veddox

70 ms·

661.
by veddox 10y ago
> I don't read comments every day Actually, the comments are probably more important to me than the stories. A lot of the programming-related front-page stories are a little too technical for me (as a mere hobby programmer), but eve
662.
by veddox 10y ago
When I first read this, I thought it was satire - who in the world is still using ed ? At the second reading, I realized you were serious and decided to check out ed (which I only knew by reputation). Having worked through the info manual,
663.
by veddox 10y ago
The difference is that with a house and a car, you pay for the physical object. With a book, you pay for the ideas contained therein - a subtle but (IMO) important difference. Which isn't to say used-book sales should be illegal, but t
664.
by veddox 10y ago
I wondered at that statement too, but for a different reason. For me, a book is an investment for life, so I don't mind spending some money on it if it's worthing buying. (If I only want to read it once, I can usually get it throu
665.
by veddox 10y ago
Good point. Some other research papers that use tablets and e-ink readers found no significant learning benefit as compared to paper: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... http://go
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by veddox 10y ago
> it's hard to say that it is really restricted to the wealthy. Good point - eReaders aren't really all that expensive (I got my first one for 60€). What might be more important when considering the distribution of eReaders is
667.
by veddox 10y ago
Like I said, eBooks do have many advantages, and yes, I do love my own eReader. None of which means that I would want to miss out on my library of real books, though ;-)
668.
by veddox 10y ago
Another major benefit I could have mentioned is that you learn better reading a physical book as compared to an eBook ( http://www.businessinsider.com/you-remember-books-better-tha... ). Again, a lot of that has to do with mu
669.
by veddox 10y ago
What's wrong with single-purpose devices?
670.
by veddox 10y ago
Glad to hear it, even though I am not really surprised. eBooks have several well-known advantages, but for all their worth and utility, there are some areas in which they just cannot match real books. To name but one: multi-sensory input. H
671.
by veddox 10y ago
Can confirm this. I get my best, deepest and most respectful conversations on a huge range of topics simply by talking to my best friends at university. (As we have some very different views, those discussions can be quite lively, but as
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by veddox 10y ago
Thanks, I'll have a look into it.
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Looking to learn assembler programming, any advice?
1 points by veddox 10y ago|2 comments
674.
by veddox 10y ago
"The Cuckoo's Egg" is an amazing book. I read it some months back and very much regretted not having read it earlier... It does a fantastic job of bringing 80's computing to life while at the same time boasting a plot st
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by veddox 10y ago
And in the meantime, the world economy comes crashing down all around you...
676.
by veddox 10y ago
> Also, I would like to make a point that comments at the bottom of the thread aren't always off-topic and boring. True. Which is why I make a point of scrolling down and reading them whenever I can ;-) Often those comments are simp
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by veddox 10y ago
I'm very sorry, gkya, I did not in the least mean to offend you - actually, I wasn't even referring to you! I simply read PG's essay that was linked above and came across this quote that I found really good and wanted to shar
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by veddox 10y ago
> Party-dominated nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business. But
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The amazing benefits of being bilingual(bbc.com)
2 points by veddox 10y ago|0 comments
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by veddox 10y ago
Sorry, this is off-topic, but PG on graffiti is simply brilliant: "In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but hav
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by veddox 10y ago
> The basis of that opinion is my belief that the use of downvotes to express disagreement often has a more positive net effect on Hacker News than a comment expressing disagreement. I beg to differ. I have the impression that there are
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by veddox 10y ago
Can't confirm that - while my school librarians weren't exceptional in any sense, they certainly were not as bad as you describe.
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by veddox 10y ago
I know I'm generalizing here, but this is another consideration: Most people who go into IT do it because they enjoy working with technology. When they're working in IT, they want to work with computers, not people. Add in the com
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by veddox 10y ago
In many ways I've simply accepted it. The main reasons why I start projects are 1) to have fun coding and 2) to learn something new. At some point I realized that neither of these actually require the project to be "successfully c
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by veddox 10y ago
Yes, definitely a hyped up story. The science itself is great, no doubt about that, but calling this a "radically rewritten bacterial genome" is over the top. And I get the impression they have a long way to go yet...
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by veddox 10y ago
> I use a similar flow for my own books, except Perl scripts instead of Pandoc. Same here, except I used Python :-) Great to hear about Pandoc though, I really need to check that out!
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Dame Stephanie Shirly: A women's software company in the 1960s (2015)(ted.com)
1 points by veddox 10y ago|0 comments
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by veddox 10y ago
Sorry, I'm afraid I can't :-/ I got my own statistics knowledge from a lecture series, a book on R, an ecology textbook and various articles... Check your local university library if you can or google around. I'm sure yo
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by veddox 10y ago
Absolutely. Especially in the life sciences it can be very hard to get statistically solid data. None of which means there isn't a lot of statistics crap floating around, though.
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by veddox 10y ago
Get a good book on statistics? About p-values: they aren't exactly outdated, but they are the subject of a pretty fierce controversy. Many, if not most scientists still use them when doing statistical analyses because they are simple t

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