rmunn

5 ms·

31.
by rmunn 26d ago
Six months ago I was teaching a beginning-programming course to six kids, using Snap!, so I was reading the forums. And there was a group effort to add documentation to many of the blocks that were lacking it. I haven't been back in a
32.
by rmunn 28d ago
> It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard , on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you
33.
by rmunn 28d ago
> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection. Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee,
34.
by rmunn 28d ago
A reminder of the guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. [...] Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." It's good to have political opinions. But please don't use HN as a p
35.
by rmunn 29d ago
> ... most of the new testament has him [Jesus] as a fully separate person with his own separate agenda ... Just want to correct a couple errors of fact here, by quoting from the sources that you're misunderstanding. "And he wi
36.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used Engl
37.
by rmunn 1mo ago
P.S. Another reason why Macbeth might have more injuries than either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet is the setting. In both Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet they're fencing with rapiers, appropriately to the setting. But in Macbeth they&#x27
38.
by rmunn 1mo ago
It's also a very physical play with a large number of onstage fights. Fight choreography is some of the most dangerous stuff to do onstage: a single mistake and someone can easily be hit by a sword that was supposed to just barely mi
39.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I could not successfully search for green-bar; I was turning up a brand of rebar made from fiberglass and various vegan bars and restaurants in different cities... but nothing related to coding or text editing. Do you have a link handy that
40.
by rmunn 1mo ago
2^27 is 128 megabytes. How much RAM do you want the decompressor to have to allocate for every file? Especially since you can't tell, by looking only at the file size of a compressed file, how many bytes it will decompress to. You co
41.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I agree that the cond example is committing the sin of trying to align with tabs. I wrote it because I had misunderstood something you were saying. But also, I've personally seen situations like this. I was working in a team whose inde
42.
by rmunn 1mo ago
The counterexample I've personally seen is multiple people editing the same file with different editors. The first person has his editor configured to indent with tab characters, and he writes Python code like this: def example()
43.
by rmunn 1mo ago
The other problem I've personally seen with "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" is when your editor destroys your tab-space mix when it adjusts the indentation. I've personally seen an editor, I believe VS Code
44.
by rmunn 1mo ago
Agreed... but see my Lisp example in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593406 for a place where tabs end up unavoidably ambiguous. Because in that `cond` example the tabs look like they're used for indentation, bu
45.
by rmunn 1mo ago
Got it. You're looking at the problem from the other direction. Yes, tabs are unambiguous if they're the only thing used for indentation. It's when some people use tabs and others use spaces that ambiguity arises. But there a
46.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I never had formal training in Latin, just what I've picked up. But grammatically, I would think the second line would translate to "No champion hath the lord", not "no lord hath the champion". Am I misunderstanding
47.
by rmunn 1mo ago
That seems like a decent way to handle the mixed-spaces-and-tabs scenario, even between lines: one line starts with `<tab><tab>`, the next line `<tab><tab><sp><sp><sp><sp>`, that's an ind
48.
by rmunn 1mo ago
What "boneheaded things with tabs" are you referring to? The picture I'm piecing together from your comments suggests that you may use tab characters in a different way than most people seem to, so I'd quite like a furth
49.
by rmunn 1mo ago
> Did you mix up your code points there? It's space that's ambiguous, not tab. Space is always the same width, but tab means a variable number of spaces (usually either 4 or 8, but I've seen 3 before) depending on people&#
50.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I mean, obviously that one should only appear within Mongolian text and not within indentation. To state explicitly what should be implicitly obvious, there is no valid reason (that I'm aware of, I welcome any non-facetious correction)
51.
by rmunn 1mo ago
Or you just forbid mixing spaces and tabs in the same indentation sequence, the way most whitespace-sensitive languages seem to end up doing. Or you make a slightly more reasonable rule: spaces may follow tabs, but no tabs may follow a spac
52.
by rmunn 1mo ago
> And they still can’t count the R’s in strawberry! Really? I do not have the time to survey the modern LLMs to see if your assertion is correct, but if it is then I'm surprised; I would have thought that that one would have shown u
53.
by rmunn 1mo ago
You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is ent
54.
by rmunn 1mo ago
> ... confused about why I would talk to the human that prompted the AI, rather than the AI that did the work. One reason is because you can't talk to the AI that did the work, not unless the human who prompted it is able to hand
55.
by rmunn 1mo ago
The current "lifetime of the author + X years" rules in effect in the United States still carry the same perverse incentive, though the incentive diminishes rapidly as X gets larger; with the very large value of X in effect today
56.
by rmunn 1mo ago
That was my thought too. Nothing in an ecosystem exists in isolation. Change a single variable, especially a dramatic change like going from 8% to 60% on a single variable, and there will be ripple effects throughout the local ecosystem. Th
57.
by rmunn 1mo ago
And probably playing Timberborn on a second monitor at the same time.
58.
by rmunn 1mo ago
Oh, sure. What's normal for the bank sure isn't normal for most individuals. I see that someone misread my comment to the point of writing a presumably-angry message that got flagged (so I'm only guessing what it contained),
59.
by rmunn 1mo ago
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for begi
60.
by rmunn 1mo ago
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the bank

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