jholman

34 ms·

301.
by jholman 6y ago
Elements of Style is not authoritative. Widely cited, widely praised, widely criticized. Find an author you enjoy, subject their work to an analysis strictly driven by Elements of Style, and you'll find they fail to measure up. Even
302.
by jholman 6y ago
Chocolate and peanut butter is amazing . And yes, as a sibling notes, Reese's peanut butter cups are actually alarmingly tasty, but.... as with any $1 chocolate bar, that's shitty HFCS-saturated chocolate and shitty palm-oil-lac
303.
by jholman 6y ago
Windows is a painful OS to use for anything other than gaming and web browsing, I agree. (Well, it was, until WSL.) If I ever again own a work-first non-gaming desktop, I will once again install some Debian GNU/Linux on it. (My gam
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by jholman 6y ago
Add a bookmarklet. You add a bookmark, and then you replace the URL with one of these: Interactive variable-rate: javascript:void%20function(){document.querySelector(%22video%22).playbackRate=parseFloat(prompt(%22Set%20the%20playback r
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by jholman 6y ago
Recently I watched a 50-engineer startup allocate more than 50% of their engineering time for about two years to trying to cope with the consequences of using Kafka as their database, and eventually try to migrate off of it. The whole time
306.
by jholman 6y ago
The really gross part is... to my eye, the deeper into the thread we get, the more upvotable your comments get ("kind, thoughtful, substantive", to quote the guidelines), but the lighter gray they are. Although I've downvot
307.
by jholman 6y ago
In my understanding, interpreters are generally not considered a member of this category, as they don't in general have formal languages as output. That is, I believe that a classically-defined compiler operates offline (there's
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by jholman 6y ago
I wrote a long comment, and immediately deleted it because I'm trying to avoid being a confrontational jerk. I disagree with your assessment of "normal CS jargon". I'm wondering if you mean "normal jargon in the C&
309.
by jholman 6y ago
> OOP as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism Ugh. Polymorphism is far from unique to OO, and predates it. If by encapsulation you mean information hiding, that's as old as the birth of OO. I've also sometimes encounte
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by jholman 6y ago
Thank you for the excellent piece. Though w.r.t. the speculation in your final "Disclaimer", I'd expect the algebraically inclined to prefer either the elegant combinatorical explosion of a J, or the build-it-yourself languag
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by jholman 6y ago
> I don't know why you can always count on someone to defend a multi-billion corporation against small companies, is there no empathy left? I don't have empathy for companies, I (try to) have empathy for people. Small companie
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by jholman 6y ago
@Theorentis said "a few hundred years ago", not "up until WWII". I mean, @Theorentis is correct, in a way, about what's good about less-industrialized societies. Though it was more true of medieval serfs and clas
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by jholman 6y ago
Agreed. Elements of Style is full of errors, some of which are so obviously wrong that even its own authors don't follow them.
314.
by jholman 6y ago
Agreed. Just a casual browse of the TOC will point out that even at the coarsest-grained level, only 40-60% of the book follows the SICP lesson plan.
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by jholman 6y ago
I still carry a torch for Polly Esther.
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by jholman 6y ago
Without wanting to police the word, because you do you, "indie" comes from "independent", as in "independent of a publisher" (or, in music, where the word comes from, independent of a record label). It doesn&#x
317.
by jholman 7y ago
This is totally not what the "military-industrial complex" is about. Wow. The MIC concept is a specific application of the general idea of regulatory capture of policymakers to the vertical of defence contracting. This is nothin
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by jholman 7y ago
If I was in a knife fight, and my buddy showed up and just hit the guy I was fighting with a SSME, I would be totally impressed and also grateful.
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by jholman 7y ago
I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off. To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops. If we didn't fly in migrant
320.
by jholman 7y ago
The idea that I might one day vaguely want to move to Dallas had never ever previously occurred to me.
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by jholman 7y ago
Normally I'd agree with "definitely not normal", but that was also my experience at Amazon less than a year ago. 4 hour onsite, no message afterwards. That was not the only procedural mess with the interview, either. No big
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by jholman 7y ago
I'll downvote any comment that complains about downvotes. I didn't get to yours before you edited it, so no downvote from me.
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by jholman 7y ago
I'm curious why you think "trope" has a negative connotation. Was that researched?
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by jholman 7y ago
That's a "but"? That sounds like you're agreeing!
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by jholman 7y ago
Without wanting to get involved in the purpose of your rhetorical question (the purpose being some kind of analogy to the StarLink situation)... How many compilers were there back in the 60s? By codebase or by install count, your choice.
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by jholman 7y ago
Not OP, but I don't trust startups to responsibly handle my PII. It's not a good gamble, based on incentives, and also based on recorded history. They usually don't encrypt it, they usually don't understand their own b
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by jholman 7y ago
Alexandrescu, too. They also talked about it pretty frequently. Maybe ggp's claim that D just needs a heavy hitter backing it might be misplaced.
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by jholman 7y ago
Maybe some big FAANG company. Start at the beginning of the acronym, I guess. I wonder if anyone could persuade anyone at Facebook to do a little bit of D professionally. I bet if even one serious Facebook engineer made a serious effort
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by jholman 7y ago
I think the point about Card is particularly interesting. Card's writing can be terrific, and in particular some of it is terrific because of the nuanced way it questions religious orthodoxy and/or the role of religion in society
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by jholman 7y ago
I've been a CAN/Modo member for well over a decade. Having to return the car makes it drastically inferior to car2go/evo for most purposes. Definitely superior for doing a home depot run or helping someone move, though.

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