oddthink

12 ms·

151.
by oddthink 14y ago
If that's your only reason, stick with emacs but use evil-mode. I flip-flop between liking evil-mode (when I'm mostly just editing stuff) and preferring standard emacs keybindings (when I'm switching a lot between shells, dired, interactive
152.
by oddthink 14y ago
Well, I went through grad school in astrophysics, and I never really learned it. If I did particle, I would have had to know it cold; then again, those guys don't know anything about magnetohydrodynamics. Presumably, if you're doing type th
153.
by oddthink 14y ago
By similar logic, quantum field theory is about 40 years old, so really there's no excuse to be ignorant of it, either. I kid, but only somewhat. Relevancy (even if just perceived) and accessibility matter.
154.
by oddthink 14y ago
When I'm thinking OO, I'm a big enough fan of the Liskov Substitution Principle that I still like Sather over Eiffel. The whole covariant argument thing seems like a solution in search of a problem. Well, a problem other than textbooky atte
155.
by oddthink 14y ago
Just an aside: I don't think you can really say "dynamic programming enthusiast" to mean "dynamically-typed language enthusiast", since "dynamic programming" already means something quite different. It threw me a bit, at least.
156.
by oddthink 14y ago
Reasonably scaled measurements are very useful, though. Everything in astronomy is measured in scaled units. Mass is in solar masses, interstellar distances are in parsecs (well kiloparsecs) or light years, planetary orbits are in astronomi
157.
by oddthink 14y ago
Thanks for the link; I'd forgotten about Qt and JavaScript, which is funny, since I was just thinking about learning it.
158.
by oddthink 14y ago
Really? I've never seen it used as an actual extension language. I've seen Lua, I've seen Scheme, at work we do everything in Python (but that's more extending than embedding), but I've never seen JavaScript as a "extend this C or C++ appli
159.
by oddthink 14y ago
The solar wind is a few nT, while Earth's field is tens of uT. You're not going to be moving anything with that.
160.
by oddthink 14y ago
It did sound a lot like he was assuming Facebook would act just like email, at which point you have to wonder why not collect email addresses. As an infrequent and naive Facebook user, I would not expect that "Liking" a company page meant "
161.
by oddthink 14y ago
If you haven't tried it, the data.table package is great. Mostly like a data.frame (in fact a subclass), but fast.
162.
by oddthink 14y ago
Thanks for the pointer; I've been learning some Smalltalk lately, but I haven't yet looked into the condition system. And, yes, I'm not saying that manually implementing pseudo-restarts is something I'd ever want to do, but some vague skele
163.
by oddthink 14y ago
In python, I usually deal with this with generators. It's not as elegant as conditions, but it works well enough. I've never tried to permit custom restart-like behavior, but now that generators are coroutines, it should be doable. e.g.
164.
by oddthink 14y ago
Wow. What an awful read. The topic should be interesting, but this guy comes off as an idiot: basic grammar errors, sentences that trail off into the void, etc. Required "job skills" classes sound like insanity. What would they teach? A sem
165.
by oddthink 14y ago
Not on AT&T, as far as I can tell. It's either $20/month for unlimited messaging, or $0.20 each. So, unless you're sending or receiving more than 100 messages a month, you're better off without a plan.
166.
by oddthink 14y ago
I know, it's irrational, but it adds an extra annoyance factor, far more than it should. I mean, I spend far more every time I take the subway somewhere. Driving across the GW bridge costs $12, and I don't worry myself about that. It turns
167.
by oddthink 14y ago
I did this a few months ago, but I'm thinking of turning it off. I know it's trivial, but there's something deeply annoying about being dinged $0.20 a pop for the SMS message to get the code. I'll have to see if I can set up the Google Auth
168.
by oddthink 14y ago
Anything is possible.
169.
by oddthink 14y ago
What's the current state of Groovy? Has it seen much adoption, compared to something like Jython or JRuby? Does it have any commonly-acknowledged flaws? I looked at it years ago, around when it first came out, and it gave me a negative impr
170.
by oddthink 14y ago
I was stuck debugging a C++ application that was just using A+ objects as its wire protocol. I never even managed to get the fonts to display properly. It was horrible. I ended up having to write my own print-these-boxed-values routines, ju
171.
by oddthink 14y ago
I was just talking with a coworker about this. We agreed that much of our existing C++ code could have been written in Java without harm (we're doing compute-heavy finance, but not fluid simulation), and that would let us skip a whole lot o
172.
by oddthink 14y ago
I remember finding this a very interesting read when it first came out. It's clearly colored Sussman's research for the years since, for example his work with Alexey Radul on "propagators". However, I've never found a way to make it actuall
173.
by oddthink 14y ago
I find it's easier to have short names, defined at the beginning, rather than clogging up my code with full.path.to.a.module. I imagine preferences vary. What I don't understand is why they prefer: from thepackage.subpackage import am
174.
by oddthink 15y ago
I said (or tried to say) above that I was strictly talking about Firefox and Safari on OS X, not on Windows. Upon re-reading, it came out a little funny.
175.
by oddthink 15y ago
Yes, that was strictly on OS X. I would think that Firefox and Safari would be rendering fonts in the same way, but Safari somehow looks better. I last compared only a few days ago. When I get back home, I can try again and see if I can get
176.
by oddthink 15y ago
They still have a way to go to hit "pretty." Sadly, it's a lot harder to measure than "fast" or "slim". I wish I had the language to describe why Safari's font rendering is so much better than Firefox's; it's "visually obvious", but I just
177.
by oddthink 15y ago
Exactly. This whole thing seems extremely artificial to me; notation is fluid and ambiguous, despite what elementary-school teachers may say. If you're calculating something, you can use whatever rules you want, and if you're reading some e
178.
by oddthink 15y ago
That's true; ePub is certainly trying to do the right thing here. I haven't used it much myself, so I don't know how well it works. For my own uses, I'd like to get decent equations and LaTeX-like special characters (e.g. \nabla), but I can
179.
by oddthink 15y ago
Unfortunately, HTML isn't a rich enough container. If you try to add a diagram to HTML, suddenly you need two files. The "webarchive" file formats get around this, but they're not standard. It seems to me that we need something like PDF, bu
180.
by oddthink 15y ago
One of these days, I'll try out node.js. Of course, since I can't help but be tragically attracted to crazy duct tape and baling wire solutions, I'd probably try to run either Amber Smalltalk or ClojureScript on it.

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