jballanc

24 ms·

211.
by jballanc 10y ago
Gah...silly markdown-not-really-markdown formatting. Should have been: "*"
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by jballanc 10y ago
I've found the vertically centered " " to be far superior almost everywhere. Definitely for comments, but even for pointers (yes, I do write a fair bit of C) it becomes clearer that the glyph is part of the type signature, an
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by jballanc 10y ago
I love that they actually included Bigelow's explanation of each decision made. So often (especially in the realm of programming fonts, it seems) decisions on letter forms in new fonts seem to be made "because it looks nice",
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by jballanc 10y ago
I can't speak for the Apple of today, but when I left Apple in 2010 there were more wizened, "gray-beard" programmers working for Apple than at probably all the SOMA startups combined. Of all the things you could accuse Apple
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by jballanc 10y ago
How so? I agree that there's been a lot of over-exaggeration on both sides of the issue. If you listen only to pundits and talking heads, you're almost certainly getting the wrong information. The actual scientists, however, loo
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by jballanc 10y ago
> We were going to see the end of arctic ice Sea Ice Extent Is Near Record Lows--South as Well as North: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/sea-ice-extent... > have a perpetual ozone hole necessit
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by jballanc 10y ago
> I can almost imagine a future "WarEnron" selling the future profits indirectly caused by future wars Pretty sure you just described every fund that's big into Honeywell, General Dynamics, Lockheed, etc. Many of these com
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by jballanc 10y ago
> And in the case of Turkey, I wouldn't call it a developing country using this definition. Yes, off topic, but I could've sworn that "developing" was the term used. Apparently, according to Wikipedia ( https:/
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by jballanc 10y ago
Most do. These days, most building codes are international and places like Turkey (where I lived up until very recently) now have earthquake codes on par with California due to recent experience with a devastating quake ( https://
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by jballanc 10y ago
There's a cost you're missing in your equation. Automobile accidents are a major cause of death, particularly for individuals in their prime productive years (unlike, say, cigarettes which still typically wait until you're
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Julia Enters TIOBE Top 50 Programming Languages(juliacomputing.com)
1 points by jballanc 10y ago|0 comments
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by jballanc 10y ago
My favorite part of his history in business is how the company whose name he eventually adopted for his whole operation (Berkshire Hathaway) was actually one of his self-admitted stupidest acquisitions, one based on vengeance rather than st
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by jballanc 10y ago
Sure, that's true of recent (< 200 yr ago) history, but plumbing's contribution to health and longevity goes all the way back to ancient Rome. (Somewhat ironically, plumbing, from the Latin word for lead, "plumbus", m
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by jballanc 10y ago
Considering that plumbers and janitors have likely, in the entire history of human civilization, done more for health and longevity than doctors and scientists...I'm kind of ok with this analogy.
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by jballanc 10y ago
I knew a woman once who went to law school, but burned out on the law before she passed the bar...so she went to medical school, but burned out on that before she completed her residency. What she eventually realized, though, is that there
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by jballanc 10y ago
SMILES is usable for any molecule (i.e. any compound with covalent bonds; crystals are generally not considered molecules), though it's most common use is for organic molecules. Parens indicate branching, and cycles are conceptually tr
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by jballanc 10y ago
Meh...it's more of a relic of a weird transition point when chemists had the tools to discover complete structures but didn't have the tools to communicate them robustly other than "in words". These days most non-trivial
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by jballanc 10y ago
I see you've never had to deal with IUPAC systemic naming? For example paracetamol's systemic name is N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)-Acetamide. Cholesterol's is 2,15-dimethyl-14-(1,5-dimethylhexyl)tetracyclo[8.7.0.02,7.011,15]heptadec-7
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by jballanc 10y ago
The difference between structural typing and behavioral typing is subtle. In Scala, you're essentially asking the type system to check for the presence of a member function on the object with a specific type signature. Since the functi
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by jballanc 10y ago
Up until now it's been the realm of PL research. The Ptolemy language is one example I know of: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.86.... [PDF] If you're familiar with duck typing, behav
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by jballanc 10y ago
Yes. Module pre-compilation is already possible, and last I heard there is work underway to use the same sort of mechanism to allow for single-executable compilation. The problem, of course, is that Julia and Go are very different beasts, a
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by jballanc 10y ago
The thing about Julia is that it's playing a whole different ballgame than pretty much every other popular language today...it's just that most people don't realize it yet! The work and design that's gone into Julia&#x27
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by jballanc 10y ago
I think there's a general misconception that Julia is a DS/scientific programming focused language. It just so happens that these are areas where its advantages are most apparent, and give the biggest early wins. Given enough time
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by jballanc 10y ago
TIOBE is much more about general computing/IT, evidenced by the relatively high ranking of things like COBOL and Transact-SQL. RedMonk, in contrast, seems more focused on pure programing (or, you might even say, the "hacker"
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by jballanc 10y ago
Hmm...I wish they had taken a bit more time to dig into the situation with Julia than simply to note it moved from position 51 to 52 on the ranking (is that even a significant shift?). Having just come from giving a presentation at this yea
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by jballanc 10y ago
Saw "OS X", "Lua", and "automation" and immediately assumed Steven Degutis was behind this...lo-and-behold: https://github.com/Hammerspoon/hammerspoon/blob/master/CREDI... A
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by jballanc 10y ago
Agree completely, especially since it's not always readily obvious which airports are better than others if you're not already familiar with them. For example, in Chicago O'Hare is much larger and busier than Midway, but O&#x
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by jballanc 10y ago
Do you fly primarily in the US? Because I have noticed that most US airlines seem to be in a race to the bottom, but this is not the trend worldwide. I fly both Lufthansa and Turkish relatively frequently and everything about the experience
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by jballanc 10y ago
Unfortunately I'm woefully behind on blogging, and there's a number of programming topics that are higher on the list than anything like that. In short, though, Turkey is a great place with friendly people, breathtakingly-amazing
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by jballanc 10y ago
One additional reason that I've observed to add to the list: * Declining dominance of the Microsoft/Oracle hegemony in secondary markets During the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were particularly effective at entering emerging ma

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