rabidgnat

7 ms·

1.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
My path to programming, as a product of the internet generation: As a child, I loved the idea of computer programming. I got books at the library that told you how, but they always needed equipment I didn't have. I actually wrote fake progr
2.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Unfortunately, bad browser support :/ http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html
3.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
I run into plenty of situations where I have multiple lines, and I'd like the respective elements to align. It's not limited to tabular data, but it's the easiest example
4.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
There are plenty of problems with CSS. You can't specify the width of an inline element, for one. That alone prevents a lot of reasonable layouts, like tables. Also problematic is a standards body that ignores this use case! In this case, t
5.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
The police investigates crimes that have already been observed. Journalists have the freedom to investigate potential crimes based on their gut feeling. Recall Enron - a police officer standing anywhere in Headquarters would have missed a c
6.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
But my original point is that there's one dev team in the middle of this dealing with concurrency, and any number of remote applications that can use it through a library because someone else worried about the hard parts. There isn't a day
7.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
It's not some silly vision of the future, but an oversimplified version of today! A brief and incomplete list of applications I use in a typical day: Remote storage and/or processing: GMail, Google Docs, Weather.com, Reddit.com, Hacker Ne
8.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Most application developers won't worry about concurrent program design. Ever. More and more applications are becoming layered each year, and all of the hard work is done on the server side. Drawing an application's chrome takes little powe
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by rabidgnat 16y ago
Rejewski and Turing's Enigma cracking accomplishments were staggeringly significant, but they won nothing. If the Allies bombed every submarine that radioed a position, the Germans would have thrown the machines into the ocean. The Enigma l
10.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
I disagree with your perspective. Scientists don't need to understand everything about life to make meaningful contributions to our lifespan. This stuff isn't magic - there are sound, repeatable principles at the bottom of everything you me
11.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting Chris Okasaki http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps It shows how to construct Red-Black trees in an extremely simple manner in Haskell. I tried this technique in C++ and I was finish
12.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
If I feel extra contact with someone is inevitable, I usually try to request that the person email me some helpful info that I need. If they say they'll "just call," I point out that [list of people] might find it useful, and joke that I ca
13.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
A friend of mine gave up drugs completely after watching "Requiem for a Dream"
14.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
You could take the beginning of habit 5 as complementary to Emacs. Has another program ever been extended to do more? Towards the end of point 5, Bram really points out the strength of Vim over Emacs - it is small enough that it could be re
15.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Keeping your email under control requires an unreasonable amount of discipline. I've managed to avoid 'defaulting' on my email so far, but at a decent overhead rate: Every hour or two, I wipe out my inbox completely and leave only items tha
16.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Easily! First, I'd stare at the Clojure webpage, and try some examples in the REPL. I'd feel like I'm not grokking idiomatic Clojure, so I'd try some Google searches, but find nothing compelling. I'd hit random Clojure links on Hacker News
17.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
I was reminded of this: "There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go" ~ East of Eden After reading this, I lost all
18.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
I lightly approve of anecdotal posts like these. Facebook controls all of the data needed to make informed decisions, and they're not going to share if the OP's claims are accurate. Lots of bad press about CPM and cost/click will force Face
19.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
You don't even need a program. The TI-83Plus lets you create backups that survive wipes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weBNfd26_r0
20.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
"I sure as hell don't remember being showered with praise or getting athletic trophies just for turning up" I experienced a lot of that, but in retrospect my parents managed it pretty well by rewarding hard work. If I got a trophy for a bad
21.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Before now, I assumed that teaching programming meant giving exercises where students figure out how to piece together the fundamentals of programming languages, and then try to build them up to harder programs. After reading through Zed's
22.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
"What happens to Lisp if Google buys ITA Software?" Over the years, subsystems will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java, and programmers will get converted one-by-one to C++/Python/Java programmers. Google would have a lot of good a
23.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
I follow the Git mailing list, and he's even-keeled and surprisingly helpful in discussions. The tone of the original post is representative of what he normally writes. I'm sure he's no saint, but his most famous rants were responses to sni
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by rabidgnat 16y ago
If you have RSI typing pain and haven't treated it, spend a whole day typing with wrist braces. It convinced me to switch CTRL and CAPS LOCK on my keyboard. I love keyboard shortcuts, and bending my wrist to hit CTRL was causing my left pin
25.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
"I really hope you are a Steve Jobs sockpuppet account" Probably not. The Jobs-o-grams that I've seen are terse. Jobs probably would have written something like: "Mark should not be hacking. We wouldn't want a Captain greasing a ship's engi
26.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
It's going pretty well, but we're cheating: we give the other devs both the CVS and the git checkout commands, and let them use what they want. The early adopters tend to be those who already use it outside of work. I agree that the tools o
27.
by rabidgnat 16y ago
Backwards-compatibility efforts like these are great. Some CVS/SVN users are (un?)surprisingly stubborn about trying new things, and they can halt upgrade efforts with their complaints. My company is converting our repositories from CVS to
28.
by rabidgnat 17y ago
Try to land a system programming gig at a bleeding-edge research company! I work as one, and easily 1/2 of the workers don't come in until 10:00. Some come in as late as 1:00 when they don't have meetings. It's also a great environment for
29.
by rabidgnat 17y ago
Wow, this actually found a moderate security vulnerability in my website! Fetching http://mysite.com/static/ returned the plaintext template of my index.html file, which I must have accidentally copied in some manual hackery during a brok
30.
by rabidgnat 17y ago
"If one of those little people you fake-befriended and then got rid of ends up in a position where you need something from them in the future, you're screwed." Or as my father put it, "The people you meet on the way up are the people you me

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