todd8

84 ms·

721.
by todd8 8y ago
My experience with FORTH was similar, although you've put into words the problems I found with FORTH better than I could. The original article is by Leo Brodie. I bought his book Starting FORTH (which is now available online[1]) shor
722.
by todd8 8y ago
It looks like they are engineering one of those glass enclosed elevators, common in shopping malls, not a computer. Why the focus on outward appearance without explaining its capabilities?
723.
by todd8 8y ago
My wife spends a lot of time (and money) on skin care, but I'm very skeptical of the regimen that she follows. I've suggested that she secretly only treat one half her face for a few months and then ask me which side I like better
724.
by todd8 8y ago
Storing environmentally friendly generated electricity in reactive chemicals would solve lots of problems (storage; reuse of existing energy industry infrastructure; energy-dense fuel for cars, trucks, and planes; lowering CO2; etc.) Howeve
725.
by todd8 8y ago
Sometimes, but more often just looking over other people's work or progress when I'm asked for help or advice.
726.
by todd8 8y ago
I've been a developer for many years, so most of the time I kind of know where I am going and have a map in my head guiding my development. I like test cases to help me with refactoring, but full TDD seems to slow me down when I try it
727.
by todd8 8y ago
Yes and it wasn’t alone, I’ve programmed on several machines that didn’t have 8-bit organization. The DEC PDP-9 and some others had 18 bit words and the big CDC 6600 series had 60 bit words with 10 chars per word, not exactly Unicode.
728.
by todd8 8y ago
The overall degree of innumeracy in society is disturbing, but what shocks me is the widespread acceptance of it in polite society. I know people that have spent years obtaining PhDs and almost gleefully admit they aren’t good at math. I do
729.
by todd8 8y ago
I’ve posted this comment on HN before, but this is my best Knuth story: In the 70's I had a co-worker, perhaps the best programmer in the department, that had gone to school with Knuth. He told me that one day while in college Knuth wa
730.
by todd8 8y ago
Yes, I think the problem isn’t patenting things without R&D but is patenting things that aren’t really novel, are obvious to someone skilled in the field, or are ideas where there is already existing prior art. While an employee at IBM
731.
by todd8 8y ago
I’ve seen this demonstration at least a couple of times, once as an undergrad around 1971. I always remembered it and a few years later I was working with a minicomputer with limited I/O so I decided to blink the row of front panel lig
732.
Residents Increasingly Fleeing New York, Los Angeles and Chicago(google.com)
4 points by todd8 8y ago|0 comments
733.
by todd8 8y ago
You will fall on your butt more times than you would like the first time you try it. Knowing this plan accordingly. Schedule your first lessons for a day with good, firm but not hard snow, snow that is a bit like solid styrofoam. Falling on
734.
Just thinking you have poor endurance genes changes your body(sciencemag.org)
2 points by todd8 8y ago|0 comments
735.
by todd8 8y ago
Quota and Stack Exchange fail me in a particularly noticeable way. A few years ago I decided to really learn Java, I think this was around Java 7 time frame. I’ve programmed now for over 50 years, so naturally I knew Java well enough to rea
736.
by todd8 8y ago
Graphics are so often intentionally manipulated to convey the authors intent. I don’t like graphs that show large differences until I realize that the origin of the graph is at say (0,1000) instead of (0,0); this can make a change from 1001
737.
by todd8 8y ago
There is a little nugget here that I've always found illuminating: the mention of the text address and frame pointer, sometimes called the ip-ep pair, short for instruction pointer and the environment pointer. The environment that a fu
738.
by todd8 8y ago
I've heard developers say this before, they want tab bars or good fuzzy search. The puzzling thing is, I feel almost exactly the opposite. I've used many other development environments (over the last 50 years), some for years at
739.
by todd8 8y ago
I've had 4 semesters of abstract algebra because I was a math major. I found even the first two semesters difficult courses. Math had always come easy to me when I was young so I didn't really understand that at the university lev
740.
by todd8 8y ago
From the US Congressional Budget Office[1]: "When workers’ earnings rise but their after-tax income rises less—because of increases in their income and payroll taxes or declines in their benefits from government programs—their incentiv
741.
by todd8 8y ago
Python is an easy to use powerful development language. Ironically, this leads to too many projects solving the same problems. It isn’t just visualization that has so many libraries, it’s almost everything. I first noticed this effect with
742.
by todd8 8y ago
Assuming that a meteor impact is totally random (which might not be true because objects that impact the earth could conceivably influence each other through gravity, etc), it is probably best to model these impacts as a poisson process. A
743.
by todd8 8y ago
I looked it up. See table 3 in https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2678018 Hawaii has the highest life expectancy of any US State, over 81 years vs some other states that are over 5 years less!
744.
by todd8 8y ago
I’ve used Lisp for decades, so it’s hard to remember a time when the parentheses bothered me, but every new programming language has some surface syntax that can be off-putting. I used to hate the hard to type curly braces when I started wi
745.
Could intermittent fasting diets increase diabetes risk?(eurekalert.org)
6 points by todd8 8y ago|1 comments
746.
by todd8 8y ago
It's not easy to imagine what other people place value on. I like peace and quiet, so suburban living suits me. Others value nice restaurants, good weather, close skiing, professional sports, access to first class health care, good job
747.
by todd8 8y ago
You’re right. Ada has come up in this thread and there was a time when I was excited about Ada (I actually worked in a group that was competing in the early Strawman—Ironman proposals that led to the design of Ada), but Ada really is too ve
748.
by todd8 8y ago
I took a peek at the link to your homepage. I wish I had a cute dog named Ada!
749.
by todd8 8y ago
This might be a preference that isn’t universally shared, but I really do find shorter programs easier to read. I don’t mean code-golf style short, but languages that don’t need a lot of boilerplate or ceremony. I’ve frequently used Python
750.
by todd8 8y ago
I like the formatting too. It looks like Computer Modern type face with a nice clean layout. This is the template I found at Tum University’s Department of Informatica for a undergrad thesis: https://www.overleaf.com/latex&#

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