bstpierre

6 ms·

1.
by bstpierre 3y ago
I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing. Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid? The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically
2.
by bstpierre 3y ago
> Some varieties of European and Asian pines have this innate resistance because they evolved alongside the fungus. However, American trees met this threat too late to develop a workable defense.
3.
by bstpierre 3y ago
This is a cool project. I'm learning French and am always on the lookout for sources of books -- and especially audio -- at the right level. To others questioning the need for rewriting: language changes over the course of a century! I
4.
by bstpierre 3y ago
Two main things I use it for: 1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next
5.
by bstpierre 3y ago
I accidentally built a kind-of compiler last year. It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was easy. But then there were complications, and I needed to
6.
by bstpierre 3y ago
Not sure about the person you replied to, but here in northeast US if you don’t mow to keep trees down you can quickly end up with a very thick growth of trees. It’s also easy to end up with a lot of undesirable (invasive) species crowding
7.
by bstpierre 3y ago
Maybe it happens a lot and nobody has mentioned it here yet, but I find live, out-of-band reviews are often very effective. By this I mean looking at a patch and asking questions or raising issues with the author. I do this fairly regularly
8.
by bstpierre 3y ago
TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".
9.
by bstpierre 3y ago
In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was kind of slow to start, especially when there were 20+ users l
10.
by bstpierre 3y ago
See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like what you're suggesting. You rank movies from 0-100, which is different from rating them. Your percentile ranking scores are compared to other use
11.
by bstpierre 3y ago
Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the two, with a thousand little variations on terms. I believe I ran into an empl
12.
by bstpierre 3y ago
Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driving a mower around and around and around — not really intens
13.
by bstpierre 3y ago
If the ticket is a direct conduit to the customer, I think you could argue that ticket management in the form of asking clarifying questions so that you build the right thing (or fix the right bug) is creating value?
14.
by bstpierre 3y ago
I worked at a shop with P0, and then there were too many P0 tickets, and then you just worked on whatever the CTO told you was the _actual_ highest priority ticket when he stopped by your cubicle for a chat.
15.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I once got USPS mail addressed to: My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.
16.
by bstpierre 4y ago
It’s not always driven by a desire for novelty. In my experience it’s just as often driven by some amount of reflection and desire to improve on what came before. I think there’s a lot of middle ground between chasing shiny new things and c
17.
by bstpierre 4y ago
> light-hearted fun is not necessary It might not be necessary, but I think it’s sorely needed Being serious all the time is unhealthy
18.
by bstpierre 4y ago
> It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections.
19.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.) I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60
20.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I’ve only played around with lisp a little bit, what about it makes it a solo programmer tool?
21.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I think my last round of it was second hand from myself on a pair of boots. Must have walked somewhere by it and gotten it on the laces, but didn’t actually get it on my skin, or washed well enough. Then on a day where I couldn’t possibly h
22.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I guess it depends a lot on where you are. My real estate tax bill has separate rates and line items for town, school district, county, and state. Some places have separate assessments on each district within a municipality. Some cities hav
23.
by bstpierre 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat The mice have a solution for the murderous cat: simply put a bell on the cat’s collar and then they will know when it’s coming. But… who’s going to “bell the cat”? i.e. who
24.
by bstpierre 4y ago
Another perspective is that interviews can also be about avoiding anyone that might be a bad developer. If you have a large pool of applicants, it's "safe" to basically reject by default and only proceed with a select few w
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by bstpierre 4y ago
Nice resource. I especially like the mental model section because this kind of execution monitoring is impossible if you don’t have a solid understanding of what you’re actually looking at.
26.
by bstpierre 4y ago
As an intern in the mid 90s I babysat a similar mix. We also had some older SunOS boxes and some Irix, but mostly Solaris. I remember the HP as being the worst to work with of the bunch - for whatever reason if one of the tests was going to
27.
by bstpierre 4y ago
I think that what you’re talking about might even be the killer feature that is often ignored: the forced simplicity. It’s a simple enough language that you can drop into a codebase and read without having to look up much syntax, assuming y
28.
by bstpierre 4y ago
Mostly I think it was that the market moved and they didn't have the capital to make the leap. Combined with a not-so-great product/market fit to begin with, this is fatal for a capital-intensive startup.
29.
by bstpierre 4y ago
In your first example you’re just using newlines as delimiters, the second is allowing either newline or comma.
30.
by bstpierre 4y ago
Even with the high end machine it still takes 27 minutes. If I have a 27 minute build I am absolutely going to context switch. If it’s more than about 3 minutes I am probably going to context switch. An interesting experiment would be to f

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