thurn

27 ms·

331.
by thurn 15y ago
The joke was popular among the more elitist vi users, sure, but Emacs was a widely used and useful piece of software 20 years ago on processors a dozen times slower than today's. That's a success story in my books.
332.
by thurn 15y ago
Emacs is the first and probably best proof that you can write fast and responsive software without needing to stick close to machine code the whole time. It's a compelling counterexample to those who don't believe you can write "real" softw
333.
by thurn 15y ago
They target pretty different components of the advertising industry. For example, I kind of doubt Coca-Cola spends a lot of money on Google ads (nobody uses Google to find a Coke). On the other hand, Facebook could be a great tool for promo
334.
by thurn 15y ago
Web APIs often have explicit versioning. Perhaps that approach could be adopted for programming, where you have the option to specify the version of a function you are using. This would enable gradual migration and adoption of new features.
335.
by thurn 15y ago
Has there been any research done on programming language readability for non-programmers? I think that that would be extremely interesting.
336.
by thurn 15y ago
Very comprehensive, although I feel that some mention of gcv's appengine-magic is called for, since deploying to Google App Engine is a very attractive prospect for a Clojure web project. https://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic . It's excel
337.
by thurn 15y ago
pg's "On Lisp" is probably the book that has expanded my mind the most, and it's pretty short: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf
338.
by thurn 15y ago
Arguably github and stackoverflow serve that purpose for our community.
339.
by thurn 15y ago
As long as they're using a reasonable hash, that probably won't be much of a concern any time soon. To give some context, a 256 bit key space is about enough to uniquely identify every atom in the known universe.
340.
by thurn 15y ago
For Mac users, SelfControl is a GUI approach to this idea: http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/
341.
by thurn 15y ago
Ruby programmers love domain-specific languages implemented in Ruby (eg RSpec). A Lisp dialect lets you implement libraries with fewer restrictions on what the DSL can do and more expressive power. Lisp takes Rails-style succinctness throug
342.
by thurn 15y ago
It's probably worth noting that Radix sort is actually O(nk) with keys of length k, and that k is O(lg n) for many reasonable key representations (e.g. integers), giving an actual bound no better than a standard merge sort.
343.
by thurn 15y ago
I'd like some slightly less anecdotal evidence before I conclude that all SSDs are doomed to an early death; we could be seeing some confirmation bias here. Maybe Jeff and his friends just had a run of bad luck.
344.
by thurn 15y ago
Personally, I tend to think that an overly dogmatic commitment to backwards compatibility does more harm than the benefit produced by supporting a tiny minority of users with five year old hardware. Backward compatibility is the enemy of el
345.
by thurn 15y ago
Why, in 2011, are people still selling books with hundreds of pages of reference material in them? Has anyone needed or wanted to consult a printed reference on the Python standard library in the last decade?
346.
by thurn 15y ago
Would this be pretty easy to implement in a language with first class functions (albeit with more boilerplate) just by keeping a list of functions to be invoked before raising an exception?
347.
by thurn 16y ago
Is this open source? Nice visuals.
348.
by thurn 16y ago
Sort of unrelated feature request (is there a better place feor this?): a small piece of JavaScript to warn before you submit a title that starts with a number between 3 and 15. There are about five articles on the front page right now that
349.
by thurn 16y ago
Kind of late to be asking, isn't it? I'm doing an internship at Facebook, and I'm reasonably sure they've finished hiring interns (about 300 of 'em).
350.
by thurn 16y ago
Does this also mean that the online edition has been completed and there will be no future chapters?
351.
by thurn 16y ago
Yes! That and people not following the Hacker News guidelines on taking gratuitous numbers out of titles. The title of this article is Link Bait 101.
352.
by thurn 16y ago
This is an increasingly common extension of the REST paradigm. Google ran into a number of problems with the restrictions of REST, so their new APIs all work this way. See their justification in this video: http://www.google.com/events/io/
353.
by thurn 16y ago
Feature and Review branches are a great idea. It just makes it so easy to work in parallel on different things, and to context-switch when you get blocked. Honestly, I can't remember how we used to solve these problems with SVN. If you're i
354.
by thurn 16y ago
Not trusting developers is kind of a problematic approach when your platform's key strategic asset is a vast library of third party applications. Apple's own iOS software is great, but the playing field for Android and Windows Phone 7 seems
355.
by thurn 16y ago
Enforcing things at the type level certainly has its place, but I have to think that wading through that TicTacToe API would probably introduce a lot more cognitive load than a nice simple dynamically typed one that raised errors when you d
356.
It's 2011, and my IDE still doesn't have a REPL(thurn.ca)
3 points by thurn 16y ago|0 comments
357.
by thurn 16y ago
I don't see any pricing information on Rocket Pack on their site. Is it available to the public? Will it ever be now?
358.
by thurn 16y ago
Bandwidth runs out fast (images are the killer). CPU has gone over a couple times too.
359.
by thurn 16y ago
I wrote my own. http://github.com/thurn/ackbar . If an article gets popular, I've paid up to $5, but below 6000 hits, it's all free. Latency could be better, but there's a lot of factors there (Clojure might be one of them?).
360.
by thurn 16y ago
How is Rubinius going to tackle the GIL issue? They say they're working to get rid of it, but I'd assume that a sizable chunk of the Ruby standard library isn't thread safe, especially C extensions. I guess I'm just not sure how they plan t

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