gchpaco

25 ms·

181.
by gchpaco 15y ago
You think emacs is one of the worst things to happen to computer science? Thus putting it in the same rhetorical category as patents, multithreading, mutable data, garbage collection, open source, closed source, closed journals, government
182.
by gchpaco 15y ago
That is true, but the teeth in a Japanese crosscut saw are very delicate and fiddly and there's lots of room to screw them up if you don't care about the product. And yet (with some exceptions) they actually seem to come sharp from the fac
183.
by gchpaco 15y ago
And that's actually perfectly normal even back in period when things were handmade; "gents'" tools tended to be flashy and functional but not really intended to be used , per se. Your ivory handled plow plane (think the guy in the upper r
184.
by gchpaco 15y ago
For reasons I don't understand entirely, Japanese pull saws never experienced the massive decline in quality all Stanley products (and those of their competitors) experienced after WWII. As a result even inexpensive pull saws tend to be at
185.
by gchpaco 15y ago
I don't know chef's knives from Adam, but I'll counter that with some stuff I do know about, which is hand tool woodworking. TL;DR: I buy handmade saws because they are demonstrably superior. Time was you could not buy a quality Western s
186.
by gchpaco 15y ago
The stock JVM is exceptionally bizarre about this because of the insane decision to pad all fields to memory boundaries (which means on a 32 bit machine a class with 10 individual bit fields consumes 40 bytes of memory instead of something
187.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Starcraft actually makes the fundamentals deliberately difficult, note, which is one of the reasons it is so competitive but also one of the reasons it has such a steep learning curve. If you're a Zerg in SC2 you must program yourself ever
188.
by gchpaco 15y ago
For a 1920s document, I would actually expect it to be (badly) typewritten, but perhaps I'm injecting too much of modern myth of the times. Certainly cursive handwriting was considered to be vital at the time. As for medieval, you can actu
189.
Who killed videogames? (a ghost story)(insertcredit.com)
15 points by gchpaco 15y ago|1 comments
190.
Google supporting searching over SSL now (in beta)(google.com)
1 points by gchpaco 15y ago|0 comments
191.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Chef is a nice idea written by people who don't understand Unix. (evidence? check out popen in their source, try to figure out why subprocesses occasionally get SIGPIPE, and then grep to see where it's used and count the file handle leaks
192.
by gchpaco 15y ago
I did a bunch of research for my PhD thesis on this, and came to the conclusion that "the probability of concurrency errors is proportional to the square of the amount of shared state". Threads share state by default, which brings signific
193.
by gchpaco 15y ago
For Hacker News, the far more important thing to point out is that no matter what block cipher you use, you are never going to get burnt by research like this, but you are almost certain to be completely boned by implementation errors. Wi
194.
by gchpaco 15y ago
It has a compose key already in Option; this is more discoverable. (or can you figure out how to write ē easily on a US keyboard?)
195.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Not, as it happens, on plan 9 systems where the kernel marks that area as not accessible. This could fail, conceivably, but then you're in much deeper stuff.
196.
by gchpaco 15y ago
You're right to be skeptical about the value of skip lists in comparison to other O(log n) type data structures like balanced trees and the like. Skip lists trade ease of implementation for probabilistic bounds, and have some minor cache ad
197.
by gchpaco 15y ago
DF is the deepest game (really, toy, like SimCity; there's only one end state within the game and that's getting wiped out, and most of the rest of the game is very open ended) I have ever played which pairs it with a terrible interface and
198.
by gchpaco 15y ago
C++11 has made things more complicated, not less. All these criticisms are still valid and can be extended with some added new stupidities (for example needing to explicitly specify capture in lambdas, a new and entirely unique way to shoo
199.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Even if it is you still have to cons up all those arguments whereas reduce doesn't.
200.
by gchpaco 15y ago
If you want to do something simple it takes a 60 line pom.xml to express it. If you want to do something a little trickier it takes another 60 lines and three hours minimum of poking around at inadequately written docs. If you want to do
201.
by gchpaco 15y ago
Racket is an exceedingly mature and stable implementation, with vast library support, of a language I have learned I don't really like (after writing my PhD dissertation program in it). It is still Lisp and that makes it miles ahead of con
202.
by gchpaco 15y ago
I have seen that happen before, but only when the domain was inherently complex. An example I actually committed; for a variety of reasons I needed a continuation driven LL(1) parser for my PhD thesis, and I needed it to be in Java. I wro
203.
by gchpaco 16y ago
APL is actually not inherently so bad, because at least the operators have some vague relationship to what they're doing and are all distinct. I can't read J at all because in attempting to embed the APL operator space in ASCII they went i
204.
by gchpaco 16y ago
TeX, one of my baselines for good typographical rules, does not do a double space after sentences, but neither does it do a single space; it's more like a space and a half (unless you turn French spacing on, in which case it is just a singl
205.
by gchpaco 16y ago
I'm so much an RPN geek that I have an HP 41CX emulator for my phone, because my physical calculator isn't everywhere. (It's actually an excellent emulator, but of course there's no tactile feel to be had from the keys, which I miss a lot)
206.
by gchpaco 16y ago
You can measure the distance by modulating the laser and checking how time shifted the reflection is. The moon is pretty close for light but it's measurable.
207.
by gchpaco 16y ago
I periodically run this for a while and try really hard to like it. Plan 9 is a true work of genius in some ways but is really insular, and I just don't like acme (ironic, because I was a big wily fan about ten years back). Plan 9 in gene
208.
by gchpaco 16y ago
MzScheme/Racket's continuations are of the "copy the C stack" variety, or were last time I checked. They are in no way efficient; it would probably be better to CPS transform your own code than try to use MzScheme/Racket's continuations di
209.
by gchpaco 16y ago
How can you claim to have done due diligence investing in a company that is notoriously reticent about any and all financial details?
210.
by gchpaco 16y ago
That's where the "from hell" part comes in.

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