treerex

8 ms·

31.
by treerex 13y ago
What's wrong with old software. If it works, why change? Just because something is "new" and "cool"? C'mon.
32.
by treerex 13y ago
I'd be interested in seeing some screen shots to get a feel for its integration and new features.
33.
by treerex 13y ago
Though, IIRC, in the book the pilot of the plane was an actual airline pilot: hard to defend against an "inside job".
34.
by treerex 13y ago
"Concrete Mathematics" by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik is probably the best preparation for tackling TAoCP, though it is not light reading either. You could also look at "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman, Leigh
35.
by treerex 13y ago
Absolutely nothing wrong with Fortran. In the 90s I worked on source-level optimizations in the HPF (High-Performance Fortran) compiler at Thinking Machines: not having a numerical processing background (and having only used Fortran for one
36.
by treerex 13y ago
I suppose it could, but the point of the object being defined as an unordered collection is because the most straight-forward way of implementing this is through a hash table, where the order of the keys cannot be guaranteed without additio
37.
by treerex 13y ago
> [B]ut the keybindings are horrendous. Even if they don't cause hand pain they're long-winded and distracting. Ha, after 26 years using Emacs I find Vim's keybindings long-winded and distracting. To each their own. Howeve
38.
by treerex 13y ago
I always get a chuckle out of people complaining that Emacs is too slow. Maybe I've just "gotten used to it", but when I first started using it I was sharing a Sun 3 with ten or fifteen other people. I'd also argue that
39.
by treerex 13y ago
The article makes it sound like Apple has never had a presence in Cambridge: ATG East was there in the late-80s through 1996. After Jobs came back the office was shut down. (Source: I was there and was laid off because of it.) The fact that
40.
by treerex 13y ago
Don't forget that the NSA is, when all is said and done, a Government organization with all the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy. I have no doubt that their electronic mail systems are under the control of an IT staff that is just a
41.
by treerex 13y ago
> this is harder to read than the callback approach right now Why do you think this is (I'm asking honestly, not trying to be snarky). Is it because you are not familiar with reading Lisp? The notation used to access channels is con
42.
by treerex 13y ago
Any of the later (or heck, even the earlier) Infocom text adventures are far from minimalistic. And contemporary interactive fiction written with Inform quite complex. Far more so than this.
43.
by treerex 13y ago
I was in high school in 1985 and our computer club built a Heathkit HERO-1, which had a 6808 processor and also had to be programmed through the hex keypad. After a few months of hand writing machine code and typing the opcodes into machine
44.
by treerex 13y ago
They touted themselves as a "Google Killer". They basically came out of the gate claiming to be the best search engine in the world, and then they went down in spectacular flames. Whoever developed their launch PR should have been put up
45.
by treerex 13y ago
Because they originate from a time where plain text was what you had, and the format was created to be consistent and easy to format by hand. I still prefer my specifications to be in plain text so that I can view them easily and quickly.
46.
by treerex 14y ago
Of course Springer has one of the most onerous paywalls I've come across. I hadn't heard of the Papers acquisition: I use it on my iPad but only because it sucks less than every other solution I've looked at.
47.
by treerex 14y ago
Zotero is unlikely to go the way of Mendeley: may be worth checking out.
48.
by treerex 14y ago
It depresses me that GLS was a better programmer at 17 than I probably will ever be.
49.
by treerex 14y ago
I took it as a reference to the clitoris being "Nature's Rubik's Cube" --- the most difficult puzzle in the world. Pretty funny, actually.
50.
by treerex 14y ago
"PC"? Watson's hardware weighs in at around 40 tons total.
51.
by treerex 14y ago
"The Pragmatic Programmer" is one of the best books on programming I've read. When it first came out I read it and then went out and bought a copy for every member of my team. It's fabulous.
52.
by treerex 14y ago
This is where Common Lisp comes in: through macros you can expand the language to include the abstractions your application needs. PG talks about this extensively. The issue is that doing this requires a deep understanding of the language,
53.
by treerex 14y ago
On MacOS X and Unixen it is just a command-line toolchain, though the Emacs support is excellent. On Windows I believe the Harlequin IDE is available. Apple's Dylan environment was never released in source form.
54.
by treerex 14y ago
Most Lisps do this as well.
55.
by treerex 14y ago
Wow, that brings back so many memories: thank you for posting this. I loved Merlin.
56.
by treerex 14y ago
For me the advantage of Emacs over a set of IDEs is its ability to support multiple languages very well within a single unified environment. In a typical day I'm writing Common Lisp, C++, XML, XSLT, shell scripts, documentation. The only ti
57.
by treerex 14y ago
This initial rollout is not intended to be used by doctors to determine (or even suggest) treatments for patients. IBM is usually very careful to point this out: they are not looking to replace doctors, at least not yet. (Source: work for a
58.
by treerex 14y ago
Huh, first thing I thought of when seeing "BBRY" was Burberry (which is BRBY on the London Stock Exchange).
59.
by treerex 14y ago
This is fabulous to see, very excited to download and give it a go. They're very responsive to questions, comments, bug reports, and are an all around great group of guys.