jgw

123 ms·

1.
Zombo.com Turns 20
2 points by jgw 7y ago|1 comments
2.
by jgw 10y ago
"I see what you did there," as they say elsewhere on the Internet. Nifty little device to make a an important point.
3.
by jgw 10y ago
I was told that the inventor came up with the idea while at the theatre with his wife. As the spotlights converged on a performer, the idea sprung to mind, and he yelped "I've got it!" Quite possibly embellished, but plausib
4.
by jgw 10y ago
I don't think any discussion of "misguided promotional offers" is complete without a mention of Hoover's "free flight" fiasco: * http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3704669.stm W
5.
by jgw 10y ago
Clever and artful, with a little nostalgia thrown in. 1993 was the year I started my undergrad and would not see a "web browser" until the following year. It's nice to re-capture a little of the spirit of what computing was
6.
by jgw 10y ago
Indeed it is - Fahlman worked with Steel et. al. on Common Lisp. Other notable folks I recognized in the thread: * Dave Touretzky - author of a well-regarded Lisp textbook in its day * Masaru Tomita - the guy who invented the GLR parser
7.
by jgw 10y ago
Of course, Fahlman is a Lisper, so of course he's going to use parens... ;)
8.
by jgw 10y ago
It makes me a bit of a luddite (and a heck of a curmudgeon), but it always makes me a little sad when good ol' ASCII smileys are rendered all fancy-like. There's something charming and hackerish about showing it as a 7-bit glyph.
9.
by jgw 10y ago
See first 25 entries or so in the permuted CL symbol index: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Front/X_Per... Scheme does use ?, and you can in CL if you really want. But CL reserves ? as
10.
by jgw 10y ago
I really like: "A bad arrangement is better than a process." I might surreptitiously slip that into the next coding style guide I come across.
11.
by jgw 10y ago
Re: "owe nothing to it", I respectfully disagree. Canadians at Waterloo enjoy a heavily subsidized world-class education, at the tax-payer's expense, then leave to contribute nothing to the economy that produced them. Inter
12.
by jgw 10y ago
No, I don't think you're seeing the proposed attack here. As I understand it: 1. A company tapes out their chip to be fabbed, as most chips are, off-shore. The design is clean. 2. The backdoor is added after it is out of the c
13.
by jgw 10y ago
Do you know if they run on 6502s and other Western chips of the time? Were they cloned, or imported? Or were there Soviet ISA's? I remember reading years ago about how Russian computer scientists in the cold war were more honed in al
14.
by jgw 10y ago
I think that's true. I think I'd formulate it more broadly as, "In our interaction, I'm vaguely aware that there's some sort of subtext that I don't understand, but is very important to you, or is even your ma
15.
by jgw 10y ago
Bit late replying to this, so I hope you see it, but as I noted elsewhere, the key here is something called a "reader macro". This is a mechanism by which you can control the behaviour of the Lisp reader (i.e., the READ function)
16.
by jgw 10y ago
Interesting! I'm wide open to more Scheme in my life - so thanks for the pointers.
17.
by jgw 10y ago
Programmable syntax (reader macros), programmable printer are 2 big ones. Also regular macros are key, manipulating code as structures not text, having both lexical and dynamic variables, closures and all the other nuts and bolts stuff. T
18.
by jgw 10y ago
Haven't spent enough time with Racket, but my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that you won't squeeze as much performance out of it, and performance is quite important. I'm also quite partial to Lisp's co
19.
by jgw 10y ago
Sure, s/built/are building/g. Without going into too much detail, I basically am subsuming another language (statically-typed, Algol-ish) wholesale into Common Lisp. It replaces that language's syntax with an s-expressi
20.
by jgw 10y ago
I enjoyed skimming over this again -- I happen to be the guy who wrote the first comment on it. I'm pleased to say that I've stuck with CL, and I'm glad I did. I've managed to use it at work, and have been using it to b
21.
by jgw 10y ago
I was hoping "What Art Is" would be salvageable, but sadly not. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/6/19/143553/870 I don't even recall who wrote it now, but I've had it book
22.
by jgw 13y ago
It did to me, too. It has some of the mood of my all-time favourite piece of Interactive Fiction - heck, of any fiction. Photopia ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html ) It's my hope that one soul, somewhere, will
23.
Show HN: SVeN, A SystemVerilog BNF Navigator(sven.xtreme-eda.com)
1 points by jgw 13y ago|0 comments
24.
by jgw 14y ago
Here's a very nice Common Lisp quickref for anyone else who might be into it: http://clqr.boundp.org/
25.
by jgw 14y ago
It's pretty much how modern ASICs are reverse-engineered today - mainly for patent infringement investigation.
26.
by jgw 14y ago
That's interesting - it's actually Steve Jobs to whom I attribute this trend. I'm not really an Apple guy, though, so it may be a misperception on my part.
27.
by jgw 14y ago
Is anyone else getting really, really bored of the term "beautiful" being bandied around so much in this type of context? It has long ceased to mean anything at all. I understand the importance of aesthetics in design, but it seems odd t
28.
by jgw 14y ago
For all the "embarrassment" that Itanium is, here's a fun fact that astonished me: The world market for Itanium is bigger than the whole market for AMD.
29.
by jgw 14y ago
I'm still not entirely clear on what Google's policy is on real names, even after reading it. Is it acceptable to have an account with a fictitious name in addition to one's own account? It's not clear to me from their policy whether this
30.
IEEE 1800-2012 SystemVerilog spec available for free download(standards.ieee.org)
2 points by jgw 14y ago|0 comments

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