lincolnq

48 ms·

451.
by lincolnq 17y ago
The link to the side-by-side sound file is redirected to a useless page. Did anyone manage to track it down?
452.
by lincolnq 17y ago
regarding your python code: do you know about 'enumerate'? It returns an iterable of (index, value) pairs of a sequence. :)
453.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Hang on, though. What if I don't even have to ask? I know that I tend to upvote people more often who I know (even without them asking). Is that bad / immoral? If you say yes, then it's very important to come up with an answer for "what's a
454.
by lincolnq 17y ago
How is it not still a net win? The automated systems fail a lot less often than humans. Even if they can't get the failure rate to 0%, it is still making things safer to replace humans by robots.
455.
by lincolnq 17y ago
None of those companies are mature, by definition (since none of those platforms have been around for long). Some of them have significant revenue, but would I buy stock in one (e.g., Zynga)? I don't think so. I consider the Facebook Platfo
456.
Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out (2005, Neal Stephenson)(nytimes.com)
53 points by lincolnq 17y ago|14 comments
457.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I always upvote people who say "go read Peopleware". See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986024 for more discussion about the book.
458.
by lincolnq 17y ago
In general, I agree. But "Only throw exceptions for the exceptional"? The rationale for this guideline sounds like a performance-driven one ("since throwing exceptions will add unnecessary overhead"). This isn't always true, and contradicts
459.
by lincolnq 17y ago
That would require a bit more infrastructure on Gravatar's part (a UI for registering a site), and would significantly slow its adoption because site owners would have to go register their site before they could generate gravatar URLs. I us
460.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I like this too, but it's worth noting two things: 1) this is from 2007 2) Real World Haskell (which is authored in part by dons) recommends against using fail, and it's much more recent. From http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/monads.h
461.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I generally agree with this concern, although I think it's likely that it will become unimportant over time as formats congeal. I guess the mitigating factor is that at least it's readable and well-formatted as ASCII, so it's not that big o
462.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Explain why you need to enforce one particular language instead of letting contestants pick their own?
463.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Meh. Looks like this guy should've taken an intro software engineering course and read a little Joel Spolsky instead of taking 5 years to learn this.
464.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I'm not too surprised at this. I think this is a great case study on groupthink. I've observed groupthink / "the outside is the enemy" behaviour in several groups that I've participated in. It can be caused by one person setting the tone of
465.
by lincolnq 17y ago
This is a great post. The author explains his methodology for testing this behavior (including a wrong turn at the beginning, which was instructive); does thorough research; demonstrates striking performance graphs; and provides a simple an
466.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Four forks per second is basically nothing. This article is blowing it all out of proportion. You can't sustain forking per web request on a really large site but at this scale it's not going to matter. The author is being stupid: the size
467.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Not _quite_ to the point of absurdity. I kinda like it. Admittedly, I dislike it when I have to instantiate four classes to read the contents of a file. But I have also used the same flexibility to great advantage, and been burned in other
468.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Unwillingness due to what, though? Because, from what I've seen, a lot of people can be very excellent programmers in one language, but be unable to learn to program in another. Actually, I don't think it's really "less experienced programm
469.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I replied to you above, but I'll reply to your specific example here. Your example is really not how PL people talk about type inference. However, you're right that you wouldn't call this example type-checking either... it would probably be
470.
by lincolnq 17y ago
There is such a thing, but it has a different meaning than how I believe you used it. You said "scripting languages have run-time type inference built in everywhere". I don't think that's true for most scripting languages. Inference refers
471.
by lincolnq 17y ago
If someone is scanning for vulnerable sites, it makes it possible to identify them without attempting the exploit.
472.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I've seen these systems and I think they can be good for teaching programming. Basically, they force the student to think about the whole problem at once, design a complete solution, and implement it without making mistakes. If you screw up
473.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Fundamentally I want to be able to ask my programming language "what exceptions might propagate to here?" Having this ability allows me to make stronger claims that my program is correct, because then I can say that the only exceptions whic
474.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Selective receive seemed unimportant, but I read the PDF presentation at the bottom to find out why he thought it was important. And I think he's right. Basically it allows your process to simulate synchronous calls (by sending, then enteri
475.
by lincolnq 17y ago
Awesome! You've written down a pattern I noticed on both Reddit and HN -- what I called the troll filter: if more comments than points, the troll filter fails (the link is a troll and unlikely to be worth reading). Exceptions are the types
476.
by lincolnq 17y ago
I don't agree. I can't reformat PDFs. I can't apply my own style sheets. If it's in two columns, I'm just screwed. With a website, I can resize the text, I can edit the style, etc.
477.
by lincolnq 17y ago
There's been a rash of nutrition articles on HN recently. Many challenge the traditional low-fat diet hypothesis. I am beginning to believe some of these articles. But damn, why do I always get the sense that all these articles are pushing
478.
by lincolnq 17y ago
With regards to visual programming, I've seen it well-executed for event driven systems. MindRover was one example. It's a robot programming game I was involved with, released in 1999. You would put components such as radars and weapons on
479.
by lincolnq 17y ago
alex responded on proggit http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9a7zr/programmi...
480.
by lincolnq 17y ago
This is actually quite helpful, thanks. I did look at neo4j, but I got as far as noting "this doesn't have queries" before giving up. So thanks for pointing out that Lucene might help with the querying part.

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