etal

30 ms·

241.
by etal 18y ago
Given where the NSF's funding is actually going, I chalk these statements up to a backlash against the trend of more people doing small amounts of programming as part of their "real" work. Scientists tend to view programming as more of a
242.
by etal 18y ago
Hey, it's still faster than a handful of dice and a blank notebook. Sometimes the point of a course's first assignment is to show students how wrong their preconceptions are.
243.
by etal 18y ago
Depends on the field -- I think Matlab is still a little more popular, especially among engineers, but SciPy (or just plain NumPy) is good for biologists. There's also a need for glue code and other non-numerical scripting. For example, PyM
244.
by etal 18y ago
Yep, my school recently started teaching Python as the intro programming language -- for the bioinformatics program, at least. C, C++ and Fortran have similar enough characteristics and capabilities for scientific work that once a researche
245.
by etal 18y ago
Dan Weinreb explains what this list is about further down in the comments: What I mean is, my friends and co-workers come up to me and say, oh, Dan, you’ve just GOT to learn about XXX! I sigh and add it to the list; if this guy said it’s c
246.
Software Technologies that I MUST Learn(danweinreb.org)
2 points by etal 18y ago|1 comments
247.
by etal 18y ago
For vim, I meant. I use gvim on Gnome, where switching Ctrl and Caps is trivial. Dunno about TextMate's movements -- I assumed C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b etc. worked there, so with a conveniently placed Ctrl key you could still navigate without the
248.
by etal 18y ago
Nothing makes me more miserable than having to scrunch up my hand to hit the Alt key. I can deal with stretching out my hands and using the pinky -- most musical instruments don't baby the pinky, and saxophone makes it do extra work, for ex
249.
by etal 18y ago
1. Swap Ctrl and CapsLock (using whatever method) 2. Use Ctrl-[ instead of Esc or Ctrl-C Now your hands can stay in perfect home-row position nearly all of the time.
250.
by etal 18y ago
Uh huh. This must be the same reason MIT struggles so mightily to get decent applicants: http://mit.edu/ http://www.phoenix.edu/
251.
by etal 18y ago
I introduced Bazaar at my new research lab, with good results. Our requirements were: 1. They're scientists who need to do some programming, rather than programmers who need to do some science, so the command line is acceptable but confusio
252.
by etal 18y ago
Yes, git does have that effect at first... I found the bzr documentation to be a great resource for understanding how DVCS (and even centralized VCS) systems are supposed to work. http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/en/user-guide/index.html
253.
by etal 18y ago
There are some great books for Scheme in particular. Many of them are geared toward the art of programming itself, rather than how to do X in Y days, which frees up the curriculum for exploring things like recursive forms that a student in
254.
by etal 18y ago
Qi uses /. as lambda; that's pretty close. I like Haskell's decisions as well. There's also the literate programming route: enter the code as ASCII, then run it through a processor to generate a prettier document for reading.
255.
by etal 18y ago
All the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in. Actually, I do prefer ASCII for anything that isn't already a convention in math -- parens to group expressions, curly braces for sets, etc.
256.
by etal 18y ago
Here's the rundown: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntrepidIbex/TechnicalOverview Not mentioned there: Finally, the themes are changing. The "New Human" look resembles the screenshot in the GIMP article currently on the front page: http://howto
257.
by etal 18y ago
The cheapest energy source right now is coal, even if carbon-offset costs are factored in. So it would be cheaper to do the electric car thing right now with the existing power sources than with the nuclear option -- but we haven't done tha
258.
by etal 18y ago
It's interesting how the PLT team dealt with this teaching problem in "How to Design Programs". The first part basically shows how to write simple Java-like code with Scheme syntax, using symbols and fixed records, and including tests as pa
259.
by etal 18y ago
That was actually true back in the early 1990s, when the Windows-Android comparison was valid.
260.
by etal 18y ago
DNA is trillions of monkeys typing on typewriters for 4.5 billion years and throwing away every page that doesn't contain any readable words. And sometimes a page happens to turn into another monkey, typewriter or page. Actually, I can't th
261.
by etal 18y ago
Easier said than done, as I'm sure Andres Yates knows. Biologists have DNA libraries, they can mark expressed genes for debugging, they can link and run this object code (with varying results) -- but there's no general compiler to generate
262.
by etal 18y ago
Indeed. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
263.
by etal 18y ago
There was a professor who tried to get around this a couple years ago by defining a special value called "nullity." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Anderson_%28computer_scie...
264.
by etal 18y ago
Picturing the graphs of y = 1/x and y = cx/x worked for me. You can make the "reasonable" value at x=0 be Inf, -Inf, or anything in between.
265.
by etal 18y ago
But then, as far as business is concerned, hasn't it already been shown that the cool new technology was a replacement for cell phones? Assuming CoolTech isn't subsequently found to cause the sudden onset of rickets in its users (or whateve
266.
by etal 18y ago
A worthy aim, but the whole idea of the "law" is Norvig's implied definition of what market penetration means. If 75% of the people in the world have never owned a smartphone, then doubling the number of smartphone owners is a big accomplis
267.
by etal 18y ago
The article's not that long! Here's the second half: To be clear, it all depends on what you count. If you're counting units sold, you can double your count by selling everyone 1 unit, then 2, then 4, etc. (In Finland I understand that cel
268.
I want a struct linker(yosefk.com)
4 points by etal 18y ago|0 comments
269.
by etal 18y ago
People have devoted careers to finding out which animals can vomit. A fellow named Borison has numerous entries on the final table -- assuming it's the same person, this bright spark hit the scene in 1953 with the finding that crab-eating
270.
by etal 18y ago
His info page says he's living in Toronto, Canada, and calls Athelone, Ireland his hometown. So technically, Canarish.

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