etal

41 ms·

361.
by etal 18y ago
Python seems to have a slightly bigger following in the sciences, at least in my limited experience. That could be pulling salaries up a bit.
362.
by etal 18y ago
There are many processes. Some of them call themselves software development methodologies, some don't. Some step-ones: * Make a list of use cases * Grab a stack of 3x5 cards and start writing nouns on them * Check to see if someone else has
363.
by etal 18y ago
Using PHP's magic_quotes_runtime as an example can support pretty much any argument you want to make about software design choices. How about this: Don't rely on DWIM-style features to actually do what thought you meant. Just write what you
364.
by etal 18y ago
I think that startup is called Ireland.
365.
by etal 18y ago
I don't have sources offhand, but Buffett's been saying this for years. He criticized Bush's tax cuts back in the day, too. I don't see anything wrong with argument, "The government shouldn't be letting me and other billionaires slip throug
366.
by etal 18y ago
This looks like a huge deal, and I'm surprised this isn't already in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. Especially since it's GPL (not clear from sagemath.org, took some digging to confirm) and most of the base packages are in Debian. I did fi
367.
by etal 18y ago
I think Subversion's scalability is a red herring. Subversion is good for decent-size projects with decent-quality developers, a common situation in The Enterprise, but that's not because it scales better than a distributed system. Subversi
368.
by etal 18y ago
The point wasn't that 2 million is a huge number, but that 5.3% is just as huge. The millions are the eye-catching part, but this looks like an odd way of saying a risk-adjusted 5% return is insane, and 10% (the target for a '90s-era portfo
369.
by etal 18y ago
It's not that SVN is particularly bad for merging; it's that bzr and git are so much better at it.
370.
by etal 19y ago
"Dynamic" has to be one of the most misleading terms in casually discussing programming languages. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1562#comment-18623 Not sure whether to throw SCons into the discussion.
371.
by etal 19y ago
I understood it to be something like a protein plaque that forms in the brain. The plaque shows up in cross sections looking like tar -- it's surprising the brain can function at all, having been altered that much. Which makes it all the we
372.
by etal 19y ago
I bet the data structures for this app look pretty much identical to this interface. It looks like the author read Joel Spolsky's "Painless Project Schedules", wrote a GUI to do that, then exposed all of the plumbing to allow endless tinker
373.
by etal 19y ago
So KML is becoming a portable de-facto standard. Three cheers for compatibility.
374.
by etal 19y ago
True. I think it might also be generally possible to pull a mapping function and a filtering function out of any list comprehension or generator expression. That helps with debugging, too, without hurting performance: def crazy_mapping(var)
375.
by etal 19y ago
Py3K goes wild with generators. Basically, everything that used to return a list (e.g. range()) now returns an iterable, and to get a list you just apply the list() constructor to that. It's about lazy evaluation. So these will be equivalen
376.
by etal 19y ago
Here's one I like: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... The index checks three search engines for references to each of 100 programming languages and tracks the number of hits. So, it's a measure of buzz. Popula
377.
by etal 19y ago
This looks a few years old. Interesting how since writing this article, Stevey's flipped on two points: 1) Javascript went from a "language you're stuck with" to the "next big language". 2) Here he has a hunch that, basically, Java is the b
378.
by etal 19y ago
If you're open to different operating systems, and a student, it sounds like you could tolerate a not-so-premium setup if it came to that. I'm guessing you're not really a gamer, and probably not doing extreme graphics or video work. In tha
379.
by etal 19y ago
Flawed, sure, but not useless. Lining up the countries side-by-side isn't very informative, but looking at the generation gaps within a single country can be. For perspective, the title of the study this chart came from is "The Accelerating
380.
by etal 19y ago
Assumption? Sorry, I wasn't aware I made any any assumptions that weren't implicit in the graph. In the U.S. a student will attend a 4-year program after 12 years of school, meaning 16 years of schooling for a "tertiary" degree. That sounds
381.
by etal 19y ago
Looks like Russia, the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and possibly Argentina are the only countries where the youngest generation (25-34) is not the most educated. The U.S.'s education rates have apparently been close to flat for the pa
382.
by etal 19y ago
I read that git was written to intentionally use every trick available in Linux for performance. Mercurial has similar features, but it's much more agreeable to cross-platform work. Mozilla uses it.
383.
by etal 19y ago
A program written in Arc' has the same number of characters and tokens, but the specification of Arc' is slightly larger than that of Arc, so the languages themselves aren't quite equivalent. But, point taken. Power involves succinctness, s