willtim

59 ms·

571.
by willtim 8y ago
Modern plastic composites with carbon fiber / glass fibers can perform as well or better than metals with regard to strength-to-weight. Plastics also have many other properties that make it preferable for a laptop case. Apple have chos
572.
by willtim 8y ago
Modern MacBooks have absolutely terrible keyboards. So unless you use it like an iPad, you'd be better off with a ThinkPad.
573.
by willtim 8y ago
A metal body is heavy, prone to dents and attenuates radio. Why are you so keen on having one? The X1 Carbon is lighter, tougher and more serviceable than a MacBook Pro, in part because of a better choice of materials. As for trackpads, App
574.
by willtim 8y ago
I use the keyboard a lot more than moving the pointer. I use a tiling window manager under Linux and lots of keyboard shortcuts, which helps. For moving the pointer, I prefer the ThinkPad trackpoint, as I do not have to take my hands off th
575.
by willtim 8y ago
My wife has a Mac, but when it dies, I'm going to persuade her to try Ubuntu. She only uses the Mac for Facebook and occasional Word/Excel. I think LibreOffice and Firefox should have her covered.
576.
by willtim 8y ago
My ThinkPad X1 is as good as any generation of MacBook, it is certainly more serviceable and has a better keyboard. You might prefer MacOS to Linux or Windows, but I can assure you that there are very decent hardware alternatives.
577.
by willtim 8y ago
Most people that know both, find functional languages far easier to read than imperative languages. They are declarative and permit a wider range of abstractions. Operator-overloading is a similar example that comes up for debate, over-an
578.
by willtim 8y ago
Unfortunately, Java is a poor choice to implement a programming language with and there's nothing about implementing static typing in this book. I honestly believe that most folks would be better off reading SICP or similar. What is n
579.
by willtim 8y ago
Often it's the ideas that are the cause of the problems, for example: magsafe required an extremely thin cable leading to fray (85 UK pounds for a new adapter), or the "magic mouse" that required raising ones right finger i
580.
by willtim 8y ago
Developers should just buy a ThinkPad and run Linux. A much more dependable machine and a far superior keyboard.
581.
by willtim 8y ago
Being brutally honest, compared to Haskell, ML and to a lesser extent Python, Scala's syntax is rather ugly and unnecessarily verbose. I'm almost certain its creators chose the syntax in order to tempt curly-bracket programmers, n
582.
by willtim 8y ago
When there's no ability in the language to abstract, there's no abstractions to learn, beyond what is built in. But this is not a blessing, it means we have to study every line of code and hope that we can uncover some emergent hi
583.
by willtim 8y ago
The Scala team appear to have their hearts in the right place. They seek to empower their users and have respect for them. I can't really say the same about the Go team, based on at least one Google presentation I have seen. This isn&#
584.
by willtim 8y ago
Arithmetic expressions on BigInteger and BigDecimal currently look like an OOP parody. I cannot believe there are folks willing to defend this decision. Even Sun couldn't resist overloading '+'.
585.
by willtim 9y ago
> It makes it almost impossible to forget to release resources or rollback transaction. No. For that you need a better type system. Linear types show great promise for this.
586.
by willtim 9y ago
If you are running Linux, iio-sensor-proxy might be worth a try.
587.
by willtim 9y ago
IMHO, it was a mistake for some languages to make "=" mean assignment. Algol and Pascal got this right and used ":=" to mean assignment. Even the use of "variable" is wrong when talking about mutable memory. &q
588.
by willtim 9y ago
> it's a miracle that with the tools we have we are able to write any network applications at all Perhaps it is time to start using a higher-level language? One with a runtime that provides green threads?
589.
by willtim 9y ago
I've read posts stating the exact opposite here on HN. So clearly it is subjective.
590.
by willtim 9y ago
I didn't actually suggest donations was a lucrative revenue model. Support could be though, for example, RedHat is a billion dollar business.
591.
by willtim 9y ago
At least with platforms such as Steam, the problem is one of porting the platform to each distribution, not all its applications.
592.
by willtim 9y ago
Steam on Linux works very well.
593.
by willtim 9y ago
If I was in the market of workstation software such as CAD, Music DAWs, industrial automation etc. I would much rather have control over the base OS by shipping a customised version of Debian or similar. This would be very compelling for p
594.
by willtim 9y ago
You had better stick with Agda or Coq then ;)
595.
by willtim 9y ago
Linux users expect not to be locked-in and controlled. Perhaps if vendors tried different revenue models, such as sponsoring new features or charging for support/bug fixes. Over the last few years I have spent several hundred dollars i
596.
by willtim 9y ago
> Only by social convention. Not enforced by the language's semantics Many FP languages do not enforce purity (OCaml, F#, Clojure). Even in Haskell, one could use IO and IORefs everywhere, the semantics fully permit writing "Ja
597.
by willtim 9y ago
> Culture matters very little. What really matters is what the language's semantics allows. I disagree. Java's semantics permit defining pure functions, immutable values and persistent data structures, but the "culture&quo
598.
by willtim 9y ago
The problem with "traditionally functional stuff" was that one could only use functional programming for a subset of problems. Monads allow Haskell programmers to use FP to solve problems involving IO, mutation and effects. This i
599.
by willtim 9y ago
Completely agree. Anyone interested in functional programming should learn Haskell for this reason alone. Skip the blog post that falsely claims a "functor is a box" or a "monad is a burrito" and go read the original pap
600.
by willtim 9y ago
I agree, but a trackball will give you the fast and precise movements you say a trackpoint doesn't give you. You'll also be able to move your hands less compared to using a mouse.

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