stiff

46 ms·

331.
by stiff 13y ago
You must be kidding. It's a solid step back from Sketchpad developed in 1963: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuKREmsiD9o Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version: http://en.wi
332.
by stiff 13y ago
Writing a Lisp interpreter is an opportunity to write a really beautiful program, do not waste it by stopping at a first version that sort of works. A nice implementation should read almost like a spec of the language, except maybe for the
333.
by stiff 13y ago
Completely agree on your last point. I have written a compiler for a small subset of something like Pascal for the JVM and it was among all other things a big exercise in software engineering. E.g. several times almost all the structure of
334.
by stiff 13y ago
Even in this position, or maybe especially in this position, I think it is downright harmful to suggest that there are books every student should read, like there is some canonical set of books that will make a great researcher of you a
335.
by stiff 13y ago
I wish people would recognize their own bullshit from time to time and just titled those posts "books I enjoyed", otherwise it turns out more into "every graduate student should read what I had read" or "books I wou
336.
by stiff 13y ago
You adopted "looking for custom methods" without making it part of the contract in any way as a best practice in the standard library, but it is a "mistake, plain and simple"? Doesn't it, like, illustrate a serious
337.
by stiff 13y ago
I was an early adopter of RSpec, have been using it for years now, and I came to think it's not worth it. More generally, mimicking natural language with a programming language DSL seems like a very bad idea. It seems nice that the tes
338.
by stiff 13y ago
He is the author of "The Craft Of Prolog", a quite famous book among people caring about programming.
339.
by stiff 13y ago
We are all abusing the technologies originally developed for hypertext documents (HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript) for building applications. If you today started working on a set of standards for handling what people currently build on the web
340.
by stiff 13y ago
Besides the mentioned issues with reusing disks, they also had used and maybe still use some faulty series of Seagate drives e. g.: http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracud... So beware of having th
341.
by stiff 13y ago
There was a lot of irony in my comments that I think not everyone understood. What I am really saying is that everything Dijkstra wrote on the topic of doing good mathematics contradicts the possibility of someone like Euler existing, yet h
342.
by stiff 13y ago
Read the following EWD to get sneak-peak at Dijkstra's view of mathematics: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW... Dijkstra's dream was reducing mathematics to formal l
343.
by stiff 13y ago
You can see how well that worked out in practice here (video lectures by Dijkstra, not from any course though): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHv5MUw7Nc
344.
by stiff 13y ago
And the irony is that Euler was a really poor mathematician by Dijkstra's standards...
345.
by stiff 13y ago
Talking about code repetition is focusing on the wrong thing, consider how metaprogramming is used in the article: it mechanically generates the same code that previously was simply in place in the class. It doesn't make anything simpl
346.
by stiff 13y ago
The examples shown in the post aren't wrong because they fail the grep test, they are wrong because they A) capture an uninteresting abstraction that is not likely to see much usage as the program gets more complex, B) mix up domain co
347.
by stiff 13y ago
what is smaller: a string of bits, or a compressed string of digits? What are you talking about? You could have had something on your mind, but this is a terrible terrible juxtaposition of words...
348.
by stiff 13y ago
Well, his answers were quite laconic compared to the other guys, but on the other hand I just sent those guys a short email and they didn't know how it will be published and what other persons were interviewed, I just asked them polite
349.
by stiff 13y ago
Wow, a postcard from the past for me. Mirror of the original full interview: http://web.archive.org/web/20080325033938/http://www.stifflo...
350.
by stiff 13y ago
The notion of domain-independent rationality is the favourite way for some nerds (so called "sceptics") to pump up their egos and then throw around nonsensical judgements in domains they don't know the first thing about. But
351.
by stiff 13y ago
He just shared some insights, he didn't critique anything and he's a Kaggler and published researcher so I don't get why he is getting downvoted.
352.
by stiff 13y ago
I would love to hear something from the author of the wiki about how he uses those notes, because I have mostly the same feelings, it looks like a CS tumblr, a hodgepodge of random concepts from random areas. I took some similar notes in th
353.
by stiff 13y ago
It looks like a clone of Helm (previously called Anything) for Emacs: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm
354.
by stiff 13y ago
Yes there is: Poincaré's writings in English translation Popular writings on the philosophy of science: Poincaré, Henri (1902–1908), The Foundations of Science, New York: Science Press; reprinted in 1921; This book includes the En
355.
by stiff 13y ago
Richard Courant said it nicely in "What is mathematics?", my all time favourite book: There seems to be a great danger in the prevailing overemphasis on the deductive-postulational character of mathematics. True, the element of c
356.
by stiff 13y ago
I don't know whether the following is true or false, and whether it is good to spread it, but it is a telling lesson about not building your worth upon your "achievements": here is a description of Von Neumann learning about
357.
by stiff 13y ago
Aaaaand here is the revelation: not everyone who is the same age feels the same way about it! You're welcome. There was a series of AskMeFi threads that were much more interesting than either the post or the comments here: http:/
358.
by stiff 13y ago
"The Rails 3 Way" certainly wasn't excellent, it was clearly a rushed update of the original "The Rails Way", it uses a lot of old practices all over the place and the stuff new in Rails 3 is just added as an aftert
359.
by stiff 13y ago
I simply get very tired very quickly when reading philosophy, not because I find the arguments difficult but because those works never seem to get to any conclusion regarding the problems being considered and there is anyway no way to valid
360.
by stiff 13y ago
I think the problem with philosophy is that language and words only go this far and we humans get tired fast when just thinking hard inside our heads without any interaction with the external world and no real-world problem to solve. I beli

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