veddox

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451.
by veddox 8y ago
Rome's population shrank from ~1 million to ~35 000: http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/rome-populatio...
452.
by veddox 8y ago
"Completely different" is a difficult concept when comparing languages... Not only because similarity is a gradient, not a category; but also because most major languages today are in some way or another descended from C. So the a
453.
by veddox 8y ago
The whole article is a fine demonstration of what happens when a Silicon Valley journalist writes a piece on biology without an inkling of what it's all about...
454.
by veddox 9y ago
Use it. Do one tutorial to teach you the basics (navigating within/between buffers, opening files, tiling windows...) and then just use it. The first week is going to be a pain, the second and third tedious, after that you'll be c
455.
by veddox 9y ago
Strato? It's not exactly what you would call a "small" competitor, but its servers are in Germany and it's subject to German security and privacy regulations (which I consider a big bonus).
456.
by veddox 9y ago
Yes, bash technically is a programming language - but it's a pretty horrible one in terms of usability, and not the first that I would teach a newbie. Plus, you really don't need it unless your deep into sysadmin stuff.
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by veddox 9y ago
I don't think people per se have gotten lazier, but the fraction of the populace that wants to learn programming has increased. When the visibility of programming in society was small, the people who were attracted to it tended to br
458.
by veddox 9y ago
Excellent life lesson! Never mind coding, that is one of the most important things we can teach our teenagers. (Not to deride coding, but you know what I mean.)
459.
by veddox 9y ago
Learning to program just takes a huge amount of frustration-tolerance. Fullstop. It's inherent in the craft and doesn't really ever go away - it's just the problems you face that change. So in that sense, complex setups are p
460.
by veddox 9y ago
> Familiarity with how computers work arguably peaked during the early-mid PC era. Now there's an interesting observation. I'm not quite sure whether you're right, but quite possibly. Looking around my local libraries and
461.
by veddox 9y ago
What's up with these "international editions"? I've seen textbooks with strongly reduced prices that were only supposed to be sold in third-world country, which makes sense to me. But surely the publishers don't con
462.
by veddox 9y ago
> 1. Most people drastically overestimate the talents and abilities of other people 2. Most people drastically underestimate their own Ehm, sorry, what's your source for that claim? (c.f. the Dunning-Kruger effect https:/&#x2F
463.
by veddox 9y ago
Coming from Germany, I find it hard to understand the scope of the problem described in the article. In my course, less than half the students bought any textbook at all during their entire bachelor's program. The professors made almos
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Evolutionary analysis of the GNU/Linux universe(onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
1 points by veddox 9y ago|0 comments
465.
by veddox 9y ago
Thank you for sharing that article, quite thought-provoking! I think the problem we're facing is not in itself the desire to improve ourselves. Rather, it's doing it with the wrong focus and for the wrong reasons. I found this quo
466.
by veddox 9y ago
I daresay the former stood you in better stead. There's enough time for learning statistics when you really need it.
467.
by veddox 9y ago
I'm not a fan of "how to succeed everywhere" books myself - if they claim that on the cover, they're usually not advertising the type of success I would wish to build my life on. Having said that, books have been invalua
468.
by veddox 9y ago
Anybody here who still seriously uses ed? I do for minor editing jobs (1-3 edits per file), but wouldn't dream of it for programming.
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How people used ed(retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
3 points by veddox 9y ago|1 comments
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Show HN: A Winnie the Pooh Text Adventure in Common Lisp(github.com)
3 points by veddox 9y ago|0 comments
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by veddox 9y ago
Personally, as a user, I much prefer desktop applications for software of any serious complexity. It's just that much better integrated into the system UI, there's no lag, and best of all: it's running on my computer. (Asid
472.
by veddox 9y ago
Gilbert's "Developmental Biology" is another great (and really good-looking) textbook. It almost made me want to go into developmental biology, just for the textbook :D
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by veddox 9y ago
Yep, that's the one I was going to say :-) "It goes really deep" is, unfortunately, a relative description. Half-way through my undergraduate studies, I had pretty much outgrown it and needed more specialized books. Nonethele
474.
by veddox 9y ago
I might inherit a project written in Julia. If I do, I guess I'll have to learn it ;-) I'm in a university research group that does ecological modeling, for which so far I've been using Python. But from what I hear, Julia mig
475.
by veddox 9y ago
If your still in your teens, keep your options open. You love programming? Fantastic! But software developers aren't the only professionals who write code. Lots of scientists do too - physicists, chemists, biologists - and of course en
476.
by veddox 9y ago
Excellent advice! Wish I could upvote it twice. > it's very easy to teach a physicist to program, but the converse is not true. Programming isn't everything, and there are a lot of subjects out there that will make you a better
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by veddox 9y ago
Absolutely. HN isn't about meeting people, it's about discussing ideas. A very worthwhile objective in its own right, but the two shouldn't be confused.
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by veddox 9y ago
BTW, thanks for mentioning the tilde club! Hadn't heard about that before... A lovely passage from the Medium article: [Talking about the history of Unix] Fast forward 20 years: Your typical “cloud” Unix server, designed in the 1970s t
479.
by veddox 9y ago
> How would one go about that now? If you know your way about Linux and the commandline, it's not that hard. There's plenty of good tutorials out there for (almost) anything you would want to do. Renting a small VPS is not part
480.
by veddox 9y ago
To me, this whole article just drips with techno-utopic hubris. The author seems honestly surprised that in its two decades of existence, Amazon hasn't yet managed to reinvent the book. ("If Amazon wanted to, it could with a singl

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