cchooper

5 ms·

1.
by cchooper 13y ago
On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their e
2.
by cchooper 14y ago
Although the lambda papers talk about Scheme, that's not what they're really about. They're really about... lambda. The takeaway is that many common features of languages can be thought of as disguised uses of the lambda operator. So lambda
3.
by cchooper 14y ago
Well if that's not an invitation to finally start my blog, I don't know what is.
4.
by cchooper 14y ago
Having just quit my job for a contractor role in London, I am so glad to see this here.
5.
by cchooper 15y ago
The Economist and Financial Times are both modern success stories for selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.
6.
by cchooper 17y ago
I could make tomorrow evening, or most other dates after work.
7.
by cchooper 17y ago
Zero-click info for error messages would be a great resource. There are already some sites that do this for specific kinds of error (e.g. ora-code.com for Oracle errors) but a general "put in this error and I´ll tell you what it means" site
8.
by cchooper 17y ago
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
9.
by cchooper 17y ago
Several Lisp applications have config files that are just Lisp files run at start-up. Emacs is an example. You can (and people do) put absolutely any code in there. There's no need to restrict it to just setting variables. So what's the dif
10.
by cchooper 17y ago
There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul. Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poiso
11.
by cchooper 17y ago
There is not a single great movie in your 2005 list. In fact Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much better decade than the current one. The 70s were even better
12.
by cchooper 17y ago
If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X? If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented? At the very most, object-orientation is a particular mechanism for
13.
by cchooper 17y ago
These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time: 1939
14.
by cchooper 17y ago
I upvoted this because it's a wonderful example of mathematical crankiness. I've always wondered why cranks are attracted to the same things: Cantor's diagonalization proof, squaring the circle, 1=0.999.. Perhaps it's because the problems a
15.
by cchooper 17y ago
I'll second Hacker and recommend his Wittgenstein's Place in 20th Century Analytic Philsophy as a reasonably accessible starting point.
16.
by cchooper 17y ago
This thought struck me when I observed the reverse process in some poor countries during the oil boom. Where people are poor and energy is expensive, there's an incentive to 'deindustrialize' by replacing expensive machines with cheap labou
17.
by cchooper 17y ago
But why do you need to offer them something when you could just take it? The answer is that they will shove a gun in your face if you do. Property rights are just as much based on force as any other law.
18.
by cchooper 18y ago
The FT called it the Great Unwinding, on the basis that the unsustainable debt/trade/current account imbalances would start to reverse their direction. It seems the only thing anyone can agree on is that we're experiencing something really
19.
by cchooper 18y ago
It sounds to me like an expert system. What I can't see is how it's different to any other kind of expert system. Just more data?
20.
by cchooper 18y ago
You're both (a little) wrong! :) You can't call something an illusion just because its true nature is misunderstood. An illusion is something that looks deceptively like something else . A hologram of a table is an illusion, but just mis
21.
by cchooper 18y ago
I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are: 1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand). 2. Film stock and processing (
22.
by cchooper 18y ago
Interestingly, almost everyone posting to the Reddit thread got that it was a joke ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81s36/i_hate_li... ) but most people posting to HN took it seriously.
23.
by cchooper 18y ago
Creole and pidgin languages are special cases though. They are simple because they are relatively new constructions, rather than because they are unwritten.
24.
by cchooper 18y ago
I understand why. Thanks for replying.
25.
by cchooper 18y ago
Other than news.arc, is there any particular aspect of the language you're focusing on?
26.
by cchooper 18y ago
I suspect it's more because these books have a fanatical following, the kind of people who want to deliberately manipulate 'Best Of...' lists to give their beliefs more publicity.
27.
by cchooper 18y ago
It makes no sense to say that the dictionary has it wrong. If you discovered that human beings were actually created by aliens for some sinister purpose then we would be their technology, but unless that's what you're proposing then the wor
28.
by cchooper 18y ago
It's quite clear that the unabomber did not consider human beings, or nature generally, to be a form of technology. His manifesto is all about the opposition of technology and nature. He says that technology destroys nature, and therefore w
29.
by cchooper 18y ago
There's a good article in the FT today on a similar theme: how this recession is/isn't like past recessions, particularly the Japanese "lost decade". http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/774c0920-fd1d-11dd-a103-000077b076...
30.
by cchooper 18y ago
It's a symmetric relationship. If a note looks like a chord then a chord looks like a note. Both a mix of frequencies and a single frequency can produce the same colour, so they both look like each other.

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