samatman

14 ms·

181.
by samatman 2y ago
An existing research exemption for copying materials has existed for many decades. Libraries have copiers. That they ruled that this specific case is not covered by that exemption is unfortunate, and the argument is not the slam dunk you ap
182.
by samatman 2y ago
It's in fact trivially easy to predict whether an author's life will end. Watch: I predict an author's life will end. I give it very high odds indeed.
183.
by samatman 2y ago
Daughter of Jerry Pournelle, btw. Google identifies her in the knowledge bar as "Jerry Pournelle's son", which is not the case, and furthermore, never was. My sole interest was in confirming the family connection, which I vag
184.
by samatman 2y ago
I've considered it from time to time. The conclusion I keep drawing is that, if I were going to benefit from a selection-oriented editing paradigm, I would use Visual mode more than I do. The multi-cursors, those I want. But I'm
185.
by samatman 2y ago
Sure, not interested in changing the past, for many reasons not least of which is that it appears to be impossible. The Python team surely did not go in to Python 3 blindly, but they botched it anyway. What I mean to say is that Python as
186.
by samatman 2y ago
There are some meaningful differences between Zig and D in this specific area, specifically, D uses exceptions and has garbage collection as the default memory strategy. That will surely result in different approaches to the leaf-allocatio
187.
by samatman 2y ago
Good thing they aren't thin-skinned and censorious! Being able to take well-meant criticism in stride is so important, I'm glad that's a core value for them.
188.
by samatman 2y ago
I would suggest languages facing the same problem learn from Perl 5's success, rather than the various failures of Python 3. Every† minor point release of Perl 5 creates backward-incompatible changes. These can be opted into individual
189.
by samatman 2y ago
I heartily agree with #2 if the language isn't Zig. Which actually supports your point: allocating in leaf functions is idiomatic in Zig, and it works out fine, because there's no allocation without an Allocator, and even if that
190.
by samatman 2y ago
I think Mike is correct. My reasoning by analogy follows. There's a game called Skedaddle, and a Usenet group, rec.players.skedaddle. A well-known player, Mike, offers a $5000 challenge for a feat, called the four-froot-hoot, which he
191.
by samatman 2y ago
What else could it possibly be?
192.
by samatman 2y ago
Spelled with an Angstrom, or with a Latin Capital Letter A With Ring Above?
193.
by samatman 2y ago
It's safe to reject Cc, Cn, and Cs. You should probably reject Co as well, even though elves can't input their names if you do that. Don't reject Cf. That's asking for trouble.
194.
by samatman 2y ago
Rare WalterBright L taken in that thread. Sure, Unicode isn't the Platonic ideal of a character encoding. It has warts, legacy features, and.. and it is a universal encoding of all human writing. What an exceptional and incredible acco
195.
by samatman 2y ago
This is a generic ideological tangent. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity Please try to follow this guideline better in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com&#
196.
by samatman 2y ago
Just as a tip: the links between comments and replies on HN is pretty thin so it can be hard to follow the connection between a comment and what it's reply to. I get fewer (not none!) of this kind of misunderstood reply after adopting
197.
by samatman 2y ago
> SQLite also always had a null type, surely? In 'stringly typed' languages, the natural value of NULL is the empty string. SQLite currently distinguishes between "" and NULL, and I don't know if this was alway
198.
by samatman 2y ago
I've discovered that deploying this quote as a compliment to someone's ac hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow, half-of-Common-Lisp code, makes them increasingly nervous until you get to the punchline.
199.
by samatman 2y ago
I'm reasonably sure that this estimate is far off the mark. The numbers I've seen suggest that the number of new software developers entering the industry has doubled every five years since at least the mid 90s. That's not
200.
by samatman 2y ago
The article draws a distinction between logging and print debugging, which it should, but in recent work that distinction has been less important to me in practice. I mostly write Zig these days (love it) and the main thing I'm working
201.
by samatman 2y ago
You'd hate my (functional!) watch cufflinks then.
202.
by samatman 2y ago
Kipling is one of the greatest authors in the English language. His work is acclaimed, universally, by anyone with taste. So to compare Dostoevsky to Kipling is high praise!
203.
by samatman 2y ago
As someone who finds chess problems interesting (I'm bad at them), they're really a third sort of thing. In that good chess problems are rarely taken from live play, they're a specific sort of thing which follows its own log
204.
by samatman 2y ago
That's a fair ask, that post was not one of my better moments. As much as I dislike the rhetorical tactic wielded with "everyone who doesn't agree with me is simply confused", a one-sentence tell off does nothing to coun
205.
by samatman 2y ago
Did you look at the data for pickups?
206.
by samatman 2y ago
Dang, it's a serious problem when discussions like this result in any serious attempts to engage from one side getting flagged to death. That's what happens here, and on any news involving the Gaza War, for quite some time. To so
207.
by samatman 2y ago
> I see that many people are confused [...] by my take that math talent isn't primarily a matter of genes Speaking only for myself, I'm not confused at all. Rather I vigorously disagree with this statement, and think that stu
208.
by samatman 2y ago
It's a matter of the definition. The general factor of intelligence, which is measured through various somewhat lossy proxies like IQ tests, is exactly the degree to which someone exceeds expectation on all cognitive tasks (or vice ve
209.
by samatman 2y ago
Simpson's Paradox[0] is the reason people are so easily seduced by the tempting, but dead wrong, illusion that humans are in any sense equal in their innate capacity for anything. Because it turns out that, in the NBA, height does not
210.
by samatman 2y ago
No, but I'm neither omniscient nor able to see into the future. It's not clear to me that the sentence you're referring to had been posted 18 hours ago, and in any case, I hadn't seen it.

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