jeffcoat

16 ms·

91.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
What do the parameters of some random function have to do with the syntax of a language? A Computer Science professor is unusually likely to use the word "syntax" very precisely.
92.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I don't have any interest in defending PHP or Java specifically, but giant projects really are interesting. They're just not Computer Science. The interesting thing about giant projects (say, hundreds of thousands of lines of code on up) is
93.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I'm a big fan of Terrence Tao's blog -- even though I (with a first-class undergraduate degree in Math) can only really follow maybe 20% of the articles he writes.
94.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Please be careful. I find this game maddeningly addictive.
95.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Thanks for the reference -- I hadn't heard that story. Definitely the nightmare of the small company selling kit planes or plans. (Edit: Aside from the nightmare of someone getting hurt and it actually being your fault. (I've written too ma
96.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Experimental aircraft (all amateur-built planes are registered with the FAA as "experimental") fall under an entirely different set of laws and regulations specifically designed to avoid that sort of of problem. That's not to say that exper
97.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
He's flying a modified VariEze, one of a series of planes designed by Burt Rutan (who, among other many other things, designed SpaceShipOne). The VariEze was sold as a set of plans; buying a set gave you the right to spend an enormous amoun
98.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Not deliberately purple, I suspect: substituting "weary" for "wary" is a pretty common mistake.
99.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I bought the Palm version of Supermemo a while back; nice program, but I found the process of creating new cards and onto the device too painful to make much use of. (I would be surprised if this problem wasn't solved in the up-to-date, PC
100.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
What did you do on project X? Was there a piece that you were responsible for? Something you're particularly proud of?
101.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
You're hinting at a general rule that goes something like "the most salient facts go at the top". When I was trying to get my first job out of college, the fact that I'd graduated from a well-known school with a decent GPA was really import
102.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I get Spanish spam calls on my cellphone, too, a couple of times a year... though I don't speak Spanish, so I have no idea whether or not I've won a prize.
103.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Welcome. It didn't occur to me just how bad the original looked (really, itreallyworks.tv?) until after it was killed. I thought about running the second submission through a tinyUrl sort of thing just to avoid (quite justified) Domain Name
104.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I submitted this under the actual title of the article ("Almost Everything I've Learned about Direct Response Television") and it was [dead]ed immediately. I found the article pretty interesting, and thought it was worth re-posting with a l
105.
Marketing insights from an infomercial consultant(itreallyworks.tv)
24 points by jeffcoat 17y ago|6 comments
106.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
One of the authors, John Baez, has been blogging since before the concept existed. If you're interested in these kinds of topics his _This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics_ is an amazing resource -- even more amazing that it's usually a
107.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
That website is the Very First Wiki. And indeed, Ward Cunningham was going for simplicity. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiDesignPrinciples
108.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
That long-tail you mention is fairly modern. The average size of a physical bookstore has increased dramatically in the past two decades -- I wish I could find a good cite for that, but I recall the bookstores of my youth as being 1/4 the
109.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
I've never worked with a Canadian programmer here in Austin who graduated from anywhere but Waterloo.
110.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
The groups responsibilities include "machinima sequences", which I take to include most pre-scripted in-game sequences that have NPCs doing something; triggered, say, by ending a quest. I suspect there are a lot of those. (I wanted to compa
111.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
The last startup I was a part of was designed entirely to make money for everyone involved by solving an extremely specific problem that you've never heard of. At least, you've probably never heard of it -- maybe you're a dentist, in which
112.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
IBM has elaborate incentive systems that encourage employees to patent every idea that comes into their heads, and few checks to weed out the bad ones. The plan, I suppose, is that it's hard to identify the important patents in advance, and
113.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
Exactly. One of the handy things about physics or math is that you can read a paragraph like your clever example above and immediately recognize it as a joke. The Sokal experiment demonstrates the dark alleys you'll head down once you lose
114.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
This one's easy: anyone making a clear, testable predication about what's going to happen 10 years from now is going to be Wrong.
115.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
While coding? None. If you're doing something so mindless that you can follow an entirely different thread of plot or conversation while doing your best work, something's gone very wrong. At best, your talents are wasted on whatever you're
116.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
The magician is an excellent example for yet another reason: one of the classic tricks in his arsenal is to narrate what's going on as he does it, and only lie just a little bit. As you well know, when a magician tells you that he surely co
117.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
None of your memories are true. Not as far as you can tell by introspection, at least. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves -- our favorite subject -- and those narratives, compressed versions of our experiences, become our memories. T
118.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
You may be having trouble finding things because calculus done with full rigor is called "analysis". The classic introductory-but-extremely-dense text is Rudin's _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_. If you're reading on your own, though,
119.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
The sentence in the article (written in January 2005) that's supposed to raise your hair: "But 95% of respondents were under age 50." Okay. So? If that's supposed to be 30 years of solid computing experience, then we're talking about people
120.
by jeffcoat 17y ago
The goal of the better suggestions isn't to avoid confrontation, but to remind that there are ways to make requests that are more and less likely to get you what you want. Accusatory, sarcastic, and snide tones are well into the "less likel

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