pmccool

16 ms·

151.
by pmccool 17y ago
Yeah, cooking can be difficult when you're time poor. I've found that: A dishwasher helps. Razor sharp knives that are properly cared for help. Blunt knives waste a lot of time when cooking. Putting a bit of time into mastering quick recipe
152.
by pmccool 17y ago
I don't see much overlap between laptop and iPad. A laptop is a desktop substitute; it's keyboard+screen in a much more convenient package with a bearable decrease in performance. An iPad is a paper substitute. It fits this niche precisely
153.
by pmccool 17y ago
Yeah, I think someone will do the obvious thing with this law: find some obviously-political thing on the blacklist and ask the courts to apply the test from Lange/Coleman v Power (which build on the early-90s cases you mention). So yeah, h
154.
by pmccool 17y ago
Don't forget Steve Fielding.
155.
by pmccool 17y ago
My logic there is that impeding political speech makes the law vulnerable to legal challenge. My opinion is that such a challenge would succeed, hence my view that, one way or another, it will stay out of areas like trade and political spee
156.
by pmccool 17y ago
Duplicated here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1228347
157.
by pmccool 17y ago
Hi! Brisbane here.
158.
by pmccool 17y ago
"Senator Conroy has conceded that greater transparency is needed in terms of how content ends up on the blacklist, but last night he again refused to make the blacklist itself public, saying it would provide people instant access to the ban
159.
by pmccool 17y ago
To me, the question isn't whether it'll replace desktops and laptops, but whether it'll replace paper. I'm not interested in an iPad as a laptop replacement, let alone a desktop replacement. I'm interested in whether I can carry one around
160.
by pmccool 17y ago
I agree that reading code is important. It follows from this that writing readable code is important. It is telling, I think, that proofreading is nigh-on ubiquitous with writing in prose, and nowhere near as popular with coding.
161.
by pmccool 17y ago
It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare, but languages that force you to write OO are by no means the rule. IME, OO some
162.
by pmccool 17y ago
They made another successful launch this week, according to this article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/23/2853372.htm
163.
by pmccool 17y ago
> Alternatively, you could learn to do it yourself, though you do need a truing stand. It is a useful skill to learn, and instructions are available online. You don't even need a truing stand, just leave the wheel in the frame and use t
164.
by pmccool 17y ago
Interesting to see the iPad mentioned. That's what interests me about it: is it an adequate substitute for an A4 (paper) notebook?
165.
by pmccool 17y ago
What's to justify? Cheap trikes are hard to ride and steer. I regret not getting my kids something decent, like a Kettler. Cheap kids' bikes are horrid too. I wonder: could a leasing system for quality kids' bikes/trikes work?
166.
by pmccool 17y ago
I'll put it another way. Most code isn't performance-critical. If you choose to write everything in, say, assembler, most of it will give you little or no gain. Assembler's harder to write than Java, so every line is costing you money, whet
167.
by pmccool 17y ago
I wasn't just talking about memory leaks. Memory allocation in C is a rich source of bugs. Even assuming they are "easy to fix", that's still a poor second to "never happened in the first place". GC isn't free, sure, but it has definite adv
168.
by pmccool 17y ago
I'd go further and say that readability and/or ease of use _often_ trumps efficiency. I/O tends to be the bottleneck at least as often as CPU, apart from anything else. I agree with the point about writing in assembly language. This rant is
169.
by pmccool 17y ago
The anti-GC part of this rant is especially hard to take. I've had the misfortune of having to debug various memory allocation problems in C. That's something I don't miss at all. To bag GC for performance without mentioning reliability is
170.
by pmccool 17y ago
Yeah, perl's bad reputation is undeserved in some ways. My definition of a bad language is one that _forces_ you to code in "bad" ways. There's very little that perl forces you to do. Insofar as it's bad, it's bad in a very different way to
171.
by pmccool 17y ago
> It's almost impossible to repeal things. The US still has a mohair subsidy from WWI. This is what I don't get; why? I get that laws aren't repealed as often as they should be. My personal suspicion is that it's a lack of political wil
172.
by pmccool 17y ago
> It's already the case that no one knows "what the law > says at any given time". So nobody knows, for example, the road rules in their local area at any given time? That's my point: it's incumbent on people to know _some_ laws. T
173.
by pmccool 17y ago
Are retrospective criminal laws even allowed in the US? They're generally considered dicey from a human-rights point of view.
174.
by pmccool 17y ago
I'm extremely dubious about the claim that it's harder to repeal old laws than to create new ones. Why would this be the case? The big problem I see is that it makes it harder to know what the law says at any given time; that's an inevitabl
175.
by pmccool 17y ago
What about "know thy enemy", assuming that Stallman is fundamentally against making money?
176.
by pmccool 17y ago
Interestingly. the president of the International Actors' Federation is quoted as saying that "we should change the word piracy". I couldn't agree more. Robbery, kidnappi g and murder on the high seas is far more serious than illegal filesh
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by pmccool 17y ago
I can't help suspecting that part of it is using their supermarket business to fund their moves into things like alcohol and petrol.
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by pmccool 17y ago
I'd say that legislation is more important than ever; privacy can now be violated in ways that were technically impossible 30 years ago. I agree that enforcing privacy laws is problematic, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, nor that it
179.
by pmccool 17y ago
Thing is, the sort of thing that BASIC makes you good at is exactly the sort of thing that Dijkstra was railing against. The point, as I understand it wasn't that learning BASIC made you incapable of writing code, but that it taught habits
180.
by pmccool 17y ago
Agree. I fear that "fundamental" is becoming debased in the same way as "evil" seems to be.

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