megrimlock

10 ms·

31.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Put differently, you want the functions that count the number of permutations and combinations possible, not functions that yield/generate the actual permutations and combinations.
32.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Could you construct a closed cycle path of 35 deg internal angles in 3D?
33.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Meta: One funny thing about online discussions is that the activation energy required to make a post means they tend to be by people with extreme positions. The same phenomenon that leads to bimodal amazon review distributions of 1 star &#
34.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Could you expand on what you mean by "I very rarely trust the author"? Isn't using their work a statement of trust? Source or binary, you are still embracing their description of tasks for an automated machine to perform ver
35.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Patrick has put his finger on this concern before, and (I feel) persuasively reframed things to resonate with an engineering mindset: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ I'v
36.
by megrimlock 13y ago
If my reading of patio11's business of software stance is accurate, I believe he'd say these irate emails are actually helpful signals to you that these people are not a market you want to bother serving! Because they have so lit
37.
by megrimlock 13y ago
> I saw at least a quarter of every working day wasted in routine status meetings, in which two or three of the ten or twelve people present spent an hour making a couple of decisions while the rest of us tried not to look too bored.. Th
38.
by megrimlock 13y ago
I remember reading that this is what Evan Martin was going to work on after Chrome... http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2012/05/new-project.html (Congrats, Evan!)
39.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Andrew's photography work is beautiful: http://www.reisse.net/
40.
by megrimlock 13y ago
His insight that crypto is hard because you don't get feedback when you mess up is good. It made me wonder what other domains are like that -- domains where correctness seems within reach, yet there are subtle aspects that are hard to stat
41.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Hey Vinay -- I just wanted to remark that supportfu.com looks great. Even though I'm not in a business where I'd need such a thing, I found your copy compelling enough to imagine myself running such a biz and how to provide the best possib
42.
by megrimlock 13y ago
I like your idea of point allocation (especially if we can include STR, DEX, and INT). But how do we set up the taxonomy of attributes? Particularly with hierarchical relationships (ex: is Machine Learning a subset of AI?) you'd want roug
43.
by megrimlock 13y ago
Evolutionary pressures on spoken language drive common concepts to claim shorter symbols, so it seems fine to pay 18 letters (plus an escape to an alternate language) for this more-rarified meaning of synergy, leaving "synergy" and "disrupt
44.
by megrimlock 14y ago
It's tempting because that's how we build our skills. You must abuse a tool to understand it, and know when to not use it. Unfortunately in professional contexts, many of us do that learning on the job, exhausting out a turbulent jet wake
45.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Definitely! Of course, argument from authority is still relatively weak in situations where experts disagree, and that's definitely the case with programming languages. We can each find our gurus -- Damien Katz, Rich Hickey, Rob Pike, Joh
46.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Try reading this. It concisely gets at some of the main ideas of his talks regarding values, identity, and perception. http://clojure.org/state
47.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Definitely. Tests are really like a dual to the code, in the sense that they are another way of describing what it is supposed to do. Like you say, as the test grows more complicated, the risk that the test code itself has bugs grows too.
48.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Right -- big publishers' size and distribution model requires them to focus on outsized wins. Their overhead is too high to take on the many smaller projects they would require to feed their cost structure. Smaller traditional publishers
49.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Thanks for this insightful comment. I have struggled to find the right ways to think about the phenomena underlying the shared memory abstractions. The limited visibility makes this harder than understanding other aspects of software. You
50.
by megrimlock 14y ago
It kinda has a similar problem to the Hegelian dialectic that Marx built his stuff on. The Singularity argument observes some trends and presumes they will continue along the same profile, carrying our society towards a specific phase-chan
51.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Dictators can work well when they are insanely talented, motivated, and tuned into their minions. Being a trusted minion of a powerful dictator has provided the most effective, fun, coordinated experiences of my career so far. On the other
52.
by megrimlock 14y ago
That (very nifty) technique only works for periodic phenomena, so it seems hard to apply here.
53.
by megrimlock 14y ago
I'm working on a GUI app in Qt where we use X11 in several places. The main usage is to open multiple connections to the X server for GL widgets, so that we can refresh their time-sensitive contents even when the main Qt event loop is bloc
54.
by megrimlock 14y ago
You are on the right track here, but consider what the contained object is: std::list <person*> people; You're right that the instantiated list entry (what the article calls "helper") will directly include a value, but the
55.
by megrimlock 14y ago
If you find this observation interesting you will definitely enjoy Maciej's analysis, "The Social Graph Is Neither": http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
56.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Id Software has been an inspiring example here, open-sourcing several historically significant game engines. https://github.com/id-Software/ However, they typically don't include the full game data; you have to use them with data from t
57.
by megrimlock 14y ago
We have a print-out of an N-set Venn diagram on the wall which we use to illustrate the peril of having too many features with subtle interactions. It resonates because many of us have worked on areas of the code preceded by comments indic
58.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Thanks for clarifying. I agree there are many environments that would benefit from version control but that lack the technical resources to make it happen with existing tech. Versions (and Time Machine history) are good steps to part of th
59.
by megrimlock 14y ago
Just curious, what makes you think they don't already use version control prolifically? What opportunity do you see? One studio I'm familiar with has some assets with change history back through to SCCS -- back through RCS, CVS, and P4.
60.
by megrimlock 14y ago
The arrows do not represent time. Instead, they reflect the way git represents the commits internally. Each commit is a set of changes to some starting state, identified by the arrow. You could think of it like a citation in a paper that

More ›