jcl

237 ms·

1951.
by jcl 19y ago
I can't seem to find a description of what the text or spreadsheet tasks were that were used to evaluate the efficiency of the users. Judging from the screenshots in the PDF linked to the story, though, they significantly involved moving t
1952.
by jcl 19y ago
It's a pity there isn't a automated way to fix this -- a Netflix-like system that sorts articles by how highly they are rated by other users who rate articles like you do.
1953.
by jcl 19y ago
Free, open-source screen capture program for Windows: http://camstudio.org/ I've used a suspiciously similar-looking program called DemoStudio in the past and I found it fairly easy to use.
1954.
by jcl 19y ago
You can figure this out yourself by comparing C# to ruby I was hoping for more specific examples, as I gathered the parent was. It's still not clear to me what "more traditional programming skills" means, or why it's a good thing, or why
1955.
by jcl 19y ago
"What static type systems force you to do is talk about the data flow of your code. This isn’t so that humans can understand it (though with some discipline it’s possible to create readable code this way), but so that the compiler and runti
1956.
by jcl 19y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Boo is decidedly more Pythonic than converge: you can write more programs that run in both Boo and Python than you can for converge and Python. Boo is pretty much a statically, implicitly typed Python. I wi
1957.
by jcl 19y ago
make things that artists like :) For what it's worth, I think this is what PG tried to do... Viaweb started out as a service to allow art galleries to get on the web: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
1958.
by jcl 19y ago
"Code is also always data! Does it mean that data is also always code? As crazy as this sounds this very well might be the case." My programming languages professor (a Scheme fanatic) expressed a similar sentiment. I recall, however, someo
1959.
by jcl 19y ago
It's also useful knowledge for spammers. If they have a list of people who are interested in topic X, then they can craft an e-mail with a subject and body that is relevant enough to topic X that the people will be likely to click on a lin
1960.
by jcl 19y ago
Nice. I notice that unlike most algorithms I've read, this one requires a credit card number as an input. :)
1961.
by jcl 19y ago
Ah, I wasn't sure what you meant. I agree that there aren't too many use cases. Personally, I think some of the existing computational geometry libraries could be useful, but I am thinking of a niche set of applications. More useful, per
1962.
by jcl 19y ago
I assume you mean it's pointless because C++ sacrifices ease-of-coding for performance, but when C++ is compiled to bytecode it won't be appreciably faster than other languages. While it would be odd for someone to write new C++ code solely
1963.
by jcl 19y ago
No kidding. Consider that as of April 2005, a Flex license had a $29,000 price tag (I haven't been able to find more recent numbers): http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/12200 Then, two years later, they announced that
1964.
by jcl 19y ago
Would be interesting to see what's the proportion of users using ad blockers. I agree. I'd further guess that there is a strong correlation between the likelihood of a person running an ad blocker and the likelihood of a person ignoring
1965.
by jcl 19y ago
Some arguments I have seen for dynamic typing: - Code is shorter and potentially easier to read. - While static typing can identify some bugs at compile time, these are usually the easiest bugs to find regardless of the language you use. T
1966.
by jcl 19y ago
I think it's just these two articles so far (considering the link in the opening line of the article). Which is probably a good thing, since they'd all be pretty similar: "Don't learn [interpreted language X]. It has [features A, B, and C
1967.
by jcl 19y ago
I've heard this idea from multiple places, so I expect it's one of those ideas that is easy to think of but difficult to implement. A similar idea was expressed in the plot of The Music Man, where children are taught to play instruments by
1968.
by jcl 19y ago
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "epic" originally meant "story or poem", which later became "grand or heroic". On the internet its meaning has shifted to indicate general extremeness -- much like the word "awesome" did in the
1969.
by jcl 19y ago
Another easy way for spammers to game the system: Set up a link with a copy of a legitimate, interesting news from another location (perhaps from a social site with similar interests) and submit it to a social site. Wait a few hours while
1970.
by jcl 19y ago
We've come from E.T. to A.I. -- Super-toys last all summer long. :)
1971.
by jcl 19y ago
That seems like a clever way to get web design clients -- a new definition of "color scheme". :) For other schemes, I recall having fun with Adobe's color scheme generator Flash applet: http://kuler.adobe.com/
1972.
by jcl 19y ago
It could be tricky to get right. For example, someone could censor a political blog from a social site interested in politics by spamming it to sites that are not interested in politics. And, of course, if this kind of filtering gets popul
1973.
by jcl 19y ago
Wikipedia says that while other people worked on it earlier, PG's essay really popularized it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering
1974.
by jcl 19y ago
You are implying there is some relation between the price of Windows and the amount of work that goes into it. Given the size of their war chest, one could argue that they already charge much more than their software costs to produce.
1975.
by jcl 19y ago
Your argument seems to hinge on the assumption that all the islanders know that there are only two eye colors present on the island (along with more subtle errors). The original puzzle says that there are an unknown number of eye colors (wh
1976.
by jcl 19y ago
I am surprised that no one to this point has brought up the Programming Language Shootout. It compares many languages across some simple problems. (I'm not sure whether or not it would allow Arc at this point, since widespread use is a cr