pjungwir

89 ms·

751.
by pjungwir 12y ago
The idea that a galaxy could be rapidly colonized by Von Neumann probes makes sense to me, but when I think about the specifics I have doubts. How many rare-earth metals go into an iPhone? Where will it get plastic from? How will it create
752.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I thought so too, but then there is also this line: > At some point, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies will likely have to shift from this work-when-you-can-but-don't-expect-money model to something a bit more conventional with,
753.
by pjungwir 12y ago
> nearly all of them have day jobs at companies like Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, Airbus, SpaceX, and Salesforce. > A lot of the work is being done by 25 UCLA students. Huh? So at least 25% of the group are students, but "nearly all&quo
754.
by pjungwir 12y ago
In my opinion Rails is the fastest way to build web applications, and the best framework for iterating as you react to new business knowledge. I don't see that changing soon. Investing in a JS framework seems like a natural complement
755.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Code by Charles Petzold will feel a bit slow at the beginning but gets pretty fun once he gets to circuits and builds up a whole functioning computer. Hackers by Steven Levy is a great history of the 50s to 80s. Very focused on the personal
756.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Here is a gem I wrote that uses a separate DSL to track indexes (including partial indexes), check constraints, and foreign keys. Rails 4 is starting to make this gem obsolete, but it still offers more than you get from vanilla Rails. http
757.
by pjungwir 12y ago
My rule is that things are almost never attributes. :-) There is less flexibility there. Escaping seems harder, and you can't have sub-elements or lists. Avoiding attributes makes things more verbose, but then that's XML for you.
758.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Question from a per-hour freelancer: Does this mean you only work on one project at a time? I seem to maximize my billable time by doing one project at 20 hours/week plus a few long-term relationships with smaller ad hoc projects. Some
759.
by pjungwir 12y ago
> every time I have to research something I end up feeling like a know-nothing I once heard a programmer say her job description was "learning new things". I'm a generalist like you, with a handful of specialties, and I do
760.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I came here to say the same thing. I was really interested in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in college, and around 22 I had the same idea as Penrose: that if the mind could be simulated on a computer, it would be a formal system in Gö
761.
by pjungwir 12y ago
No, Postgres has supported those for a long time. For example: SELECT * FROM employees e WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM employee_projects ep WHERE ep.employee_id = e.id
762.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Line-oriented text-based interfaces strike again! I haven't used Perl in years, but I'd like to know why the POE approach is groty. I'd prefer writing the thing in Perl than Expect. As a dad waiting eagerly for his son to be
763.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I assumed he was thinking of mass as a function of diameter, which for a rocky planet makes sense to me. I thought his comments were pretty amazing myself!
764.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Sort of OT, but I've been writing some malloc-less C lately, where most/all memory is on the stack, and I've been wishing for a way to control the space with a function argument, for example: void foo(int x) { cha
765.
by pjungwir 12y ago
It's amazing how much they look like electron orbitals. . . . Sometimes its seems like the reason we see nature reuse the same patterns is not from any physical mechanism but simply because math only has so many "shapes." I a
766.
by pjungwir 12y ago
When I was a kid I wrote an ascii-art dungeon exploration game in BASIC on our Tandy 1000. I worked on it for months, maybe even a couple years, adding and adding. One day the floppy it was on failed. I actually did rewrite it, and I rememb
767.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I run Linux on my desktop and servers, and I can't say much about FreeBSD, but if you want a taste, I recommend building a little NAS for yourself and installing FreeNAS. It's been fun to play around with jails and ports and learn
768.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Here is a blog post I wrote about using a recursive query to pull out this kind of tree: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-f... The problem I was tackling was making the tree sorted l
769.
by pjungwir 12y ago
As a "talented" person who believes intelligence is mostly trying, I'm thrilled to see these ideas appearing so often on HN and in the culture. I ran into this idea in a striking way while reading a biography of Thomas Aquina
770.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I confess ignorance about this theory, but I see it a lot and I don't understand. It just seems bizarre to think that life began on a comet. Sure, we want to know the origin of life. What does pushing it off the Earth solve? I guess my
771.
by pjungwir 12y ago
In my limited C# experience I found `int?` to be really nice, and an operator to non-null it sounds even nicer. I wonder if there is any chance of Rust getting an abbreviation like `?` so you can write `int?` instead of `Option<int>`.
772.
by pjungwir 12y ago
jsmn is a nice JSON tokenizer. You malloc a chunk of memory up front, but that's it. It gives you pointers to the tokens and you can do what you like with them. I am using it in an app that has a fixed-size data structure that is popul
773.
by pjungwir 12y ago
> I use OpsWorks quite a bit but have found it very challenging, and the feedback cycle when attempting to develop new cookbooks is excruciatingly slow. Yes. As a frequent Chef user, I was really excited about OpsWorks, but it feels quit
774.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Wow, I watched that show as a kid too! For an anime series with an actual airborne aircraft carrier, see Star Blazers. In my memory all these old shows have blurred together, as if from another life time: BotP, Star Blazers, Robotech, Voltr
775.
by pjungwir 12y ago
> CEOs aren't afraid of jail time Let's test that hypothesis. :-) I suspect if they really didn't mind that much we would see it more often. edit: s/more often/at least once/
776.
by pjungwir 12y ago
I hate the idea of giving these banks special treatment to keep them solvent, but if that's really necessary, fine. But there's no reason we can't lock up all the executives and fine them personally.
777.
Linux versus E. coli (2010)(blogs.discovermagazine.com)
2 points by pjungwir 12y ago|0 comments
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by pjungwir 12y ago
Having done a couple Angular projects now (and not really loving it), I started learning Knockout on the strength of this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2kl88s/angular_... So far I&
779.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Thank you for your correction! I am still suspicious that there is some forgotten weirdness lurking in there, but I'm glad someone didn't let me propagate my mistaken recollections unanswered. :-)
780.
by pjungwir 12y ago
Ha ha, I knew I shouldn't have answered that question. :-)

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