rmunn

6 ms·

1.
by rmunn 5d ago
Don't worry, I didn't spend much time digging through comment history. Thanks for the links; I'm about to have to leave my computer and do something else for several hours, so I can't look at them right now. But since yo
2.
by rmunn 5d ago
I'd also recommend `:degree <= 0` as the check, rather than `= 0`, just in case someone passes `5.01` to the function (which would cause an infinite loop as you'd never hit exactly 0). But yes, if that was just coded into the c
3.
by rmunn 5d ago
Where the heck did the sudden vitriol come from? I went through the HN comments of the person you're replying to and found nothing like the kind of thing you're replying to in the first several pages. If he said something months a
4.
by rmunn 5d ago
That's more true in some locations than in others. There are places where the reported quality of life is quite a bit higher than others. I see comments like yours a lot on HN, and I'm starting to suspect that the average HN comme
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by rmunn 5d ago
DuckDuckGo is owned by Microsoft? Are you sure? You're not confusing them with Bing, by any chance?
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by rmunn 5d ago
Good example, which is why both you and the other commenter gave it. And if that's as far as it went it wouldn't have bothered me so much; it was when conservative people I know were getting different results from liberal people f
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by rmunn 5d ago
Glad to know the team is growing, it makes me slightly less worried about the project's bus factor.
8.
by rmunn 5d ago
There's a limit to how long the name can be, even in Snap! — not an enforced limit as far as I know, but a practical one. You don't want the block you're dragging around to be thousands of pixels wide, it's very inconv
9.
by rmunn 5d ago
Oh yeah, forgot about those! (I didn't teach them to beginners for obvious reasons). Those make it a Scheme rather than a Lisp. And thank you for all your work not just on Snap!, but on Logo before that. You have done a lot for codin
10.
by rmunn 5d ago
If you mean the tables in the https://eddie.codes/posts/pandas-should-go-extinct/#i-have-b... section, it looks like those came straight from the Amazon paper, in which case __eddie__ shouldn't fix them, on g
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by rmunn 5d ago
The tables in the https://eddie.codes/posts/pandas-should-go-extinct/#i-have-b... section.
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by rmunn 5d ago
Cute title; I thought I was about to read a contrarian ecologist saying "a species that is so very specialized in its diet and finicky in its reproductive behavior doesn't deserve, evolutionarily speaking, to survive". (Ser
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by rmunn 5d ago
I wouldn't mind that one. That a man in the US and a woman in Japan would get different results for a search for "sushi restaurant" is perfectly reasonable (even if the woman in Japan was searching in English). It's when
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by rmunn 5d ago
It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying
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by rmunn 5d ago
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: t
16.
by rmunn 5d ago
Not true in this case; the original intent for BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks) was as an extension to Scratch. When the Scratch team decided not to merge it, the BYOB folks decided to build it into Snap! instead of abandoning the perfectly-fun
17.
by rmunn 5d ago
In Snap! version 12 they have added the ability to create tutorials, which are projects that load up with a limited set of blocks (you choose what set is available when creating the tutorial). This fixes the intimidation problem: you can ev
18.
by rmunn 5d ago
> I think Snap! could take advantage of its equivalency with Scheme, and you could just parse Scheme into Snap! blocks, and the other way around. And ChatGPT knows scheme pretty well, though it's not as ubiquitous and standard as Ja
19.
by rmunn 5d ago
If you're thinking that LLMs will be doing all the coding, well, in my experience I get far better results from the model when I say "Write me a function that does X. It should take parameters Y and Z, and its validation step sh
20.
by rmunn 5d ago
It did as of six months ago when I evaluated Scratch and chose Snap! instead for teaching the beginning-coding class I had signed up to teach. Scratch had lists, but they were only allowed to contain text or numbers, not other lists. To m
21.
by rmunn 5d ago
When I looked at Scratch six months ago, its lists were deliberately handicapped in function. They could only contain text or numbers; they could not contain other lists. Nor could they be passed as parameters to functions (!!), which rea
22.
by rmunn 5d ago
Six months ago I was teaching a beginning-programming course to six kids, using Snap!, so I was reading the forums. And there was a group effort to add documentation to many of the blocks that were lacking it. I haven't been back in a
23.
by rmunn 7d ago
> It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard , on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you
24.
by rmunn 7d ago
> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection. Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee,
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by rmunn 7d ago
A reminder of the guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. [...] Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." It's good to have political opinions. But please don't use HN as a p
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by rmunn 8d ago
> ... most of the new testament has him [Jesus] as a fully separate person with his own separate agenda ... Just want to correct a couple errors of fact here, by quoting from the sources that you're misunderstanding. "And he wi
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by rmunn 9d ago
I'm sure it was often used, but I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the non-English-speaking country where my father worked for many years. So "green-bar paper" is not the only apparently-commonly-used Engl
28.
by rmunn 9d ago
P.S. Another reason why Macbeth might have more injuries than either Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet is the setting. In both Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet they're fencing with rapiers, appropriately to the setting. But in Macbeth they&#x27
29.
by rmunn 9d ago
It's also a very physical play with a large number of onstage fights. Fight choreography is some of the most dangerous stuff to do onstage: a single mistake and someone can easily be hit by a sword that was supposed to just barely mi
30.
by rmunn 9d ago
I could not successfully search for green-bar; I was turning up a brand of rebar made from fiberglass and various vegan bars and restaurants in different cities... but nothing related to coding or text editing. Do you have a link handy that

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