gcv

59 ms·

571.
by gcv 17y ago
As far as testing goes, I have a simple approach. If I just wrote some code and had to poke at it in a REPL with some different inputs to check if it works, then I should take whatever I did and turn it into a test. With a good testing fram
572.
by gcv 17y ago
Regarding newlines: in Emacs 23, I recommend visual-line-mode over auto-fill-mode, unless you actually need hard line breaks. For when you do want hard newlines, (setq-default fill-column 80). I never understood why the default is 72; it ma
573.
by gcv 17y ago
What do you dislike about Berkeley DB? I've been using it for a little while for a pet project, and it seems decent. I'd like it to support range-based join cursors, but that's not a major complaint. Granted, I haven't yet had to deal with
574.
by gcv 17y ago
One curious difference between the author's approach and learning theory: he just made students ask questions, whereas learning theory wants students to actively answer them. I once had a psychology class where the professor, who worked on
575.
by gcv 17y ago
It depends. How much do you need the project done? How quickly? If you will be dead in the market if you don't ship in six weeks, hire A. Let him work the way you know will make him productive, because your product depends on it. If being f
576.
by gcv 17y ago
I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out p
577.
by gcv 17y ago
Very slick. I wonder if this upcoming release adds proper support for C++ templates. As is, I don't know of anything other than Visual Studio which makes debugging STL or Boost-heavy C++ code a reasonable task.
578.
by gcv 17y ago
[Golden orb spider silk is] five to six times stronger than steel by weight... Insanely cool.
579.
Making cloth from spider silk(nytimes.com)
45 points by gcv 17y ago|16 comments
580.
by gcv 17y ago
Yes, it is customary in Russian writing to write century numbers in Roman numerals. The Russian language is going through a significant anglicization phase right now, though, so this will probably change.
581.
by gcv 17y ago
Not bad, except it does the Gmail "delete" = "archive" thing. Any idea how to make "delete" = "delete"?
582.
by gcv 17y ago
I had fairly bad experiences with pair programming. None of the physical reasons the author brought up applied: it was in a decent, private room, with decent hardware. The social problems did not apply: it was with cool, friendly people. It
583.
by gcv 17y ago
Could the trees have been infected by Dutch Elm Disease? I've regrettably seen many old trees cut down from it, and you can't see much damage until it has progressed significantly. Granted, I've never seen it affect an entire street full of
584.
by gcv 17y ago
There aren't any "corner cases" or "gotchas" in these examples. I even fed the examples to javac to confirm my answers. Just to see if something changes, I then translated the examples to Python, and found that Python does exactly the same
585.
by gcv 17y ago
...we’ll finally be leaving our shared file system behind. We’ve far exceeded the normal IO tolerances of GFS... Which GFS? Red Hat Global File System ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_File_System )? GlusterFS ( http://www.gluster.com
586.
by gcv 17y ago
I like this idea quite a bit. No application server means less maintenance and less administrative overhead. Of course, it also means that the newly-empowered database has to scale out just as easily as an application server. For starters,
587.
by gcv 17y ago
Read Mill, for an introduction to the basics of consequentialism. Read Kant, for an introduction to the basics of deontology. Read up some more recent work which tries to fix the problems of both. I don't off-hand remember anyone recent who
588.
by gcv 17y ago
"At the present time, tarsnap does not support Windows... and does not have a graphical user interface." ... "[Tarsnap] attained profitability in February 2009." This is really inspiring. Congratulations. Goes to show that if you make s
589.
by gcv 17y ago
The general point of the article rings true with me. An early prototype helps pinpoint the hotspots of complexity, which were probably not at all obvious in the design stage. I have run into this with my programming. I tend to start out wit
590.
by gcv 17y ago
ghc is one of a handful of MacPorts which does not work with Snow Leopard, although this should be fixed soon (32-bit only, though): http://trac.macports.org/ticket/20132
591.
by gcv 17y ago
I read in several blog posts that Cassandra has its share of data-corrupting bugs. http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2009/07/06/up-and-runnin... mentioned that even Facebook does not use it as a system of record. Wonder how Digg deals w
592.
by gcv 17y ago
That was worth clicking through just to learn about Homebrew ( http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew ). Not sure I'll be leaving MacPorts for it, but it's good to know alternatives exist (and no, fink doesn't count).
593.
by gcv 17y ago
1. Check out z: http://github.com/rupa/z . It's a pretty nice productivity booster for flipping between different directories. It's quite easy to port to zsh, also. 2. Learn to use the editor modes on your shell. If you use Emacs mode in z
594.
by gcv 17y ago
In zsh, you (1) don't need to write a function, and (2) you don't need to type "cd" to switch directories. setopt auto_cd alias -g ...='../..' alias -g ....='../../..' alias -g .....='../../../..' alias -g ......='../../../../.
595.
by gcv 17y ago
Yes, that's an explicit move. That's what I mean by informing the VCS that you renamed a file. It amounts to holding the VCS's hand and means that even trivial code rearrangements require considerable extra care, or explicit support for tha
596.
by gcv 17y ago
Thanks for posting this. Fossil has many good ideas. Since I rather like learning about source control systems, I took this one for a spin. It's definitely pretty fast, although I didn't stress-test it. It noticed that I have GPG set up, an
597.
by gcv 17y ago
Most papers bend over backwards to avoid bias in pure news coverage. The resulting he-said she-said style of reporting is rather comical, and sometimes gives credence to complete nonsense. "A house in the XYZ section of Some Town burned dow
598.
by gcv 17y ago
We should most certainly expect a newspaper to deliver well-researched, unbiased reporting. When a newspaper is shown to have cheated or made a mistake, we should stop reading it or receive a full explanation and apology. The Times is reaso
599.
by gcv 17y ago
Generic code with all my objects cleaning up after themselves. Are you sure they really cleaned up after themselves, and you don't have a subtle memory leak waiting to happen because of some unnoticed and rare and disastrous problem with
600.
by gcv 17y ago
"Pravus" means crooked, faulty, or bad. I'm pretty sure "pravis" is the correct declension to match "gustibus" (a declension "gustus"), but my Latin has unfortunately atrophied substantially from lack of use. So basically, I changed the pro

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