normac

5 ms·

1.
by normac 11y ago
Count me in on this as well. It's very strange because it's not a voice, but in some sense there is sound--I can "hear" when there's a rhyme, for instance. I've heard it claimed that the reason some people thin
2.
by normac 11y ago
On the off chance you haven't heard of him, you might want to check out Daniel Tammet [1]. He's a high-functioning savant who has number-related synesthesia, can do calculations by juxtaposing images as you describe, and he's
3.
by normac 11y ago
I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they're the most notorious
4.
by normac 11y ago
This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 emulator in JavaScript , it's still faster to pop open
5.
by normac 11y ago
One of my favorite pieces of code I've written is a 150 line Python script I made to solve a really ugly text processing problem. I have tried to use it as a code sample when talking to potential employers, but it backfires because it
6.
by normac 11y ago
Python occupies a niche that isn't going away any time soon: making it easy and natural to write readable, straightforward, more-or-less imperative, slightly boring code of the type you learned in CS 101. This is still a very practical
7.
by normac 11y ago
Totally out of left field here, but I got some auditory synesthesia from watching this, especially on high speed. If any of you did as well and are interested why, it's probably the same phenomenon talked about here: https:/&#x2F
8.
by normac 11y ago
That's pretty neat. Clearly some level of parsing needs to happen before run time, or else it couldn't even balance braces to know where the function body ends. So it must be that it parses the function body just enough to figure
9.
by normac 11y ago
That's pretty much what Tcl is, even to this day. Ousterhout saw scripting languages as extremely high level tools used to issue commands to the low level code that does the heavy lifting. It's very much the same philosophy as she
10.
by normac 11y ago
Interestingly, Tcl was parsed the same way all the way up until Tcl 8.0 introduced a bytecode system in 1997. Each line was parsed right before execution with no separate parsing stage--your code could crash in the middle of executing from
11.
by normac 11y ago
This kind of thing makes me wonder if there are dozens or hundreds of other cases where people were lost at sea and survived for many months and thousands of miles, but never made it to land so we'll never know.
12.
Ask HN: Software gigs involving small, scripting-type tasks?
7 points by normac 11y ago|5 comments
13.
by normac 11y ago
This raises an interesting problem--could we find the word even faster by using something other than a standard binary search? The first thing that comes to mind is skipping past letters that don't appear very often at that point in a