mjd

27 ms·

361.
by mjd 6y ago
Another vote here for the Malory. An earlier draft of this article had a Malory example, but I decided it wasn't needed. But the Malory is not hard to read, and it's a lot a of fun.
362.
by mjd 6y ago
I'd say yes. It's not that long, and it's not so much a single story as a series of related episodes. Also, I think it shows Steinbeck at his best and at his worst at the same time. He really wants to hit you over the head
363.
by mjd 6y ago
Perhaps not yet, but nobody is born a writer. It is not too late for you to become one.
364.
by mjd 6y ago
My phrasing was poor. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23013090
365.
by mjd 6y ago
My phrasing was bad. I should have said "the mistaken belief that an irrational number is * defined to be * one whose decimal representation doesn't repeat”. Usually we define it like this: an irrational number is one that isn&#
366.
by mjd 6y ago
That is not what I meant at all. (My phrasing was unclear. Sorry for the confusion.) Jordi understood what I meant though.
367.
by mjd 6y ago
It's _true_, but it's not good as a definition, because it's hard to reason about. It drags in all sorts of contingent facts about base-10 representations that are not usually of interest. The equivalent property, that a numb
368.
by mjd 6y ago
I think this is a very insightful remark. People think that numerals _are_ numbers, and it's hard to explain why this is not the case, because we have no way to talk about specific numbers _except_ by using numerals. But many frequen
369.
by mjd 6y ago
Clearly you have found your calling! I look forward to your book.
370.
by mjd 6y ago
Yes, that's why it would have to be a completely different book.
371.
by mjd 6y ago
So many reasons. Here are just a few. The new book would not be a “variant”, it would be a completely different book. To gain the expertise needed to to a good job with the new completely different book would require that I spend years stu
372.
by mjd 6y ago
I opened the account with my personal address. Then later, I added a secondary email address to it so that I could post items to my personal account by emailing them from my work email. I didn't realize that Trello would interpret th
373.
by mjd 6y ago
Not a chance.
374.
by mjd 6y ago
I implemented a simple markup language, “Mod”, that was similar to the “POD” language used to format the Perl man pages. There's a summary here: https://github.com/mjdominus/mod The main desideratum was that I sh
375.
by mjd 6y ago
I hope that someday you discover that people sometimes do things for reasons other than “self-promotion”.
376.
by mjd 6y ago
The interior design and macro packages were done by a brilliant Morgan-Kaufmann employee named Julio Esperas. The actual typesetting was outsourced to a firm in Bangalore that didn't have much experience with TeX and that did a very ba
377.
by mjd 6y ago
The publisher _requested_ that I wait six months, and I agreed to that.
378.
by mjd 6y ago
Yeah, I'm very disorganized. Also, I had a new baby in mid-2004 and I was really busy for a couple of years.
379.
by mjd 6y ago
It's “tiers of answers”, not “tired of answers”.
380.
by mjd 7y ago
They emailed me about this back on January 30: Subject: Your company ExampleCo will soon manage your Trello account Good news! Your Trello account is getting an upgrade. ExampleCo will now manage Trello accounts with a exampl
381.
by mjd 7y ago
Thanks. I had been calling these technological anachronisms “horseheads” (after the fake horse heads that were sometimes affixed to the hoods of early motor vehicles) but I didn't want to use my own word when there was a pre-existing
382.
by mjd 7y ago
Hey, that's a great idea! I could write a Javascript device that puts a number in the corner of the viewer's slide, with some indication of whether they were on the same page as the presenter, and which they could click to jump to
383.
by mjd 7y ago
These are the same assholes that sued Google in federal court, claiming that even if Google provided only snippet results in searches, the very act of Google holding an archive of copyrighted books, and allowing it to be searched, was itsel
384.
by mjd 7y ago
I have two responses to that. The first is that I think your specific example is mistaken. The C89 standard mandates a diagnostic message “for every translation unit that contains a violation of any syntax rule or constraint” (2.1.1.3). I
385.
by mjd 7y ago
I came here to say something similar. The author says: > In C89, undefined behavior is interpreted as, “The C standard doesn’t have requirements for the behavior, so you must define what the behavior is in your implementation, and there
386.
by mjd 7y ago
According to the article, the German government would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to its spokespersons: > the German health ministry would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to one of its spokespe
387.
by mjd 7y ago
This is a really misleading title. The evidence here is extremely thin, and The Guardian has no actual source, just reports from _Die Welt_ that themselves claim only an anonymous source. I suggest something more like: “Anonymous German sou
388.
by mjd 7y ago
Me: <clicks download link> > academia.edu wants to access your Google Account / mjd@fpuhpx.com / This will allow academia.edu to: / See and download your contacts Me: Nope.
389.
by mjd 7y ago
> It's not fake money. It's getting paid to view ads. It's getting paid with fake money to view ads.
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by mjd 7y ago
Thanks for your kind words.

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