mtomczak

6 ms·

1.
by mtomczak 15y ago
How does refraining from collecting sales tax make Amazon look cheaper than Barnes and Noble? The sticker price doesn't factor in the sales tax; on an item-by-item comparison, the prices would look the same if B&N could match Amazon. Ba
2.
by mtomczak 16y ago
I wonder if there's correlation between below-average physical activity and insomnia? I assume that a lot of coders---by necessity of their task and the tools they use---spend most of a week sitting as opposed to, say, a mail carrier or sto
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by mtomczak 16y ago
Thanks to the general availability and utilization of vaccines against smallpox and polio, massive improvements in sanitation and emergency response, and long-term cardiac therapy, the death rate due to cancers is radically up. Cancer is a
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by mtomczak 16y ago
My experience with the legal system has been limited to a handful of vehicular violations and one tour of jury duty. But from that limited perspective, I cannot see why the justice system should minimize useful facts. Apart from the laws th
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by mtomczak 16y ago
Is it possible that the difference between 1984 and the world into which we could be moving is that Big Brother recorded all motions and activities of the citizenry, but the reverse wasn't true? Perhaps that's where balance lies.
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by mtomczak 16y ago
I've heard this approach described as a failure continuation, and it's a good approach. It's much easier to do in a language that allows for easy creation of closures. Such a system wouldn't be impossible to construct in C++; you could crea
7.
by mtomczak 16y ago
Property values are significantly lower in Pittsburgh, which makes property ownership easier. And the top-quality colleges in the city continue to graduate excellent candidates for tech company employment. Although a graduate can ship out w
8.
by mtomczak 16y ago
Slightly off-topic, but if you're installing ODE on Windows, you're in for a world of hurt. I never had the chance to try any other dynamics packages that build on Windows, but I'd recommend shying away from ODE; this is a "devil I know, de
9.
by mtomczak 16y ago
I'm sure I'll get accused of having no sense of humor, but I have to observe that from a usability standpoint, this is unhelpful. It gives me no clue as to what I've done wrong, it wastes my time, and it offers me no help in correcting my b
10.
by mtomczak 17y ago
I think this is the flip-side of the startup coin that many people forget about. The quote from the article that stuck out most for met was "But most of all: nothing is more motivating and inspiring than the sense of ownership and self-dire
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by mtomczak 17y ago
There are similarities between Facebook and AOL. But one significant difference is the interface. AOL had a proprietary client to access its service network. It made sense at the time, but it was often clunky, had not-insignificant bugs, an
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by mtomczak 17y ago
Interesting point. But if we aren't going to trust SSL, what should we trust for commerce over the Internet?
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by mtomczak 17y ago
In the short run? Flash Player. If your browser doesn't support Flash, you are still getting a more fragmented web experience than the person running Windows XP on her $250 netbook.
14.
by mtomczak 17y ago
I use my netbook mostly to write small web server applications in Ruby and Python. This device is not "for" me.
15.
by mtomczak 17y ago
For the record (though as other commenters have pointed out, this rant on LabView is off-topic): LabView is a very successful tool that is used by many programmers in various fields, not just instrumentation. LabView does have compiler erro
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by mtomczak 17y ago
For his baby-momma to keep the baby in, of course.
17.
by mtomczak 17y ago
I believe that I see your point, and I would agree that the verbosity of HTML leads to sharability, and that is a strength. But the verbosity is also one of its weaknesses for large projects; it adds a great deal of overhead in terms of kee
18.
by mtomczak 17y ago
They are functions you can make up on the spot. That's usually the extent of my explanation. Surprisingly, most of the people I talk to assume that the "fancy" parts of closures (such as variable value capture and upvalues) are the way such
19.
by mtomczak 17y ago
Sounds like fun. I'll be in for that. How do we know where to find each other?
20.
by mtomczak 17y ago
I can't help but wonder if it's a mistake to try and push widespread adoption of Linux distros in the desktop space. It's possible there's insufficient money to be made in that space--Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is a de-facto mon
21.
by mtomczak 17y ago
Sadly, I think the issues mentioned in this comment are exactly the point, primarily the last issue. Most desktop consumers using Windows and MacOS aren't used to dealing with a product that isn't a household name. While lack of vendor supp
22.
by mtomczak 17y ago
Yep. Working at a startup company in the city right now, in fact.
23.
by mtomczak 17y ago
Not a bad article. But the article summary on HN is pretty much a lie; I'm pretty sure you can cure NS with various techniques, including blunt-force-trauma to the cranial region.
24.
by mtomczak 17y ago
This news and Google Apps coming out of beta in the same day? I can't take all this sudden and drastic change!
25.
by mtomczak 17y ago
I strongly suspect that's the point. What does "beta" mean on a web service that is continually updated by the developers in essentially realtime? The only real meaning I can think it has is the liability concerns that others in this thread
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by mtomczak 17y ago
Here is the thing I wish someone had told me my freshman year of high school. If you're interested in computer science, study topics in discrete mathematics, real algebra (the algebra where you compute with symbols instead of numbers, look
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by mtomczak 17y ago
I've seen Mono used to great effect in the Unity 3D game engine ( http://unity3d.com/ ). Game engines are one of those interesting spaces where speed matters quite a bit, but so does ease of modification; you want your developers to be comf
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by mtomczak 17y ago
It's funny, because I have a simple AppJet app that I was considering re-implementing in Rails, having recently learned the basics of the framework. AppJet has just helped me make the decision. Thanks, AppJet!
29.
by mtomczak 18y ago
Greetings! I'm one of the regular readers of codinghorror who had never seen news.ycombinator.com until just today. With respect, the original poster (pollster?) is painting with a rather large brush. Could we please at least be allowed to