nbouscal

43 ms·

421.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Whenever you actually put in the time and effort to learn and understand the abstractions. There are plenty of people who have done so and who are enjoying the benefits of having done so. I'm still a novice by comparison, and I still f
422.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Here I thought the analogy worked well for that exact reason. They're both very complex problems. That's why both fields are still in the state that they're in.
423.
by nbouscal 13y ago
> Modern IDEs are not text editors. They are heavily augmented with syntax highlighting, completion, code-folding, refactoring, squiggly red lines. How do any of those features make something 'not a text editor'? I'm prett
424.
by nbouscal 13y ago
If that's the case then you're only examining a subset of the probability distribution, which means you're getting skewed results.
425.
by nbouscal 13y ago
If the host always opens the left-most door not picked by the contestant, the host would open the door on the prize one out of every three times.
426.
by nbouscal 13y ago
The host has to know where the prize is, otherwise how could he open one of the two other doors after the player's first choice?
427.
by nbouscal 13y ago
That's only for wars, not "military actions". We've only actually declared war five times in the history of the country.
428.
by nbouscal 13y ago
IIRC it's not due to random instabilities, but rather due to the no cloning theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
429.
by nbouscal 13y ago
There is a huge difference between figuring out what the best balance of stats is for min-maxing compared to the actual exploration that takes place in EVE. Seriously, it's no comparison.
430.
by nbouscal 13y ago
You're missing a lot of auxiliary factors when you just look at college, let alone a specific college program. The educational advantage rich kids get starts at birth. A huge amount of it simply comes from having parents that make you
431.
by nbouscal 13y ago
That's not how tax brackets work. Tax brackets in the US are marginal, which means that the increased rate only applies to income above the threshold. It is impossible for an increase in income to be accompanied by a larger increase in
432.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Burritos! Monads are Burritos! ( http://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuitio... )
433.
by nbouscal 13y ago
> Tax policy has a huge impact on expanding a business. No, absolutely not. As someone who has run a small business, there is exactly one thing that made me hire a new employee: too much work (aka demand). That's it, period, absol
434.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Basic income is definitely key, and could form one part of the author's suggested strategy of increased government spending. Another card in our hand is decreasing the length of the work week, which has already been done in some Europe
435.
by nbouscal 13y ago
One thing being left out of this discussion so far is signing, which is arguably just as important in many cases as encryption. There are a fair number of situations where you don't care all that much who can see the data, but you care
436.
by nbouscal 13y ago
No, the first sentence says that it’s an “introduction to Haskell monads derived from a categorical perspective.” Big difference.
437.
by nbouscal 13y ago
That's not a problem with Stephen's approach, that's simply what he was writing about. I found it to be a great concise presentation. Your post and his post have different goals, that does not make either one better than the
438.
by nbouscal 13y ago
There was a UReddit course several months back, those videos might still be up. Where to go really depends on what you want to learn. If you just want to get a general feel for it, Wikipedia's probably the best place. If you want to ac
439.
by nbouscal 13y ago
I think the observer pattern can be useful as well (though there are definitely alternatives), but for the most part you're right. Factory pattern et al exist to solve problems that are introduced by OO. Get rid of OO and you no longer
440.
by nbouscal 13y ago
It was definitely never meant to be what it is today, and that's one of the reasons that most informed people with a choice choose not to use it. It may support everything one needs to write structured and well designed code in theory,
441.
by nbouscal 13y ago
No. Having a nice family, nice holidays, and not being stressed do not require money. Furthermore, your counterexample of a tiny apartment and cheap food don't actually contrast your definition of the good life. You can have a nice f
442.
by nbouscal 13y ago
"earning a seriously better life" is one of the saddest phrases I've heard. You don't earn a good life, you make it.
443.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/552/
444.
by nbouscal 13y ago
It was clear from the context that he was not using 'schizophrenic' as a medical label (since he was not applying it to a human), but rather as a metaphor that most people would easily understand. Picking nits does not contribute
445.
by nbouscal 13y ago
The product is aimed at techies? I got a very different impression, from phrases like “we have a passion for simplifying the life of non-geek people,” as well as the general tone of the pitch.
446.
by nbouscal 13y ago
It has a class system that was bolted on after the fact, leading to tons of inconsistencies. It has "closures", but they're not proper lexical closures since you have to explicitly declare what part of the lexical scope you w
447.
by nbouscal 13y ago
Javascript has some really, really bad parts. It also has some very good parts. PHP has the former, but not really the latter. The most common argument made for it is that it's drop-in-and-go, so you don't have to worry about thin
448.
by nbouscal 13y ago
They're not contradictory at all. People who present themselves as PHP developers tend to have a set of common differences from people who present themselves as Ruby or Python developers. That doesn't mean that the competent among
449.
by nbouscal 13y ago
It also gets a bad rap on HN because it is just not a very good language. There are much better alternatives, and those alternatives are now really easy to use and deploy. Yes, there are good PHP developers, and they can make it work. I lik
450.
by nbouscal 13y ago
That's fine, and I don't think that using PHP for a project is necessarily a bad decision. That said, there are a lot of factors to consider. PHP developers and say, Ruby or Python developers are generally rather different types o

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