toadpipe

5 ms·

1.
by toadpipe 17y ago
What a crock. The things we know amount to nothing compared to the things we don't, and education doesn't even move the needle on that dial. So what? What matters is what you need to know to accomplish some goal vs. what you know right now,
2.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Niceness is not the same thing as determination. Also, trying to flatter someone described as a good judge of character doesn't seem like a good idea to me. /serious
3.
by toadpipe 17y ago
People who give up too early, for any reason.
4.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Pretty much the entire industry, as well as the academic system, is based on the premise that the vast majority of code can and should be written by programmers who will be borrowing heavily against great (in the sense of being large even m
5.
by toadpipe 17y ago
If you are not interested in learning how to do it properly, then hire someone who is. Failing that, do not attempt to do it in C.
6.
by toadpipe 17y ago
It can increase people's commitment to compassion too. Like Lisp or Forth, it is an amplifier. Actually placebos are a better analogy. Both are imaginary social support that allows a body to commit resources that would otherwise be held in
7.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Expressiveness in a single line of code is such a stupid metric. magic() What's that? It's a function call. What does it do? Anything. Everything. Why does it need a complex grammar? It doesn't. Spend your time thinking about the problem, n
8.
by toadpipe 17y ago
If someone could come along and invest the millions of man hours required in making a performance-critical high-level language without the C-baggage As long as it also had C syntax, and something close to the C memory model, and was recog
9.
by toadpipe 17y ago
This is really tempting, but my guess is that the answer is going to be no. Users want something that just works, and they would probably rather dig through a pile of stuff to find that one thing that just works rather than script it themse
10.
by toadpipe 17y ago
In my opinion, a lot of The Software Problem(tm) can be traced back to this tendency to underestimate the difficulty of using magic black box X. Maybe this is because most programmers never try to make a real magic black box X that will be
11.
by toadpipe 17y ago
So now that I've voted up every plinkplonk comment, my comment is that most people obviously haven't read the book. The post is pretty good, but the book is better. You should read it. If you do read the book, you will see that the discussi
12.
by toadpipe 17y ago
The point is that some people are too blinded by their ideology to even come up with a crude solution, let alone an elegant one.
13.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Per Minsky, big brains are a liability until an innovation comes along that allows them to be used properly. IMHO big disks, along with big RAM and big processing cores (now core arrays) are liabilities because we don't know how to use them
14.
by toadpipe 17y ago
It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cos
15.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at anticipating and
16.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporatin
17.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications o
18.
by toadpipe 17y ago
So you're saying that "they weren't right for their jobs" is wrong. What about the "burned out" part? What do you know about why they left? Did they just move on the more interesting things, like so many startup people do? Genuinely curious
19.
by toadpipe 17y ago
You are standing on the shoulders of people who design languages, vs. standing on the shoulders of people who write libraries. Languages are much closer to the central concepts in computing, and the people who work on them have done a lot m
20.
by toadpipe 17y ago
It depends on your priorities. Many U.S. families move long distances every few years, and many young single people move significantly more often than that. Certain jobs can require someone to move almost daily. Part of it is because people
21.
by toadpipe 17y ago
The gold box/pepsi/coke/cola/jolt/id/idst/soda languages are indeed interesting, but from the outside of VPRI it isn't easy to figure out what they do. Listening to Alan Kay try to summarize it in a few minutes ( http://irbseminars.intel-re
22.
by toadpipe 17y ago
This is like the adult version of everything the culture tells you where you're a kid: "you're special! you're a unique snowflake! you can do anything, if you just believe in it! follow your dreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeams!" The adult version is more
23.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Given that DSLs are hard, it does not follow that sticking "foundational concepts" into "components" is a better strategy than DSLs. If you write a DSL, you are standing on the shoulders of real giants. If you rely on components, you are go
24.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Maybe it is possible for lesswrong to be less wrong after all.
25.
by toadpipe 17y ago
The title and content of the post state that, if the UI is terrible, then it was (probably) created by a programmer. They do not say the converse, nor does the converse automatically follow (the converse being: if the UI was created by a pr
26.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Note to readers who might misunderstand: the above posts (parent and parent parent) are trolls. The only thing worse than dialog boxes are attention whore dialog boxes with poor writing. The user does not want to read your stupid dialog box
27.
by toadpipe 17y ago
It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way to keep the IT
28.
by toadpipe 17y ago
This is basically a worse variation on the better Worse is Better article by Richard Gabriel, focused on software design as business strategy instead of as a pure popularity strategy. The core observation of Worse is Better is that the 50%-
29.
by toadpipe 17y ago
It means that the anti-aliasing is done with the positions of individual RGB components in mind instead of treating whole pixels in a grid as the fundamental abstraction. It allows for smoother anti-aliasing at the cost of some portability
30.
by toadpipe 17y ago
Modularization is indeed independent of programming discipline. That is basically my point. Breaking a program down into the correct components is all-important, but most of this happens well below the module level. Unless the system has be

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