mquander

84 ms·

811.
by mquander 16y ago
I always assumed that it tended to work out for "normal" users -- that sucks if it doesn't. I tend to be the sort of person who "[thinks that] development versions, experimental and unstable are for old ladies" (HT to xorg-edgers.) I'm pre
812.
by mquander 16y ago
FYI, I think "apt-get autoremove" will do what you want -- list packages which were installed automatically as a dependency and are no longer necessary. (I'm not sure how or if you can do the same thing with the package management GUI.)
813.
by mquander 16y ago
I agree, I bet that many children would benefit a great deal from that. Eight hours less at school is eight hours more time to expose a kid to as many cool things as possible. That said, I think that encouraging a ton of reading of someth
814.
by mquander 16y ago
My contribution: If you're doing this, and you have a smart kid, for God's sake, buy a lot of books, buy every book you can think of and put it in your house. I can point at three quarters of my interests and trace them straight back to b
815.
by mquander 16y ago
People will find a market unethical if it's consistently biased in a way that seems unnecessary and "unfair." In this context, since bribery isn't a common part of American culture, it seems unfair to give an advantage to people who are sk
816.
by mquander 16y ago
No, you don't. The difference is one of transparency. Information about various televisions and their pricing is freely available to anyone who asks, whereas reliable information about the necessity or possibility of bribes is hard to obt
817.
by mquander 16y ago
I don't really understand where this post is supposed to be going, but I agree with Yudkowsky regarding all the "emergence" I've ever heard about: A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective "emergent" from any sentence in which it appear
818.
by mquander 16y ago
Come on, in no sense was the Infocom era the "golden age" of interactive fiction. In both quantity and quality of work, the "golden age" is from the mid-nineties through right now.
819.
by mquander 16y ago
Re: the underlining -- no idea, just an instructional aid, I guess. Here's another example that might look "DSLy": http://www.brool.com/index.php/pattern-matching-in-clojure The pattern matching macro "match" is written entirely in Cloju
820.
by mquander 16y ago
Frankly, I agree, but I feel like my objections to this are so far out of the mainstream (in a world where every webpage is slathered in "Twitter/Digg/Reddit/Facebook this" links) that I am not even going to try to champion them.
821.
by mquander 16y ago
Here's the "LINQ" of Common Lisp, which may look "different" enough to convince you: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/doc/cl/loop.html (It could be implemented identically in Clojure, if you cared to.)
822.
by mquander 16y ago
You can change prefix expressions to infix with a macro, if you like; didn't you read SICP? Your DSL can look however you want it to, as long as there are some parentheses around the ends of it.
823.
by mquander 16y ago
Strictly speaking, none of those features were necessary to implement LINQ. Anonymous functions were already possible in C# 2.0 with the ugly delegate syntax. Type inference saves a lot of keystrokes, and anonymous types save big famili
824.
by mquander 16y ago
I think that a "submit this to HN" link is less spammish, because if someone clicks it, the implication is that your blog post was actually genuinely interesting to someone. The issue I have with doing it yourself is that you're not compet
825.
by mquander 16y ago
I consider it spammish too (there's my feedback.) But my observation is that there are a ton of people who link their own blog posts all the time, and if the blog posts are of an OK quality, everyone here seems to be fine with it.
826.
by mquander 16y ago
Well, if you got that interpretation out of the sentences in the article, you're a more adventurous reader than me.
827.
by mquander 16y ago
No person says "more than $5,000" to imply that the value may be any amount greater than $5,000, with equal probability. Saying "more than $5,000 a month" if you actually mean "$150,000 a month" may as well be the dictionary definition of
828.
by mquander 16y ago
We aren't speaking technically. It's a story.
829.
by mquander 16y ago
Give me a break. Is he making closer to $150k a month, or $5k a month? Both statements cannot be "equally true" coming from a human pen.
830.
by mquander 16y ago
I got the precisely opposite impression. He expresses that he is very happy with his accomplishments and his work, and says that his biggest regret is not being able to finish The Dreaming Machine. If what you took away is "spend less t
831.
by mquander 16y ago
I actually changed my mind, after thinking about your points and refreshing myself on the relevant history. I agree that your portrait of the situation is worth reflecting on, and not that much of an ad hominem . I wish you would have el
832.
by mquander 16y ago
I haven't had the chance to test it out yet, but my impression has always been that first-class functions should be presented to imperative/OO programmers as a replacement for polymorphic functions. Frequently, for an abstraction X where I
833.
by mquander 16y ago
My downvote signals that if you want people to take interest in claims like that, you need to substantiate them. It also expresses disapproval at the insertion of a tangentially-related, flamebait ad hominem into a thread discussing a pa
834.
by mquander 16y ago
Wow, thanks a lot. I was strongly considering purchasing a DX for exactly this, after trying a Nook and finding the screen to be too small for most PDFs.
835.
by mquander 16y ago
Let me contribute my perspectives about the posts in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627749 mathgladiator's post: I would vote this down as being totally content-free. The words "late night orgies" do not make a commen
836.
by mquander 16y ago
I think the interest in P=NP specifically is for two reasons besides authority: - Anyone with a little bit of CS or programming background can understand the formulation of the problem, similar to how anyone can understand Fermat's Last The
837.
by mquander 16y ago
If you're being sincere, I suggest that this is the generally-held position on this thread of discussion: A) A lot of people are immensely fascinated by questions in theoretical science and mathematics, including P=NP. B) A lot of people en
838.
by mquander 16y ago
The comment I wrote was a pithy, uninformative comment that was misleading about the content of the article (I suggested that the author just didn't understand ambition very well, but she's clearly not talking about general ambition; she ex
839.
by mquander 16y ago
I agree with you so much that I deleted my original comment, because I unjustly ignored a lot of what the author was saying.
840.
by mquander 16y ago
I'm not saying it's a terrible idea, only that it's probably a big portion of their motivation to centralize and control map distribution.

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