gcv

46 ms·

271.
by gcv 14y ago
To be fair, I think drawing is an exceptionally good example of a learnable skill. Is the same true of music, though? If someone has trouble hearing and distinguishing intervals, can that person learn music? What about ballet, which pushes
272.
by gcv 14y ago
I like the concept quite a bit, but the devil is in the details (as always). A similar idea was attempted by findmefit, with a focus on fitness events and yoga practice, but I think they had a lot of trouble getting traction.
273.
by gcv 14y ago
How about this: charge a subscription fee to perform "destructive" actions on HN. This means posting comments and voting, including upvotes. Perhaps submitting stories can remain free — the paying users will determine the quality of the sub
274.
by gcv 14y ago
Arq backup works great. It does encrypted incremental snapshot backups to your personal S3 account (unlike most services which hold your backups hostage). It has an open-source recovery program. It has a documented format. For local backups
275.
by gcv 14y ago
This is terrific. By the way, if you take just a handful of lessons, you'll probably get further with your playing than you might think. There's way too much "you have to learn music as a kid" mentality out there — adults can pick up the ba
276.
by gcv 14y ago
Also graphics. That said, it's absurd to make a dichotomy between the two. Both are essential. Maybe not at first glance at a simple CRUD app, but both get surprisingly handy once you want a bit more out of it.
277.
by gcv 14y ago
...only in Finnegans Wake. And let's be fair to English professors, many of them don't take that book too seriously. :)
278.
by gcv 14y ago
Interesting! This same problem occurs in calculus as well. Leibniz's notation is pretty offensive, for example: in basic calculus, d/dx is an operator. In differential equations, you suddenly begin treating dx as a separable algebraic term
279.
by gcv 14y ago
Nicely put. I have increasingly come to the view that computer science really is a branch of applied mathematics. My most intellectually rewarding recent work has been on (programming) projects where I get a chance to use some computation
280.
by gcv 14y ago
I was wondering about this as well. Is this a correlation number, and should I translate it as "the best tests give no better than a coin flip of selecting a good candidate"?
281.
by gcv 14y ago
Neat. But I have Emacs configured to use the command key as Meta, so this needs to be configurable in the drills.
282.
by gcv 14y ago
Explain and demonstrate the use of Taylor series. Quite a bit easier than many of the other suggestions below, and will weed out total idiots. Kind of like asking a supposed programmer to explain a "for" loop.
283.
by gcv 14y ago
Reddit as a whole brings immense value in the sheer volume of unusual content. The AMA section varies from banal to fascinating, for example — and the strength of the interesting content far outweighs the easy-to-skip bad. The quality of in
284.
by gcv 14y ago
Well certainly, in a real-world program which runs for long periods analyzing tons of data, JVM startup costs and JIT costs amount to nothing, as they are paid in the first few seconds. But we are talking about short, synthetic benchmarks h
285.
by gcv 14y ago
Sure thing. I made it run for 4000 cycles twice. The first (cold) run took 2831.323 ms, and the warmed-up run took 2571.397 ms. About 10% faster. Judging by the invocation noted at the bottom of http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/progra
286.
by gcv 14y ago
To Clojure-curious people: please ignore this article. It is misinformed. Others on this thread have pointed out that the Alioth benchmark takes startup time into account. Yes, this imposes a startup penalty on Clojure. More importantly, th
287.
by gcv 14y ago
Purely numeric operations in recent Clojure releases are unboxed, meaning primitive arithmetic executes the same way as it does in the JVM. There are several tricks for removing the overhead of dynamic function lookups, so function call ove
288.
by gcv 14y ago
I'm surprised to see a mainstream kernel powering military hardware at all. I'd have expected to see QNX, or something somewhat obscure with hard-realtime features.
289.
by gcv 14y ago
An interesting side note from one of the stories: "some universities with multiple colleges house [English and computer science] in different schools, making double majoring... impossible." These universities demonstrate remarkable short-si
290.
by gcv 14y ago
YMMV. I have bought fully-loaded mid-release-cycle Apple laptops for the last ten years, starting with the Rev. D TiBook. Each lasted for several years of heavy use. At year 3, they started feeling dated, and at year 4, I generally replaced
291.
by gcv 14y ago
REAMDE was a bit long, true, but I had a blast reading it anyway. For one thing, it's really fun — right now — to read a book which accurately portrays up-to-the moment garbage like social media, MMORPGs, and a bit about startup culture. Pl
292.
by gcv 14y ago
Perfect. Thank you so much. Guess I don't know as much about Emacs as I thought. :)
293.
by gcv 14y ago
It's really easy to compile your own binary (if you have Xcode or the new separate compiler from Apple). Grab the source, "./configure --with-ns && make install", and Emacs.app appears in the nextstep/ subdirectory of the source tre
294.
by gcv 14y ago
There's a slightly annoying regression (to Emacs 22, behavior, I believe) in the Mac version. Some Unicode characters (like —, “, and ”) cause the line to expand in height slightly. Does anyone know of a fix?
295.
by gcv 14y ago
I recommend a book called "From Bash to Z Shell" ( http://www.bash2zsh.com/ ). It favors zsh, but teaches tons of bash tricks, too. The files you're describing are just startup files, read by bash as it starts up in various modes. I put my
296.
by gcv 14y ago
I suggest building some muscle in your arms. It's amazing how much strength does to combat the physical horror of sitting at a keyboard all day. Wrist curl, reverse wrist curl, overhead press, bench press, deadlift, pull-up. All these helpe
297.
by gcv 14y ago
Did Adobe fix its horrific installers in the latest versions?
298.
by gcv 15y ago
Curious. How do you manage to pay attention both to a video and to your code at the same time?
299.
by gcv 15y ago
I was thinking more along the lines of proprietary trading. There is no regulatory oversight for risking your own money, and the amounts required to get started are reasonably modest. See, e.g., http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9s9d7/
300.
by gcv 15y ago
TFA doesn't say anything about education and background here. I'm curious about whether these results are reproducible for people who earned their wealth through mostly honest businesses, through inheritance, through various dealings in thi

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