wonderzombie

15 ms·

91.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I want to agree with you, because what you say is eminently reasonable. But I've never, ever, ever accidentally hit the power button. And I don't consider myself a particularly good typist.
92.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Man, I am 100% sympathetic to the issues Solnit is talking about -- gentrification, the plight of the poor, public transit -- but I find this approach & framing completely off-putting. It's hard to articulate why. Maybe the whiff o
93.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
C'mon. Have you ever read a published interview? Do you think even a non-trivial percentage of people speak in complete sentences, with mostly-correct grammar? Seriously? For what it's worth, I call myself a feminist and at this p
94.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Why? You can stage the changes you want to commit, and stash the unstaged changes. Run tests, &c. Commit locally but do not push. If you test more and it's still broken, you can iterate on that with git commit --amend. The rest of
95.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Syntax is the presentation layer for semantics. Semantics are the content, meaning, and/or implications for what you convey via syntax. They're largely orthogonal. def add(x, y): return x + y (define (add x y) (+ x
96.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
What other OO languages? Ruby is Lisp-influenced for sure. :) Anyway, the context is explicitly Java vs C++, not Smalltalk or Ruby or Python. I imagine if Smalltalk were the dominant platform this would've turned out differently. So le
97.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I agree with you re: humanities. I should also say that I think it's a shame if what's "useful" is the only thing that we, as a society, decide to focus on. What about literature, art, and culture? Should we just content
98.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
They covered this; it's sort of a rational choice, in the sense that since college is required for everyone, kids just want their certification. You or I might not like this attitude (I don't) but it's not altogether surprisi
99.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Did you read the same article I did? There was plenty of blame to heap on the kids, though it's rational (ctrl-F for mini-max). The problem is that the article just isn't particularly useful. It's an editorial, so fine, whate
100.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-autho
101.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Agree w/ siblings that this is a great comment. I'd like to amplify it. A lot of imperative languages end up being really similar once you've learned a few of them. I'm not an expert on PL history but, AIUI, ALGOL was
102.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Of course. That said, Clojure doesn't have those, given that it has a dynamic type system and destructuring instead of pattern matching (not as clean, IMHO), so a comparison to Haskell in this respect is less useful.
103.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
This is kind of the dirty secret of any kind of programming, that it's very hard to make arguments that this or that technology leads to categorically better or different software. I mean, yes, there are specific domains, like trying
104.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
That's a somewhat naive view of immutability. Garbage collection should take care of the 10mb of numbers you aren't using anymore. True, there are issues for more complex data structures, but that's why persistent data struct
105.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
You don't need to "know Lisp" in the sense of being proficient, but you need to be familiar with s-expressions. Once you grok s-expressions, the rest is "just" grokking a bunch of functional idioms not specific to C
106.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I second this. I really like Clojure, and it's what I started with in terms of Lisps. When I wanted to explore more "traditional" Lisp, I looked into Common Lisp, and it didn't thrill me. It felt old to the point of decr
107.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I'm skeptical. How do you know what's intended behavior and what isn't if you don't know why the code is structured the way it is? Understanding what it does is necessary but not sufficient. You risk introducing more b
108.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I suspect it's because the usual threat model is "overseas attacker" rather than "attacker one state over." That said, if it's by IP, I don't see why they couldn't localize it closer, at least to an a
109.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
See also www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik‎.
110.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
If you don't have any of that to worry about -- no regrets, no past mistakes -- that's great for you. That might be why the thought of someone having access to your "secrets" seems so contrived. But what about someone wi
111.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Disingenuous? Maybe you're unaware of why Knuth invented TeX in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#History . It sounds to me like Knuth wanted something that wasn't just a straight up text dump
112.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
These pieces are the reason why I still read HN today. Thanks for submitting it and thanks for upvoting it, everyone.
113.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I am not sure that's a useful criterion in practice, though. People are fond of saying that languages will not make you orders of magnitude more productive, and I think the corollary is that on average they will not make you orders of
114.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data, let alone the singular.
115.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
This is anecdata. And if we're being as rigorous about evidence against the claim that it's meritocratic, we need to be as rigorous as evidence affirming that it's meritocratic. This does not meet that standard.
116.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
You begin from the premise that everyone who believes they have earned their money is correct. This is why the phrase "born on third base, think they hit a triple" was born. It's fine if your premise is that people who have m
117.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I am seriously trying to figure out if you are trolling or not. I mean, there's something to what you're saying here. Just that you've picked the weirdest-ass venue for it. You're not supposed to give a shit about your f
118.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Right, right. Let's skirt past the idea that men may be in any way responsible for the industry they dominate, and focus on the fact that women aren't creating enough GitHub profiles or having enough hackathons. In addition to shi
119.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
Likewise, can we get some data providing (e.g.) negative indicators that race is a factor? A lack of correlation between gender/race and achievement would be useful. As I said upthread, I don't think the burden of proof should res
120.
by wonderzombie 13y ago
I think in this case the article is trying to shift the burden of proof. Why should it be on someone who's asking whether it's a meritocracy rather than on the folks who're repeating this claim? And if the answer is in the af

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