owinebarger

12 ms·

61.
by owinebarger 17y ago
That idea has a name, and it is "Unix". qmail remains my favorite example of this philosophy put into practice.
62.
by owinebarger 17y ago
I can't seem to find my copy of the 2009 Scheme Workshop proceedings, but Shriram Krishnamurthi's crew presented some work there that was pretty impressive. They are oriented toward teaching programming to 7-8th graders, before they learn a
63.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Not really. The flattening part is old hat in functional languages, though this particular formulation is restricted to the special case of "non-recursive" functions. I don't know about the particular optimizations they apply to the flatt
64.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Excellent, excellent essay. There's even something for people seeking money (but you should read it even if you aren't): This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on th
65.
by owinebarger 17y ago
This extended flailing of Mark Helprin seems thorough, but it seems a lot longer than necessary for most of us. Synopsis: Mark Helprin does not do his research and throws around a lot of unjustified and erroneous invective.
66.
by owinebarger 17y ago
In this case, Kodak evidently offered to store his pictures for free, then when he wanted them back because they were going to delete them, they did not make it easy to get out. As a prospective customer, I pay attention to whether someone
67.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Do you think that's a good strategy for getting people to be your customers? Really? Notice how gleeful the author was to have "defeated" the company here. Is that how you want your customers to look at your company?
68.
by owinebarger 17y ago
This is definitely a well-written essay. I also have a favorite passage: "There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversit
69.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Point #3 is really important for anyone considering or starting grad school.
70.
by owinebarger 17y ago
People are quantitative when they do their business planning. In this context cheap is when cash flow is running close to break-even or better. If you have employees without revenue, it's probably not cheap. If you'll need employees for a
71.
by owinebarger 17y ago
If you own the copyright to that code, it's not clear to me why putting it in the code you're giving to them would necessarily even give them the right to use it, much less give them the copyright to it. Meaning: if I were your prospective
72.
by owinebarger 17y ago
How much money will you be saving them by using your pre-existing work? I realize you're a college student with a summer job, but it seems that you've got the situation backward.
73.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Any chance to see the median instead of the average? It's interesting to see spolsky at #3 with 14.88 on 87 comments and pg at #20 with 7.88 on 4721 comments. How do the underlying distributions compare?
74.
by owinebarger 17y ago
If they don't pay taxes, wouldn't they be subject to (real) pirates?
75.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Sweet. It appears to have proper tail recursion. (define (fib n) (fib-help n (lambda (fn fn-1) fn))) (define (fib-help n k) (if (<= n 1) (k 1 1) (fib-help (- n 1) (lambda (fn-1 fn-2)
76.
by owinebarger 17y ago
"The truth is, while intelligence isn't knowledge, it can be rapidly converted into it." Don't you know that it just takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of anything: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?_r=
77.
by owinebarger 17y ago
This actually strikes close to home. Two of the closest people to me are lawyers, and they hate discussing law with me. The problem as I see it is that I'm interested in what the best law/result would be, and they're focused on what's like
78.
by owinebarger 17y ago
If nothing else, implementing a reasonably efficient but basic Scheme interpreter is a short exercise that can be done in a pinch. "Reasonably efficient" is a consequence of the proper tail recursion.
79.
by owinebarger 17y ago
Hint: Some people believe Lisp was a discovery, not an invention.
80.
by owinebarger 17y ago
I find this post by a language designer perplexing. The fool-proof way of getting proper tail recursion is transformation of the program into a form in which all control flow is expressed in the form of function calls in tail position, incl
81.
by owinebarger 18y ago
I found myself thinking I could see the answer as you were describing the problem. That's good writing! My guess would be that you'd need to have a new data structure for the text (or pointing into the straight text) that tracked the order
82.
by owinebarger 18y ago
That's a really interesting site. In the talk at http://www.deepcapturethemovie.com/ he has a graph showing how "naked short-selling" can be used to create an illusory over-supply of a stock and drive the actual stock price into oblivion
83.
by owinebarger 18y ago
For me, hapless has a connotation of clumsiness. The hapless person goes through life fumbling every opportunity. The opposite is a person adept at taking advantage of every opportunity. Relentlessly resourceful sounds like a person who m
84.
by owinebarger 18y ago
I don't think Krugman's conclusion that a savings glut is the problem is explicit enough. It's that so much of the savings was lent for consumption expenses, not investment in capital. This effectively localized the consumption in a relat