ruricolist

13 ms·

91.
by ruricolist 11y ago
Does anyone read actually read code left-to-right, line-by-line? I for one start with the shape of the code -- the pattern of color (from syntax highlighting) and negative space (from indentation) -- and only then focus on the different p
92.
by ruricolist 11y ago
This is a good example of the technical restrictions that make lyrics a (proper) subset of poetry: note in particular the abundance of long vowels, which make it not just readable but singable.
93.
by ruricolist 11y ago
You aren't by any chance Yvor Winters?
94.
by ruricolist 11y ago
The rest of the story: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-parable-of-the-fisherman/
95.
by ruricolist 11y ago
With the obvious proviso that by the time you graduate said career path may no longer exist.
96.
by ruricolist 12y ago
I dispute the basic narrative here. If you have tail calls, you have GOTO. If you have closures, you have pointers. The story (so far) is not one of features disappearing , but of features being subsumed by other more general, abstract fea
97.
by ruricolist 12y ago
Had the author bothered to read Livio's book, he might appreciate that the reason it is so easy to see the golden ratio in designs is not DNA, but math: anytime you divide a measurement into two parts, one larger than the other, the ra
98.
by ruricolist 12y ago
In some cases, yes. If you are committed to doing everything in JS, then you have two choices: 1. Deliver a degraded experience to modern browsers and a terrible experience to older browsers. 2. Deliver a good experience to modern browsers
99.
by ruricolist 12y ago
Why browser compatibility? Why polyfills? I don't understand the logic that goes from "Modern browsers with fast JS engines make fancy web apps practical" to "let's make sure our fancy web apps run in old browsers w
100.
by ruricolist 12y ago
I was just thinking to myself the other day that the danger of actually taking the time to write something thoughtful and cogent the days is that once you have convinced the intelligent, open-minded readers, that leaves everyone else to wri
101.
by ruricolist 12y ago
See The Chess Variants Pages ( http://www.chessvariants.org ) for other historic chess variants, such as chaturanga (the original), Tamerlane chess (like shatranj with extra pieces and a larger board), and Byzantine chess (played
102.
by ruricolist 12y ago
Now I understand why I was never able to find out anything about where my great-grandfather came from -- very likely it was one of those little villages that were simply wiped out.
103.
by ruricolist 12y ago
About wheelbarrows: the Western wheelbarrow isn't unoptimized, it's just optimized for a different purpose: loading instead of moving. Having the wheel at the front allows for a deep body with low sides, which makes it easier to f
104.
by ruricolist 12y ago
This recipe, like the original, suffers from a bizarre lack of bacon grease.
105.
by ruricolist 12y ago
There's an excellent paper on how to build list comprehensions (in Common Lisp) on top of simpler iteration constructs: http://www.ai.sri.com/~latendre/listCompFinal.pdf I have a (very loose) implementation of thi
106.
by ruricolist 12y ago
I remember this piece being better. Now it seems rather glib. As someone who programs mostly in Lisp, I think I’ve learned more from studying array languages than from anything else outside of Lisp. Implementing a handful of functions and d
107.
by ruricolist 12y ago
This used to be a big problem in astronomy, before the introduction of computers. Astronomers would use a special device, called a "blink comparator", to rapidly switch between two pictures so they could see the changes between th
108.
by ruricolist 12y ago
I haven't found that to be the case. I don't mean that Clozure's performance is bad, but optimizing numeric code is SBCL's reason for being. When I switched from SBCL to Clozure, I had to move things like password hashin
109.
by ruricolist 12y ago
To be fair, the compiler is more than a bit more primitive. Clozure doesn't come close to SBCL where numeric code is concerned. But the garbage collector really is much better, especially under heavy concurrency.
110.
by ruricolist 12y ago
I imagine people who are interested in this would also be interested in the Silk Road Gourmet: www.silkroadgourmet.com. Everything from Babylonian recipes to reconstructions of Roman fish sauce.
111.
by ruricolist 12y ago
In working on TBRSS, which is intended as a technical solution to the problem of the fast web, I have increasingly come to suspect that it is, in the social sense, much too late. There is an entire generation of people out there to whom
112.
by ruricolist 12y ago
Is this a satire? I mean this seems like a satire of the fact that the unfortunate framing of functional programming in terms of "purity" and "impurity" clouds a very abstract question with the intense instinctive reacti
113.
by ruricolist 12y ago
For the record, exactly such a library already exists: http://common-lisp.net/~frideau/lil-ilc2012/lil-ilc2012.html Although the specific problem of state-with-backtracking would be more idiomatically solved with
114.
by ruricolist 13y ago
One could make the argument (I think so, at least) that if the number of associations you are dealing with is small enough to write out literally, then using a hash table is a mistake. It might be one of Common Lisp's strengths that is
115.
by ruricolist 13y ago
The tricky thing with all of these (pjax &c.) is that by loading with JavaScript, you lose progressive rendering, so while reducing latency you may actually lose perceived speed.
116.
by ruricolist 13y ago
There is one very strong practical justification for pseudonyms: some people have very common names. There are thousands of people named Paul Rodriguez, probably hundreds named Paul M. Rodriguez, but there is only one person who goes by &qu
117.
by ruricolist 13y ago
Unfortunately this doesn't work for programming, because in programming we never really know in advance how long anything is going to take, not even within an order of magnitude: a five-day problem looks just like a five-minute problem
118.
by ruricolist 13y ago
Any specific complaints?
119.
Show HN: A feed reader for readers(tbrss.com)
2 points by ruricolist 13y ago|2 comments
120.
by ruricolist 13y ago
The boldest of the officers resumed speaking. 'That one ship is ninety million miles long, Your Highness. It shimmers like fire, but moves so fast that we cannot approach it. But it came into the center of our fleet almost touching our

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