psykotic

90 ms·

721.
by psykotic 16y ago
> You haven't actually used Fortran, have you? It's okay for demonstrating short snippets of code, but actually writing Fortran programs is pretty awful if you're used to modern languages. It's like the syntax of BASIC combined with the
722.
by psykotic 16y ago
> Oh come on, they are quite rare in the US as well, and the US is a LOT larger than Germany. Yes, if "a LOT larger" means 3.5x larger. Germany has 82 million inhabitants and is the most populous country in Europe.
723.
by psykotic 16y ago
Yes, you got it. In my mind there is also a difference between fully adapted words like psychology and foreign technical words such as techne, gnosis and episteme the way you might use them in a class on Plato. This second class of words,
724.
by psykotic 16y ago
That's where pragmatism comes in! Some words are grandfathered into the language and that's that. For names of people that have yet to be entered into dictionaries, I fight my little fight to have their pronunciations conform more closely t
725.
by psykotic 16y ago
There are two levels of mispronunciation. If you pronounce 'Hermite' in English so it rhymes with 'thermite', you have no excuse. It's ignorant and plain wrong. If you pronounce it with a silent 'H' and use the right ending sound and as clo
726.
by psykotic 16y ago
Yes, that tends to happen automatically if you speak fast. I'm fastidious on this question because I hear most foreign names utterly mispronounced by English speakers, so I try to do my small part in rectifying it.
727.
by psykotic 16y ago
Wonderful writing! He should collect these essays into book form to counterbalance the influence of pseudo-erudite pedants like Lynne Truss.
728.
by psykotic 16y ago
> In my personal experience, I won't easily switch between languages For me the trickiest is switching fluently between the sound systems of several languages in a split second. Suppose I'm speaking in American English and mention a dou
729.
by psykotic 16y ago
> There is a lesser known variation of "find a cycle in a linked list" There's also a lesser known alternative to Floyd's tortoise-and-hare algorithm called Brent's algorithm. It's a little faster in practice, but more importantly it re
730.
by psykotic 16y ago
Memoization and dynamic programming are not exactly the same. Memoization wins when the filled-in part of the table is expected to be sparse. Because dynamic programming works bottom up, it always fills in the entire table. Memoization's do
731.
by psykotic 16y ago
Other popular examples he could consider adding: Image seam carving. Remember when this was all the rage a while ago? The 2D offset pattern is "up-left, up, up-right" for the vanilla version of the algorithm. If you want to support seams wi
732.
by psykotic 16y ago
> Also, there's a tendency to hear about a patent and think that because your system does something similar, it would be infringing against a patent, but that also is not necessarily the case. Right. You can often dodge patent claims by
733.
by psykotic 16y ago
Thanks for the long post! That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselve
734.
by psykotic 16y ago
We can call it a tree of delegation if you like. It sounds reminiscent of how Linux development is managed. At least to me this suggests a scale that's distinctly beyond a community.
735.
by psykotic 16y ago
Hashing adds a touch of mystique but doesn't serve much of a security purpose when the list of candidates is so short. :)
736.
by psykotic 16y ago
Yes, it's an interesting set of problems. It makes sense to discuss them on a startup-oriented community website like Hacker News. My humble suggestion is to step back and look at simpler, non-scaleable ways of building communities that are
737.
by psykotic 16y ago
Communities that are so large they require webs of trust to be managed hardly deserve to be called communities. No matter what you call them, they don't offer what I'm looking for.
738.
by psykotic 16y ago
I'm skeptical of technological solutions. Up-voting and down-voting are an unnecessary and in fact harmful ornament to reasoned agreement and disagreement. If you're posting under your real name in a community of your professional peers, al
739.
by psykotic 16y ago
Re: The Black Sun The only communities I've witnessed that maintained or increased their quality over time were private, invitation-only affairs overseen by a respected and benevolent dictator. MUD-Dev was like this in its heyday. JCL invit
740.
by psykotic 16y ago
BDD, TDD, Agile, XP, Software Craftsmanship, etc. But let's not pollute this comment thread any further. I'll try to keep my snide asides in check.
741.
by psykotic 16y ago
Sorry, I couldn't help myself. In my defense, I was genuinely expecting an article on BDDs and was disappointed when it wasn't! Testing is fine. Process buzzword bingo is silly. Of the exceptional programmers I know, not one worries about a
742.
by psykotic 16y ago
Here I was expecting an article on using binary decision diagrams to efficiently solve some combinatorial problem with business applications! Why this confusing initialism? Oh wait, silly me. For a second there I forgot that the intersectio
743.
by psykotic 16y ago
I suppose, said or insinuated no such thing. What a childish comeback. Of course it isn't evil. If you're starving then making money is not only not evil but a necessity. Beyond meeting your immediate needs, working endless hours at a repet
744.
by psykotic 16y ago
> yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I coul
745.
by psykotic 16y ago
> There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history. Everyone tends to view history from an angle that supports their preconceptions. You don't seem to be any exception. > Terrible as the worker conditions might hav
746.
by psykotic 16y ago
Your conclusions are poorly supported by the evidence and reasoning you proffer. > 1. Anything that's free but is limited gets abused. Free does not mean unrestricted. Degrees in law and medicine are highly sought in Denmark, and the un
747.
by psykotic 16y ago
Yes, that's texture swizzling. It's useful any time you are accessing higher-rank arrays in a spatially coherent manner without any directional bias. Bit interleaving only works with power-of-two dimensions. That's limiting. But for the cac
748.
by psykotic 16y ago
There are lots of practical uses. One that immediately comes to mind is cache-friendly layout of power-of-two textures, usually called texture swizzling. Another application is designing clock trees on VLSI chips to minimize clock skew; tha
749.
by psykotic 16y ago
I am a Danish citizen. She is a university-educated project manager for a large international engineering firm in Thailand.
750.
by psykotic 16y ago
My live-in partner went home with me to Denmark for Christmas. The border crossing in Copenhagen Airport was pleasant and completely without incident. What was maddening was the process of applying for a visitor's visa. In addition to forms

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