happy4crazy

21 ms·

61.
by happy4crazy 15y ago
Yes and no. In a vacuum, I think the more you know about CS the better--for instance, if you want to be a "full-stack"[0] programmer, reading a bunch of Rails tutorials won't be enough. Unfortunately, studying CS for three months probably w
62.
by happy4crazy 16y ago
The commenter, Akhil Mathew, finished third in last year's Intel Talent search. He's a freshman at Harvard now. I googled him after the announcement, and when I found his Math Overflow profile, I remember being really stunned--the idea that
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I got mine (monastic.io) from iwantmyname.com, which has been nice to work with so far.
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Show HN: Some fun with recursion, and a little Haskell(monastic.io)
4 points by happy4crazy 16y ago|0 comments
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Ugh. Restrepo is an incredible film. My younger brother is a freshly-minted second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, so I'm very thankful that there are people like Tim in the world who can help people like me see what soldiers go through.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Learning the micro-steps well is like learning an abstraction in a program. Once you learn the abstraction to the point that your understanding of it is unconscious, then your thought processes are lifted to a higher level. This is true un
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
It sounds trivial, but the idea of breaking things down into micro-steps is incredibly useful. I think it's fundamental to effective abstract thinking, and yet most people (including me!) don't consciously think this way. As an example, I w
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I guess I'm not disagreeing with you, but I personally find his style exhilarating. I mean, come on: Dijkstra used to say “beauty is our business”, to which I would add that life is too short, and bright minds too precious, to waste on ugl
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I just have to say, I love Robert Harper's blog. He writes like I imagine Paul Graham would, if he were a slightly pedantic college professor--with crisp sentences that make points, dammit. His book on Standard ML is wonderful: http://www.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
If you enjoy playing around with quaternions, you may also have fun with geometric algebra. Geometric Algebra for Physicists is very clear and gently paced. http://www.amazon.com/Geometric-Algebra-Physicists-Chris-Dor... This one also loo
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
My introductory physics class in college included a problem that investigated the effects of "2d" gravity (a generic attractive force proportional to 1/r instead of 1/r^2) on a point mass in the plane. When the professor mentioned that I co
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I play around with Haskell quite a bit, but not so much ML. Do you know why ML won out at CMU? I'm reading Cousineau's "The Functional Approach to Programming", which is based on ML, and I end up just translating most things into Haskell--t
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Ha, in one of my physics classes the professor actually set pi = 1 :)
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A Universal NoSQL Engine(mgateway.com)
1 points by happy4crazy 16y ago|0 comments
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GlobalsDB: InterSystems' NoSQL entrant(globalsdb.org)
1 points by happy4crazy 16y ago|0 comments
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Yeah, me too--I'm actually thinking about writing my first blog post as a LYAH-level intro to monad transformers :) Here's an article that helped me understand them: http://www.grabmueller.de/martin/www/pub/Transformers.en.htm...
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
LYAH is fantastic. Lots of really beautiful material, and it's choke-on-your-coffee funny.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Likewise. When I first read this, I honestly felt a shiver go down my spine--it was eerie. I was basically the physics major equivalent in college, and now love playing around with Lisp/Haskell/etc.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Alas, I'm not really studying Icelandic at the moment--too busy learning Mandarin :) I went there on vacation last spring and fell completely in love with the language (and the landscape!!), so I would definitely start playing with it again
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
"by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit" Pretty good advice for any challenging task. Also, how cool is it that irish gaelic of all languages would get such a pretty website? I can easily imagine these becoming a series of sites
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Awesome! I've been thinking about how much I miss tutoring, and was grumbling just the other day about how annoying it is to advertise your skills in any reasonable way. Just signed up, so if anyone has kids who need math/science/cs help in
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I'm also a few chapters into The Elements of Computing Systems, and I also think it's excellent so far :) I'm posting my project solutions to my github account, fwiw: http://github.com/happy4crazy/elements_of_computing_systems
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Is Yi still being developed? I've also encountered the fibonacci gap with Haskell, so looking at Yi would be pretty fun, but I was unable to install it via cabal the last time I tried.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Cool, thank you, causes.com looks like it would really useful.
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Ask HN: Best way to raise money for a small charity trip?
1 points by happy4crazy 16y ago|3 comments
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Ticking pomodoro clock and/or Ke$ha on repeat.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Ugh, I can already feel my SAD kicking in :<
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
Haha the croissant story is awesome. I'm amazed that worked.
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I personally really love this, and have actually been thinking about a YC app idea that would complement it really nicely. I will definitely try to spread the word in Boston. Good luck!
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by happy4crazy 16y ago
I've been teaching myself programming over the past six months or so, and I'm very glad that I started with Ruby. The syntax is clean, and I think it's awesome that Ruby's object model is so elegant. I agree that the magic parts are frustra

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