gchpaco

43 ms·

361.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Go is significantly more strategic and it is possible to do well at the amateur level with middling tactical skills but a good strategic sense (the best, of course, are excellent at both). One of the most important lessons that I have the
362.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Once I was writing a simulator for a reversible CPU, and the best documentation available was the man's PhD and Master's dissertations. When I told my instructor about it, he said "geez, I hope nobody ever has to read my thesis" which I
363.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Oh gawd, not the Martingale again. (do not do this. The modern expression is "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay liquid") At least arbitrage across bookies is reasonably safe. And I like the "marriage problem" c
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I was regarded as some strange kind of mutant because I not only kept academic papers in version control, I also had a single global BibTeX database that all my papers referred to. It was really, really nice but so not the done thing in th
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by gchpaco 17y ago
This sort of tree animation is a powerful way of exploring structured data like this--I've used it on call graphs and seen it used for social network data and RDF before. Remarkably smooth animation here.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
That depends entirely on how they do it. If they're careless and let it oxidize it'll be "layered rust". If they do it properly you basically weld the powder into the shape you want, and you can start with most any kind of steel you want.
367.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Curly braces and then parens is a GCC extension. If you're going to do complicated macrology, GCC is the way to go because of typeof and a bunch of related extensions designed to make macro use work. But it's still a staggering amount of
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Having owned a bunch of older and newer Ikea stuff, the real problem IMHO is Ikea knockoffs. If you're willing to buy actual wood, Ikea sells it and it works fine--it's not especially decorative but it is at least decent at being tables/be
369.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Having an implicit timezone for the current position--as iCal does, say, while still allowing you to create events in other timezones--is a UI issue, and not necessarily a bad idea. But storing or ever even computing with "times" without a
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The way the Java annotations are defined, it is almost always necessary to understand all annotations before modifying the code. It doesn't have to be this way, but the annotation processor has sufficient power to force it to be this way i
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I had a wrist scare a couple of years ago, which made me take the prospect of Dvorak seriously. It has helped, I think, although I changed too many variables to be sure.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There's a great deal of extra momentum being added through the engine and water pump that you're not accounting for.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Since fabricate makes Python, a full language available, it's not that there's things that cannot be expressed, it's really about ease. So I'll tell you about something I did when I was a grad student. I was using an up to date TeX install
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by gchpaco 17y ago
R is a superb prototyping language for statistical work, but making it work right for batch work is unnecessarily difficult IMHO. Still, an immensely useful tool.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The central problem with these sorts of "make replacements" is they miss out on the whole thing that makes make useful. I care not a whit about implicit rules, and I would welcome a real language over GNU make's function apparatus (filenam
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by gchpaco 17y ago
So I'm guessing you mail hard drives around, rather than use the net 'cause somebody might have cracked sshd or OpenSSL? Wait, you don't? Gee.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Diamonds are superb materials and are used every day in industrial processes all over the world. None of these are gem quality nor does anybody give a rat's arse about their diamond paste or diamond cutting wheel being pretty.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There are effectively no FOSS alternatives. A few groups have toyed with making their own C compiler; some in the BSDs were toying with I think lcc, and I've seen reference to tcc. The thing of it is GCC is very mature and quite good at w
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There's a lot of promise here; I wish there was a "this is why I did it and this is what place it fills in the ecosystem" page somewhere. It'll be interesting to see how this develops.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Custom woodworking, or possibly photography. But modern photography is so computer-based in some ways I doubt it qualifies.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There's an argument in there somewhere, behind the repetition of anecdotes, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. The idea that somehow people developing on laptops is bad because now the server has to support that development envi
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by gchpaco 17y ago
This just shifts the burden; GMail now becomes a spam reflector to an arbitrary target of your choosing. I understand the goal but the implementation is a problem.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
It was a train wreck beforehand. It has since gotten even worse. The remarks I made at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598805 still stand, IMHO; basically due to backwards compatibility concerns, there are almost always at least thr
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I don't expect this to make C++0x any less of a train wreck--it would take an act of God to do that at this point--but it's interesting to note that most standards committees see their role as codification of existing practice, whereas C++0
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I have more academic qualifications than you can shake a medium sized stick at, and was largely self taught and continue to be largely self taught. My experience as a TA was that a disturbing number of my students had enormous entitlement
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by gchpaco 17y ago
In fact due to an odd lacuna in the law inherited from English common law, if someone in the business of selling cars (say, a used car dealer) sells one to you, that car cannot be repossessed (although the used car dealer is liable for th
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There is no argument here. There is a lot of "but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" and "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book". Never mi
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by gchpaco 17y ago
.. Although depending on the particle theory you subscribe to, it may only be unidirectional to us (positrons being electrons moving backwards in time, etc.)
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Conceded that technically OpenSSL is much better off than BIND ever was. When I was a lay-sysadmin many years ago, I ran BIND because what else was there? but always in the back of my head was the possibility that someone found Yet Another
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by gchpaco 17y ago
djb's little creation needs more cooking, that much is for certain. Brand new all but unreviewed ECDH, stream and hash functions. The hash isn't even in the SHA-2 competition. It doesn't matter who djb thinks he is, using this library in

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