sramsay

46 ms·

361.
by sramsay 13y ago
> At every count, each soldier looks at their neighbors, considers what they themselves were already doing, and decides what to do next, completely according to what they see. Anyone else think this is an incredibly ugly problem statemen
362.
by sramsay 13y ago
Anyone notice that this reads more-or-less like a description of Steve Jobs?
363.
by sramsay 13y ago
Oh, for heaven's sake. Now that he's gone and written this template, what the hell are we going to talk about on HN? Everything is ruined.
364.
by sramsay 13y ago
I've been through these phases too. But they keep on recurring time after time. Me too. As I get older, though (I'm well past "maturity" ;), I find myself going back to C more and more. I'm not exactly sure why.
365.
by sramsay 13y ago
Just out of curiosity . . . What followed the phase in which you were writing everything in C?
366.
by sramsay 13y ago
There's nothing like the fiery, strident rhetoric of a manifesto to get one's heart pounding. "Application requirements have changed dramatically in recent years." I mean, if that doesn't make you want to lose y
367.
by sramsay 13y ago
Just when you thought "I've written an x in JavaScript" can't get any more insane . . . Still, this wins the Nobel Prize for awesome.
368.
by sramsay 13y ago
Well done, man. Seriously. Every time someone starts talking about how x language makes it "easy" to do some kind of backflip, I start peering over the fence. Then someone almost immediately implements it in a C library -- or i
369.
by sramsay 13y ago
Thank you for saying that. I was worried that I was hallucinating alone.
370.
by sramsay 13y ago
Just for the record: I'm an English professor. I know less about blackbody radition than the person who created the picture. I just read someone saying that in the thread and decided to make a joke out of it. But please, do continue
371.
by sramsay 13y ago
Hacker News C-discussion response template: "That's why [insert other language] has [insert feature]. This avoids some of the edge cases in [insert popular non-C language] along the lines of [insert unused obscure language]. Ear
372.
by sramsay 13y ago
The "artist's rendering" is always my favorite part. Astronomer: We want something sort of like Jupiter, but purple. Artist: Can I do that big red storm thing? Astronomer: No, no. Don't do that. We don't know if t
373.
by sramsay 13y ago
Yes I have. A while ago I expressed shock and outrage on HN at the systemic sexism (of the "geek community") evident in the PAX business, and in other similar incidents. I was then given a lesson in logic (because this wasn&#x2
374.
by sramsay 13y ago
I'm not convinced of that at all. "One or two volumes is all it takes, since it's all pretty much the same." Ah, so much time wasted on my English Ph.D. (studying under Richard Rorty, at one point, starting the year bef
375.
by sramsay 13y ago
I don't really mean to defend C (though I rather like it, despite its many flaws). I only meant to point out the wisdom (which I recall reading in the K&R) of this idea that "taking away" features might make it easier to
376.
by sramsay 13y ago
"I also think that Clojure is particularly enjoyable, elegant and beautiful, while at the same time extremely practical, easy to learn, and well suited to modern application development; it is the best designed programming language I h
377.
by sramsay 13y ago
What seems to me most outrageous is not the strip (which is obviously tasteless), but the response toward people who objected. But you're absolutely right. We need a new word to describe open hostility toward victims of rape.
378.
by sramsay 13y ago
I've never been to PAX, have little interest in comics, and had never heard this story before. But if this is any way an accurate telling, then this whole thing is completely obscene. Rape jokes? Mocking people who object? Merchand
379.
by sramsay 13y ago
The same is true of the Presidential Seal, under 18 USC 713 of the United States Code. The NSA might be a little too aggressive here (satire is protected speech under the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution), but I can understand the d
380.
by sramsay 13y ago
I think you're making it too complex (or else I am). I think the OP is making a kind of "batteries included" argument (a la Python) -- that is to say, "it's better when the language has everything built in, as oppo
381.
by sramsay 13y ago
> The point is the runtime dependencies are small. Is that the point? Because that makes absolutely no sense to me at all in a world of modern linkers, shared libraries, etc. My assumption is that the OP was concerned about reducing the
382.
by sramsay 13y ago
> With C I would have to either depend on a 3rd party library I can never quite get past this one. There seems to be this fantasy that you can write your code without any kind of dependencies whatsoever, and that the user can just drop
383.
by sramsay 13y ago
Lua is indeed very, very aweseome -- for all the reasons enumerated, and then some. But your average Rubyist/Pythonista shouldn't be fooled. The ecosystem of Lua assumes you eat C for breakfast, and if you don't, you're
384.
by sramsay 13y ago
:help version7.4 has all the details, but the two most significant ones cited are "New regexp engine" and "A more pythonic Python interface." Of the former, the help file says: What is now called the "old" rege
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Vim 7.4 is released(vim.org)
245 points by sramsay 13y ago|124 comments
386.
by sramsay 13y ago
What I think, is that you are saying something that people (and not just "people," but some of the most brilliant people in the history of computing) have been saying for 20 to 40 years.
387.
by sramsay 13y ago
Yep. "We need to think hard about . . . consider the past . . . the reigning paradigm . . . in fifty years . . ." YES! YES! YES! I CAN SEE IT! KEEP GOING! YOU'RE A GENIUS! TELL IT, BROTHER! "Visual programming . .
388.
by sramsay 13y ago
Right, and issue three of this article's "multiple issues" is "This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (April 2011)"
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by sramsay 13y ago
"To break the minute barrier [they] fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a s
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by sramsay 13y ago
I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really ea

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