gavinpc

33 ms·

271.
by gavinpc 12y ago
> uglier and unnecessarily more verbose than it needs to be Nice autologism.
272.
by gavinpc 12y ago
I transcribed a part of that talk for another thread, where he mentions the 10KLOC system from Parc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860680
273.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Here is Alan Kay from a talk that was just on HN today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY&t=8m9s The amount of complication can be hundreds of times more than the complexity, maybe thousands of times
274.
by gavinpc 12y ago
The OP is a very good designer. Why does the killer achievement have to be an app?
275.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Is the "flash of unstyled content" really so "dreaded"? I've noticed it regularly on the publish side of the Google Play Store. The chain reaction this sets off in my head is about 100 FUOC's long. And it goes
276.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Totally agreed. I'd love to see this in Clojure. I will stop using XSLT as soon as there is a better way to... transform XML. It is a pure functional language you can use to make web pages, yet it is really automata non grata , if y
277.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Can't quite tell if this is a joke, but here's a related "story about a bug" from Doug Crockford [0]: I made a bug once, and I need to tell you about it. So, in 2001, I wrote a reference library for JSON, in J
278.
by gavinpc 12y ago
TL;DR, stack frame all the things. I'm joking (kind of), but I was reminded of this talk about implementing TeX in Clojure [0], in which you are shown the pains Don Knuth took to avoid subroutines calls, ostensibly for performance reas
279.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Related, from two months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8349721
280.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Ha! "Exploit Compiler Name Length Limits" I worked for many years on a FoxPro application with a 10-character limit. The first version of the program was written under a two character limit. This never bothered my boss, who w
281.
by gavinpc 12y ago
I prefer to call this "material modeling," because before you put a pixel on the screen, you have to ask yourself how all the components fit together in the state machine that you are building. The analogy to the physical world br
282.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Can someone explain how TCO is a feature of a language? Does it change the syntax or grammar in any way? Isn't it an implementation detail that is invisible to the programmer? What would stop an existing javascript engine from rewri
283.
by gavinpc 12y ago
I find the name "reduce" unfortunate, especially since the classic example, (defn sum [xs] (reduce + xs 0)) (or whatever) only reinforces the naive assumption that it makes the thing smaller . It was only after playing
284.
by gavinpc 12y ago
If this web site is any indication of what they mean by "open"... I don't think we agree on what that word means.
285.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Is that image for real?
286.
by gavinpc 12y ago
I evacuated from (my hometown) New Orleans just prior to hurricane Katrina, leaving a startup that hadn't paid me for months. I used freelancer.com (then getafreelancer.com) for about a year to get started on my own (in Oklahoma, long
287.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Nerd sniping: how many books are in the library of babel? Here's a PDF: http://www.cultureofdoubt.net/download/docs_cod/library%20of... Wikipedia has calculations, if you want to cheat: http://en.w
288.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8144212 (Except that this links directly to the "hello" page, which is really cool.)
289.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Because "just work" are the words I associate with IE. No, really, I swear. (No, really, I swear . JUST WORK!) Developing for other browsers is, well, developing; getting it to "just work" in IE is, well, "just
290.
by gavinpc 12y ago
This is a longstanding Blogger bug that happens when cookies are blocked. They haven't fixed it because you and I are the only people on the planet who whitelist cookies.
291.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Writing is the best and hardest way to think. "Drop by drop," as I've heard say. I love the binder practice. I got a printer about a month ago, printed a bunch of files (notes, incomplete songs, etc), deleted them, then r
292.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Bill Gates is still alive. I've heard it said—and I agree—that he'll be remembered not for Microsoft, but for his philanthropy, particularly his foundation's work aimed at the worldwide eradication of infectious diseases. M
293.
by gavinpc 12y ago
> The America Invents Act changed the law to allow the public to submit examples of prior art while a patent application is being examined. And that’s why the USPTO asked us to set up Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site where software dev
294.
by gavinpc 12y ago
In this radio piece about the Harlem Children's Zone, they reference a study that connects the sheer volume of words a child is exposed to with success later in life [0]. It may just be that reading is one way to increase the number of
295.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Like others, I am doubtful that this is the best way to go about it. But to answer your question, the main area where I've found Project Gutenberg's epubs could be improved is in their navigation outline (the toc.ncx file). For e
296.
by gavinpc 12y ago
(As an aside, I sometimes feel the same way about node.js, where I've seen "node.js is awesome" listed among a project's "features." Nothing against it, I just don't get the obsession.) I appreciate this
297.
by gavinpc 12y ago
Doesn't work if cookies are blocked. Well, it is a "white board," anyway.
298.
by gavinpc 12y ago
I remember getting the Borland C compiler as a ten or eleven year old and thinking, twenty megabytes! What in the world could they need twenty megabytes for? That was like, my entire hard drive. N.B. you have a typo Z:/> mou
299.
by gavinpc 12y ago
As other posts have stated, CSS variables are not the same thing as preprocessor variables. Specifically, they cascade. A preprocessor cannot possibly implement CSS variables with cascading because it the value is resolved against a live
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by gavinpc 12y ago
If you haven't already done so, nothing will further clarify your understanding of politics, literature, religion, and in short human beings, than to free yourself from the unsupportable notion that the human mind has any problem sus

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