smanek

70 ms·

661.
by smanek 18y ago
Heh, funny. I just spent a few hours doing basically the same thing with Java. Right now it works with either functors or dynamic proxies, and I think I might be able to do it with annotation processing (roughly the same as decorators). I'l
662.
by smanek 18y ago
Sounds good. But, there is nothing wrong with using some other language as your intermediate 'bytecode.' If memory serves, early versions of C++ compiled to C, Arc (basically) compiles to Scheme, Python can compile to C, and many others. Ei
663.
by smanek 18y ago
Thanks for the response. By "not a very fun environment" I was referring to the Wasabi programming environment, not the people/social/office environment. Sorry for the ambiguity. I've read most of your essays, and the FogCreek environment s
664.
by smanek 18y ago
That's a fair point - I don't have all the facts. I do respect that you had a huge (and effective) code base in ASP that you (for very valid business reasons) didn't want to rewrite from scratch. I understand that each of the decisions you
665.
by smanek 18y ago
Yep, right you are. That seems like a much more reasonable way to go. Parallelize the build - not the compiler.
666.
by smanek 18y ago
What's wrong with that? All else being equal, compiling will generally be faster. Most languages (Python, Java, Ruby, most Common Lisps, etc) do compile - just (usually) to some intermediate and portable bytecode rather than raw machine c
667.
by smanek 18y ago
I'm a big fan of incremental builds - no point in recompiling 1M LOC when only a few source files have changed. Image based systems (like Common Lisp) are particularly nice because you can just recompile the functions that have changed and
668.
by smanek 18y ago
I'm enjoying RWH (available freely at http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/ ). I'm only about a third of the way through it, but every few chapters the author ostensibly takes a break from the pedagogy to show us how to build a real progr
669.
by smanek 18y ago
What more can Stanford really do? He goes there tuition free, his room and board are free, and he gets subsidized work during the summer. It was two weeks between when the semester ended and he started receiving his summer work paychecks -
670.
by smanek 18y ago
Wouldn't it? Given limitless energy, you can literally create matter out of thin air (E=mc^2) ... You could create new planets, replicas of anything, etc. Hell, you could even distort time to fit your needs. Granted, it would take more ener
671.
by smanek 18y ago
Did you read the article? First of all, it's just talking about undergrad - not graduate school. They are different. Second, the study cited shows that attending a prestigious school does increase earnings, contrary to some misinterpret
672.
by smanek 18y ago
I stand corrected
673.
by smanek 18y ago
Of course it is. Sequoia gave YC money in return for a part ownership of YC.
674.
by smanek 18y ago
The contracts themselves are good in principle, they were just executed stupidly (and the stupidness was rewarded with a bailout). But there is no reason that I shouldn't be allowed to sell you a guarantee that "X" won't happen (for any val
675.
by smanek 18y ago
This is promising. Probably the best technical solution to spam I've heard. Twitter + PGP + Good UI could work ....
676.
by smanek 18y ago
Almost all the energy a computer takes in (over 99%) is 'wasted' as heat. Talk to anyone who has ever run a datacenter. The heat output of a machine is exactly equal to the amount of energy consumed. Maybe a watt or two leaves the room as e
677.
by smanek 18y ago
For what it's worth, this is 9 months old and all the specific problems mentioned were fixed a while ago. But the general techniques Zed presents are still valid and interesting.
678.
by smanek 18y ago
I think the big problem with rendering LaTeX client side is that everyone uses different style files, fonts, etc. The options are to either include them all on the page (which would make it difficult for me to upload a LaTeX file, since I'd
679.
by smanek 18y ago
Yep, it isn't a new idea. The premise of Von Neumann machines is that you work around the cpu/data bottleneck with increasingly faster (and larger) caches. You have a tiny bit of ludicrously fast on chip memory (registers), a few megs of su
680.
Ask HN: What headphones do you use in the office?
11 points by smanek 18y ago|30 comments
681.
by smanek 18y ago
He wants a 10K RPM HDD and a laptop that stays cool ... Those two seem mutually exclusive to me. It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast, and it all gets turned into heat in the end. MLC SSDs are pretty cheap these days - if you
682.
by smanek 18y ago
But I don't care about random-access speed when I'm just using it for media (music, photos, video). I think within a few years most people will end up with a small (a few hundred GB) SSD for their OS and programs, and a very large tradition
683.
by smanek 18y ago
The movie has a rave review from Ebert http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/having_wonderful_tim... . The creator is also accepting donations, to help cover the creation costs (especially for the song licensing fees) at http://question
684.
Beautiful Full Length Movie Released under Creative Commons(sitasingstheblues.com)
50 points by smanek 18y ago|7 comments
685.
by smanek 18y ago
Pretty much. The trick is that since scheme is a lisp-1 there is no need for a different special operator to signify you're declaring a local function instead of a local variable (a la the flet/let dichotomy).
686.
by smanek 18y ago
Fair enough. But, in my experience, most issues that cause deadlock reduce to binary decisions - in which case having an odd number of deciders is sufficient. If you have to account for n-ary decisions, then you can never be to guaranteed t
687.
by smanek 18y ago
Because Weebly is a YC company, and PG probably hard coded in an exception for them ;-)
688.
by smanek 18y ago
That's stupid. Two is prime - which does allow for deadlock. And for odd primes, why are they better than just odds?
689.
by smanek 18y ago
You may want to turn off directory browsing ... Playing around for a few seconds didn't reveal anything particularly bad (although, this was very interesting: http://divvyshot.com/static/bandwidth_costs.xls ). The Java applet also seems to
690.
by smanek 18y ago
A recession is going to, somewhat counter-intuitively, increase obesity. Unhealthy food is far cheaper (per calorie) than healthy food ( http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he... ). That is also one of the reasons you

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