the best of both worlds, although I'm probably considered a heretic in both religions. (setq viper-mode t) (require 'viper) (custom-set-variables '(column-number-mode t) '(inhibit-startup-screen t) '(s
560.
by drblast 16y ago
Programming is hard because it involves a trade-off. Programming isn't really about solving a problem, it's about limiting options until the only ones left are what people want. I spent a few months about a year ago re-writing a massive co
561.
by drblast 16y ago
I can tell you a bit about how I implemented the same system in my editor. It's quite simple if you think of every operation as a function that modifies the document. As you do something, a function that reverses those changes is pushed on
562.
by drblast 16y ago
Yes, it is. That's an extremely old version I wrote as a "let's see if I can do this" project. You can see the newer one by browsing the subversion repository, which unfortunately is broken until I commit the fix tonight. I'm working on i
563.
by drblast 16y ago
Maybe these people are looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong person. If you want to hire me, here's how. I'd love to be part of a startup, but I have a family and a day job that I can't quit easily. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I
564.
by drblast 16y ago
Exactly; people in power, especially in large organizations, are very nearly a self-selecting group. In the military, for example, to make it to the upper levels, you have to make a conscious choice not to retire after 20 years and instead
565.
by drblast 16y ago
Writing medium-sized projects in Javascript, I often look toward the sky and thank the originators of that language that they had the foresight to include closures and first class functions. I use them all over and save a significant amoun
566.
by drblast 16y ago
I'm writing a new text editor and I spent an inordinate amount of time on the undo system. I never realized how many things the choice of undo implementation would affect. But I did come to the conclusion that Emacs' default undo system is
567.
by drblast 16y ago
I've only written a few small programs in Haskell; one was a basic parser. The pattern matching syntax made a lot of things trivial to express that would require switch statements or if/else chains in just about any other language, so I lov
568.
by drblast 16y ago
If you're a new programmer, remember that most programmers aren't trying to figure this out. They're already substantially invested in the language they chose years ago, with a large base of knowledge and already written code. Static vs. d
569.
by drblast 16y ago
Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and B would both lose because nobody would know they exist. So it's not completely inefficient. How much would you pay to not have to look around who knows where for
570.
by drblast 16y ago
Sounds like a good idea, I'll start working on it. Do you have any other ideas for features?

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