qntm

13 ms·

91.
by qntm 15y ago
> Nerds are expected to be horrendously, gratuitously crass, offensive and insensitive of people's emotions. This is like being mad that the sky is blue. Speaking as one of millions of pleasant, sensitive nerds, I find this offensive.
92.
by qntm 15y ago
I would be very interested to see a single real-world use for a fixed-point combinator. I have a reasonable understanding of what one does, but I still haven't got the faintest idea why you would ever need one, nor have I seen a single situ
93.
by qntm 15y ago
By the "old news is still news to someone" logic, the same 2500 stories could circulate through the HN front page over and over again forever.
94.
by qntm 15y ago
Of course, there are plenty of actual tricky programming concepts: closures, tail recursion, coroutines, memory management, concurrency, regular expression matching, caching, algorithmic complexity, naming things...
95.
by qntm 15y ago
A function call in a for loop's conditional is practically C best practice. K&R do it on almost every page.
96.
by qntm 15y ago
Isn't this more of a problem with rel="start" than rel="next" and rel="prev"?
97.
by qntm 15y ago
> I think Google is right here. If you mark something as a sequence, it is reasonable to presume that the start of the sequence is the normal entry point, in this case the front page of your blog. I disagree. Just because the rel="prev"
98.
by qntm 15y ago
Indeed. But the point I was making was that this hypothetical coder introduced more complexity by adding "i--;" whereas the code could equally well be fixed, in the same number of keystrokes, while reducing complexity, by removing "i++;".
99.
by qntm 15y ago
What's wrong with the code, then, is that it was written under a little too much pressure for the developer to think clearly. for ( int i=0 ; i < this.MyControl.TabPages.Count ; ) { this.MyControl.TabPages.Remove ( this
100.
by qntm 15y ago
The best I've managed is this: http://qntm.org/fib I find that removing all mention of Y combinators made the whole thing a lot easier to read.
101.
by qntm 15y ago
I'm going to write up some sort of explanation once I can get my head around it myself.
102.
by qntm 15y ago
The way I look at it, there is only one reason to write tests: to assure shippability . Everything else is a pleasant bonus. It amazes me that so much can be written without even touching on this.
103.
by qntm 15y ago
Windows 7 was the first operating system I used which actually got this right. The options present, like "keep the second file, but rename it" and "do the same thing for all the rest", were options that I actually wanted to use and which we
104.
by qntm 15y ago
Thus, mathematics unexpectedly turns into a Choose Your Own Adventure novel!
105.
by qntm 15y ago
What is true in mathematics is whatever leads to no logical contradictions.
106.
by qntm 15y ago
That has merit. Personally I usually find myself doing something more like this: if (argc != 3) { printf ("Wrong number of arguments"); // throw an exception or return NULL or something } if (!fname) { printf (
107.
by qntm 15y ago
Certainly. The else block in this case is executed when "NULL != fname" is false. That's an unnecessary double negative and takes a nonzero amount of mental effort to unscramble. The example I gave reverses this. This would also be acceptab
108.
by qntm 15y ago
In addition to everything else, please don't use a negative condition in an if/else statement. if(NULL != fname) { g = fopen(fname, "w+"); } else { g = tmpfile(); } Better: if(NULL == fname) {
109.
by qntm 15y ago
Man, and here I thought that documentation-driven development was the top of the ladder (above test-driven development, above just writing the code first).
110.
by qntm 15y ago
Well, if we are, then this certainly isn't the only industry in which everybody is a fraud. Look at the people who make movies, or generate electricity, or trade stock, or grow corn. Look at the people who run our various countries. It's a
111.
by qntm 15y ago
Doesn't that become awfully confusing?
112.
by qntm 15y ago
Speaking as a novice Ubuntu user, I don't even know what "install a port" means. Do you mean "open a port"?
113.
by qntm 15y ago
This is not a perfect solution because the RLO character isn't printed, there is nothing to highlight. There are several other non-printing characters in Unicode that I'm aware of, like the zero-width space.
114.
by qntm 15y ago
Just forcing a company to say "We expect X amount of growth in the next financial quarter, and the reason we expect this amount of growth is - even though we are an international financial corporation - guesswork and gut feeling , rather
115.
by qntm 15y ago
Interestingly, the article explicitly states that our dictionary supports only the exact string lookup command, dict.contains(string). Strictly speaking, the full content of the dictionary isn't available to us, and we can't create the re
116.
by qntm 15y ago
This was actually going to be my solution as well. Regex engines are optimised for exactly this sort of problem, why duplicate the work manually?
117.
by qntm 15y ago
I'd be willing to say it right now, since I agree with it.
118.
by qntm 15y ago
Just backslash-escape the internal right-paren. (So do I ;\))
119.
by qntm 15y ago
I think the code is the solution. If the code isn't written, the problem isn't solved.
120.
by qntm 15y ago
The boy should provide load-testing services as a spinoff business.

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