etfb

10 ms·

61.
by etfb 13y ago
It's official. I am a total gumby. There are minds out there that are to mine as the entire city of New York is to a house brick and half a bagel. And they're all using APL.
62.
by etfb 13y ago
Clever. You win one internet.
63.
by etfb 13y ago
Yes - to all three customers. Accountants don't like change.
64.
by etfb 13y ago
Can't you? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang )
65.
by etfb 13y ago
Do airline booking agencies still use that weird mainframe-like program for all their bookings? I heard it was impossible to replace because you'd need to switch the old one off, and there's never a moment when there's not th
66.
by etfb 13y ago
You're a brave mammal, taspeotis, risking the wrath of Microsoft's remaining fans with that comment. Never mind; I laughed at least.
67.
by etfb 13y ago
First review of Windows 8 I ever saw described it as a brilliant advertisement for Windows 9. Personally, I can manage it -- knowing about Windows+D, Windows+C and Alt+F4 makes it minimally usable -- but I don't like it.
68.
by etfb 13y ago
I still have a couple of clients using an accounting package I sold the first version 1.0 copy of in 1988. Thank gods for DOSBOX, is all I can say.
69.
by etfb 13y ago
I often considered it, but this was over a decade and a half ago, and I don't recall enough details to make a good story out of it.
70.
by etfb 13y ago
I knew a guy named Steve who ensured job security using Delphi. He wrote this malevolent and semi-sentient framework called The Framework, that managed to combine the ugliness of COBOL with the programmer-friendliness of... well, COBOL, no
71.
by etfb 13y ago
My first thought when I saw that trivial programming question was to write it in Brainfuck. My second thought was to come here to the comments to see how long it would be before the attempts started. My third thought was, if you're all
72.
by etfb 13y ago
I built myself a standing desk and used it for a couple of months. It was my feet, not my back, that convinced me to go back to sitting down. I suppose if I'd invested in some kind of special flooring or even more comfortable shoes, I
73.
by etfb 13y ago
I gave it a week, and there was nothing. I was astonished! It seemed such a logical extension of the idea. I'm ashamed at myself for doing this "demo" instead of just sitting down and writing it myself, but that mortgage won
74.
by etfb 13y ago
C:\> TWENTY48 Loading... Ready. You are in a darkened room. On the floor in front of you are sixteen tiles, arranged in a grid. The tiles are labelled A1, A2, A3, A4, B1 and so on up to D4. There is a tw
75.
by etfb 13y ago
For context: the Computer Language magazine in the 1980s had a tradition of April Fools editions. This is from one of them, before they got too serious, changed their name to Software Development magazine, and blazed the way for Dr Dobbs i
76.
by etfb 13y ago
It's kind of absurdist humour. HN has been full of responses to the rather clever 2048 game lately -- 2048 in HTML5, 2048 in the smallest number of bytes, the 2048 AI solver, 2048 in Brainfuck, 2048 in Latin, etc etc etc. This is amu
77.
by etfb 13y ago
I have two hypotheses, both untestable (and therefore worthless): 1. The distance between stars is too huge, so there has to be a trick to beating it easily, like FTL travel or wormholes, because otherwise it's just crap. 2. If any sup
78.
by etfb 13y ago
(To clarify, Scott is one of my heroes from my days following the ever-evolving C++ standard. Anything that leaves him feeling like a "grunt" is, to a fair approximation, hairier than Chewbacca.)
79.
by etfb 13y ago
Oh dear. Scott Meyers calls himself "just a grunt on the ground". I think we're all doomed.
80.
by etfb 13y ago
And the Oscar for the most cryptic hyperlink on Hacker News goes to... Oh. Another fascinating article about Bitcoin, the internet phenomenon that is to cryptography what Ayn Rand is to philosophy. I'd happily pay for an option to di
81.
by etfb 13y ago
Remember that meme that was going around about social media and donuts? Twitter: I am eating a #donut ... Instagram: Here's a heavily post-processed picture of the donut I just ate ... Facebook: I Like donuts! ... Google+: I am a Googl
82.
by etfb 13y ago
I know I'm a bitch for laughing that an article about Linked In inflating its usage figures is posted on Google+.
83.
by etfb 13y ago
I'm going with my gut here: every sentence I read from this guy makes me hate him more. If I read this article before applying for a job with his company, I would only have myself to blame if he made an offer and I accepted it.
84.
by etfb 13y ago
In Forth, the following are fairly common definitions in the core: 0 CONSTANT 0 1 CONSTANT 1 -1 CONSTANT -1 In an Algolian language like C++ or Java, if the syntax were legal, these would be: const 0 = 0; const 1
85.
by etfb 13y ago
Oh gods, I just realised they'd have to get Eddie Izzard to play him. Who else could be the Izzard of Woz?
86.
by etfb 13y ago
Would be funnier if his name had been Steve Pozniak, but I still give it points for geek cred.
87.
by etfb 13y ago
Hmmm... highest rating comment in ages = pun + eighties reference. Lesson: learned.
88.
by etfb 13y ago
The ideal name for a movie about Steve Wozniak, given how often he's misrepresented in the whole Jobs/Apple story: Woz/Not Woz .
89.
by etfb 13y ago
Only for things with zero value. Why, what worthless things would you inflict on people in the name of tolerance?
90.
by etfb 13y ago
I'm a QWBX - that's the personality type for people who think pseudoscientific bullshit like the MBTI doesn't belong in the boardrooms, factory floors and minds of the human race.

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