smosher

26 ms·

211.
by smosher 14y ago
I see a frightening number of people buying into the disturbing assertions made in TFA: - that analytical thinking isn't necessary for programming. - that translating pseudocode is a sufficient test of programming skill. - that Excel isn't
212.
by smosher 14y ago
My Cygwin experience has been quite authentic actually. But I was cheating, I'd use it for SSH and rxvt in combination with xming to establish a forwarded X session. (And x-mouse and alt-drag for that nearly authentic mouse behaviour.) Desp
213.
by smosher 14y ago
Since the introduction of the GPL3, there's been a steady purge of GNU software from OS X. Is it all GNU software that's being purged, or just the GPLv3 licensed stuff? If the latter, I can't say I blame them. The former case can go eithe
214.
by smosher 14y ago
In particular idiom does not mean something deliberately entered into the language to solve a particular problem—that's just regular semantics. Idioms are by nature emergent. For example I might be conscious of 3 idioms among all the langua
215.
by smosher 14y ago
Sure, you can handle errors and you can explicitly pass the buck. That's no different than what we do in C. Exceptions are out-of-band (from a regular return value), and what you're talking about is entirely in-band. What you're doing, func
216.
by smosher 14y ago
What am I missing here? This appears to be fully in-band and contains a redundant code path (constituting a NaN bug in languages with incomparable NaN—no idea if that applies to Go) for no apparent reason.
217.
by smosher 14y ago
The definition you just quoted fits perfectly with what you said you wished racism meant. Mazel tov! Why are you arguing about this? Your homework is to go out and tell everyone you know that you're an unrepentant racist.
218.
by smosher 14y ago
Let me be very clear: I am saying you are a racist independent of whether or not you recognize differences between races, real or imagined. Of course it has negative connotations. Most people don't like racists. You can't seem to deal wit
219.
by smosher 14y ago
If PHP is English I am cutting out my tongue.
220.
by smosher 14y ago
A racist who's too cowardly to own it. Why is racism and cowardice such a common combination?
221.
by smosher 14y ago
IIRC there are several posts on that blog just obsessing over how awesome static typing is. On the other hand there are probably more people who are ignorant about the value of static typing than that of dynamic typing. Every time this is b
222.
by smosher 14y ago
Ten Thousand Hours.
223.
by smosher 14y ago
The human ability to generalize concepts is amazing, watch—I'll swap out your of matter for of quantum information and suddenly you're up to speed on subject of discourse: "The teleportation of quantum information." Magic! Your langua
224.
by smosher 14y ago
There's no such thing as F-T-L travel of anything. It's okay though, the quantum information is not traveling.
225.
by smosher 14y ago
Are you referring to the potential weaknesses just discovered recently?
226.
by smosher 14y ago
Not in any sense is it dishonest to call it quantum teleportation, since the quantum state is precisely (and only) what is subject to the phenomenon. What is dishonest is the claim that F-T-L communication is possible. The quantum state doe
227.
by smosher 14y ago
Nowhere that I know of, at least not for certain. The company with the mail server I used has been subsumed by another company, however some other companies from that time may still be running compatible mailers.
228.
by smosher 14y ago
I am chose my phrasing for the very reason that it's merely incredibly unlikely and not at all impossible. I've even sent mail with bang-paths post-2000 just to confound the recipient, though it is a rare network that would accommodate that
229.
by smosher 14y ago
A few years ago I would have agreed, and I still do in general. But now I'm not sure that Perl grammars aren't up to the task and still as 'regular' as PCRE. However you still shouldn't be writing your own unless you're writing an email val
230.
by smosher 14y ago
Just for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang_path#UUCP_for_mail_routin... But yeah, that's effectively dead and you probably don't want to try sending mail that way.
231.
by smosher 14y ago
I sure hope you're not accepting table and field names from an untrusted user. If you can't trust the individual who is administrating the application you might want to rethink some things.
232.
by smosher 14y ago
Hawkins' reasoning struck me as very misguided. I'm not an expert in the field and I'm not up to speed on what Numenta's current form is, but his concept of creating half an intelligence has always offended my sensibilities. I wanted to say
233.
by smosher 14y ago
The work at CERN is for Science, not Religion (or misplaced Patriotism if you prefer.)
234.
by smosher 15y ago
I'm glad to hear that. As another poster mentioned, I also favour BSD style licenses for libraries, but I don't scoff at LGPL.
235.
by smosher 15y ago
He was exaggerating a bit when he said "tens" of years ago. It wasn't that long ago that dialup was downright pervasive in North America and Europe. At that time it didn't take too much abuse to discover just what an overstuffed pipe would
236.
by smosher 15y ago
This is an odd thing to complain about. Sure it's a UI faux pas, but it's nothing compared the the creative placement of cancel buttons that's been introduced in 4+. It took me a full day to figure out why 90% of the files I downloaded were
237.
by smosher 15y ago
Do you mean clean room? That protects you from copyright, but not from patents.
238.
by smosher 15y ago
I keep seeing Unlambda (and co.) in literature here and there. It's sort of surprising to see an esolang show up in computer science theory. It's fitting at the same time. I was on the mailing list, and I can tell you the people who come up
239.
by smosher 15y ago
We have some Python code kicking around, but it hasn't penetrated our codebase very much, and in fact has never made itself integral. We have one very small yet important tool that had an implementation in Python but it was eventually rewri
240.
by smosher 15y ago
By now Perl 6 is viewed as best an interesting research project by organizations using Perl 5 in production. As a member of an organization using Perl 5 (among many other languages), I should probably speak up. Though we haven't donated m

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