zedshaw

13 ms·

91.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Yep, works pretty well actually, but not secure yet. It's a hack to test out the idea.
92.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Well must be a slow news day today so I'll say a few things about FuqIt for the high-minded HN crowd: 1. Don't run this at all in anyway that someone can access it. It's ultra hackable. Extra points if people can point out
93.
by zedshaw 13y ago
If that code is an idea, then the idea is "HACK AWAY!"
94.
by zedshaw 13y ago
If you can abstract everything to be anything then nothing has meaning.
95.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Maybe I'm King of The Jinjas!
96.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Pretty much. Oh, except, there's actually an interesting idea in there if you look really closely.
97.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Hey Zed here, are you talking about exercise 46? http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex46.html If you email me with the problems you had I'll see what's wrong with the exercise and figure it out. There was
98.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Looked like he already had people talking about it, and this was definitely not planned. It's a stroke of pure luck not genius.
99.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Wait, I'm going to sidestep the whole book's ultra-crazy content and ask a kind of really obvious logistic question: Why the hell was he doing a kickstarter for a book he could easily publish online for 0 money down and only cost
100.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Thanks! Glad you liked my book. Any criticisms for improvements?
101.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Not as far as "total asshole, does coke, and actively kisses ass" does at the same companies. <rimshot>
102.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Not really. What we need is people not learning C (or any language) without also learning how writing it wrong causes defects. In my book (mentioned in the post) I have students using Valgrind and attempting to break their code starting at
103.
by zedshaw 13y ago
Hell yeah, learning how to make compilers should be what a BS in CS is all about. Pretty much everything in computer science can be turned into a language and compilers have almost all of the major topics in CS as one easily explainable t
104.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Oh, I need to update that description. It's not LaTeX based anymore. EDIT: Alright done. Project actually now uses reStructuredText instead of LaTeX, mostly because of issues converting LaTeX to anything other than PDF.
105.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Uh, yeah they're not more PR savvy than I am. The vast majority of people that know about me think more like you do, and only a few mostly Rubyists think of me as some kind of boogeyman, which I also tend to cultivate since it's damn funny
106.
by zedshaw 14y ago
The only time I've ever had someone complain about the "you can't make money" part of the sentence is when they're trying to run a con. Usually this involves some scheme to chop up my book and sell it on Amazon or put it up somewhere else
107.
by zedshaw 14y ago
No, and I'll give you my distinction that separates education from indoctrination: Education's goal is to teach you something so that you can then go on without them, thus why they teach a wider range of topics within a subject. Indoctrinat
108.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Most of this is true, but I found that it completely falls flat on its face once you want to do any reasonable HTML output. htlatex is an abomination that should be destroyed in the fiery pits of hell after some long quest with a ring an
109.
by zedshaw 14y ago
No, I advise against telling students to use it unless they're ready. Use whatever the hell works for you if you're writing a book. Well, except Microsoft Word.
110.
by zedshaw 14y ago
I don't use raw LaTeX anymore. Check out the new README and latest repo as I've switched to rST and full on Dexy to do the build.
111.
by zedshaw 14y ago
No, this is now the latest template. That's what I'm using in all my books now, and it's coming from a more advanced project for writing music books http://orkestrix.org/ My goal was, if I could write about code and music at the same tim
112.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Meh, I was just being lazy and should have done it yesterday. No harm done.
113.
by zedshaw 14y ago
If I'm teaching someone rails deployment and making their first rails app, then maybe but that's a whole lot of indoctrination there. You have to pick, but to me you're basically just making customers not programmers. If I'm teaching someon
114.
by zedshaw 14y ago
If you're stuck then I'm finding there two common causes: 1. It's a structure problem, so you have to go back to organizing the concepts and how each chapter flows. Try changing the first lesson as a way to start rethinking this. 2. It's a
115.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Alright, all fixed up and should work with the actual content and the newest dexy. Shoot me problems if you try it. http://gitorious.org/learn-x-the-hard-way/learn-x-the-hard-w...
116.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Crap, well I just updated this and didn't rewrite the README. Let me fix that real quick.
117.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Hey @mwargh could you email me at help@learncodethehardway.org? I got awesome goodies for you. I ended up completely redoing the LxTHW base structure and converted all my books to it, but I haven't got around to updating the repo with the
118.
by zedshaw 14y ago
Actually, my understanding is you can't really trademark titles of things. That's why you'll see books and movies with the same titles and nobody getting sued. There's also a Perl book that predates my book which I didn't know about, so th
119.
by zedshaw 14y ago
I think a big part of it is that there is a very strong hatred of intellectualism in the US, to the point that people who learned to use computers are called nerds and other vile things as well as abused and beaten for it. I think previous
120.
by zedshaw 14y ago
So, you get to say something incredibly invalid and easily disproven like "you can not learn any skill in 10 weeks" because I wrote an essay in 2008? Four years ago? Let me guess, you aren't very good at this whole logical argument thing wh

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