phaedrus

39 ms·

331.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Have you tried plants? I can't see windows from my desk, but I've got my cubicle filled with plants & it kind of makes up for it. One is a tropical shrub behind my monitors which would swallow my whole workstation if I didn&
332.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Back when I used to experiment with Markov chat simulators, this was a big problem. Besides the disappointment of finding out a particularly clever generated sentence was actually verbatim from the training set, there's also "acc
333.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I was about to comment that this sort of thing would be a great source of "stock" pictures for powerpoint presentations; pick a theme (subject) and hand-pick the good ones.
334.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I saw a talk by an npm developer who dismissed type checking as "just another kind of unit test" for your code (and advocated instead dynamic typing and manual unit tests). It bothered me enough to think about what was wrong with
335.
by phaedrus 8y ago
The problem here is not static typing or its interface to the outside world. The problem is most mainstream static typed languages have shit handling for Sum Types. With proper support and proper syntax static typing would actually help y
336.
by phaedrus 8y ago
The comparison with aviation instruments is apt: I remember seeing a TV special that talked about how in the early days of aviation (circa WWI) the pilots' culture of seat-of-the-pants flying and bravado was resistant to suggestions t
337.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Thanks for these links. Never did drugs but as a teenager I once had pneumonia and a 104F fever. The night before I got treated I was seeing some of the more organic shaped form constants with "demonic" overtones. (I put that in q
338.
by phaedrus 8y ago
A nice article and neat little demo. While it serves as a foil for the point the author was making, I feel like Prolog depth first search (DFS) is almost used as a straw-man by many. It's not that the problem the OP points out never
339.
by phaedrus 8y ago
You're not wrong to be afraid of the circular saw. Whenever it comes up I introduce it as "and here's the most dangerous tool I own". However I look at my table saw this way: getting the table saw allowed me to use it
340.
by phaedrus 8y ago
What do you consider a large majority? Consider a three mathematically ideal gerrymandered districts. Two are engineered to have 50% + epsilon supporting party voters. "Burn" the third by stocking it with 100% dissenting party
341.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I disagree with his conclusion which equates the database to functional programming. Relational algebra is a third paradigm on the same level as, and different from, OOP and FP. I remember seeing an article pointing out that the database
342.
Show HN: I translated (most of) a Coq proof into a C++ template metaprogram(godbolt.org)
1 points by phaedrus 8y ago|0 comments
343.
by phaedrus 8y ago
This was what turned me off from Linux Mint for my own use. The catch-22 of you need to upgrade to a supported version, but the servers / packages you would need in order to do the upgrade were turned off in the meantime. To be fair,
344.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted but I'll second this. I had the same thought when my home state decided to double-the-double damages for some tickets (e.g. speeding in construction zone). For many if not most indivi
345.
by phaedrus 8y ago
This actually sounds like it would be an excellent candidate for making a hobby robotics sensor - too bad they weren't readily available (at least in the US). Kind of like the Game Boy Camera, although it sounds like the Game Boy Came
346.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Actually I own several hammers which spark joy: a small mini-hammer which fits perfectly in my hand. A large sledge hammer which is entirely too heavy to be practical, but feels like wielding Mjolnir when I use it to break brake discs loo
347.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I recently started playing an Android game called Euclidea. It teaches the basics of compass and ruler construction (geometry) and asks you to complete various tasks such as bisecting an angle or finding a circle equally spaced between fou
348.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Several years ago I wrote a falling sand game for the Parallax Propeller chip, which is an 8-core microcontroller. One core was needed to drive the video output, and I had up to 7 other cores running a simple ruleset: 1. If a sand pixel h
349.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Problem is there is a class of mediocre programmers who do get results - it's just that they are productive building things that appear to work just long enough for them to be able to move on to the next task, but their work either d
350.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I have three SSDs in three different laptops/desktops. In their current host machines they've been working flawlessly for a couple of years. Prior to my figuring out which SSD paired best with which host machine, I experienced i
351.
by phaedrus 8y ago
VALDOCS. I had an Epson QX-10 with a Z-80 processor, 256K, and green monochrome screen when 486's were out and the 1st gen Pentium was coming out, but with VALDOCS I was able to do all of my homework the same as anyone using the Micro
352.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Imagine if the provenance of every code line or machine instruction was tracked all the way from what the human wrote to what the machine executes. Combined with data flow analysis, itself combined with runtime analysis via a feedback proc
353.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I've been thinking a lot about Software Archeology, trying to envision what that might be. I think we don't even have the tools yet to do a Site Survey. Somehow I can't fully envision what those tools would look like, but t
354.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Granted Microsoft sets a particularly egregious example here, but the way we (don't) track dependencies is f'ed up across the whole software industry. It should be (nay, needs to be) possible - in an automated way, with a visual
355.
by phaedrus 8y ago
The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge was prescient. In his novels one of the nicknames for the intra-galactic inter-net is "the web of 1000 lies".
356.
by phaedrus 8y ago
This reminds me of an idea I had when I was a freshman in college, in 2004 - 2005. I proposed a research project based on generalizing Markov chat bots to amplitude waves through neuron-like nodes. Basically, instead of discretely recogni
357.
by phaedrus 8y ago
I'll do you one better - when my first wife was in nursing school, part of her education involved many hours of unpaid internship. So she was working 2 years for free giving care at a hospital she could not afford to be treated at he
358.
by phaedrus 8y ago
Many of the applications at my workplace use flat text files in CSV format for logs and configuration. For new development I've been using Sqlite to replace some of these usages. Sometimes when I need to analyze legacy log files I im
359.
by phaedrus 8y ago
In 2002 I decided to install Windows 95 on a black & white Win3.1-based laptop, just for the heck of it. It had a one or two hundred megabyte hard drive, but only a floppy drive for I/O, so it felt like metaphorically building a s
360.
by phaedrus 8y ago
The Machine Stops was one of the first science fiction stories I ever read, and one I will never forget.

More ›