fallintothis

16년 전discuss

This also works wonders with a lightly-held pencil when you're falling asleep in class. Kept me awake through many early-morning lectures.

fallintothis

16년 전discuss

Because that is what they said.

In so many words. I trust their second sentence is relevant and makes more sense to investors, but I imagined it being their slogan. "Gamador: We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better" just sounds humorous (hence the giggling). To me, as a Joe-average user, it sounds more like That Guy from Futurama than "we make a lot of really addicting games".

fallintothis

16년 전discuss

I was giggling at Gamador's summary.

We make social games. We launch faster, iterate faster, and use metrics better.

"Use metrics better"? I guess that one wasn't crafted with consumers in mind.

fallintothis

16년 전discuss

Agreed.

I find martial arts discussions funny. More often than not it's a bunch of people arguing over which one is the "best" in a "real-world fight", which usually degrades into arguments over what "real-world fights" are like, because none of them has ever actually been in one. But it's pretty silly: I know I'd have fun in any martial art right now. If I wanted to know how to fight someone for real, I'd study some form of military combat.

fallintothis

16년 전discuss

I actually pronounce it "tree-eye", even though that's all sorts of incorrect.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

I think the syntax cards were pretty bogus anyways. If you really wanted to compare syntax, you'd do better to compare grammars (e.g., Scheme's: http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z...) than to decide what's important enough to include in some gif. It's hand-wavy at best (cf. the explanations of why things like eql were on the card) and straw-man at worst.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Provably safe at compile time

Is this true? I was under the impression that the Haskell standard didn't formally specify its type semantics. Do works like http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/thih/ "count" (i.e., is it the canonical reason we presume Haskell's type system is provably sound)? Honest question.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

I'm surprised there seems to be so much LaTeX hatred floating around the comments. I don't really know anything about typography, but typesetting my documents using markup is a pleasure. While I often fall into the trap of designing as I type, as soon as I get the styling right, it's consistent. Once I get BibTeX references to compile correctly, I can just \cite (even \possessivecite or \citeasnoun) and not have to worry about dangling bibliography sources that aren't used anywhere in the paper, citation style inconsistencies (where does the volume number go again?), making typos in separate references to the identical source, and so on. Did I change the order of some figures? \ref will still refer to the correct number. I could highlight some word and chord a shortcut to italicize something, then have the processor try to be smarter than me about what should and should not be italicized after that, etc. But I'd rather \emph a word and be done with it (and be able to do things like \usepackage{ulem} to change emphasis to underlines instead). Rather than tabbing back and forth to try to get the proper list structure when the processor gets confused about line breaks, I can textually mark where I want the list to begin/end, where it should nest, etc. Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly. I can do all of this in Vim, where I have productive text-editing commands and even spell-checking. Not to mention typesetting math!

The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just typing it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.

As any deeper understanding of the universe inevitably leads to practical applications, I should think.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

  Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
  physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
  forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
  especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
  relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
  altogether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC#Purpose

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Also, why does the URL need to be human-readable? URLs are for computers. The content is for the human.

Disagreed. I can't stand sites with ugly, incomprehensible URLs: even if they're just appending parameters ad infinitum, it's unnecessary drag on the process of editing, sharing, and typing the URL. E.g., something like

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?_enc
  oding=UTF8&node=1286228011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_r=05
  F7VG5R8T4MBDH7QQ6N&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_i=507846

is, near as I can tell, mostly equivalent to

  http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Books/b/ref=sa_menu_kbo0/187-1539918-5044028?node
  =1286228011

and could probably be made even simpler. Of course sites need to carry some amount of incomprehensible information (YouTube's video IDs, reddit's story IDs, marco.org's blog post numbers, etc.), but shoving as much as you can into the URL isn't the way to do it. I type specific URLs like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic and news.ycombinator.com/newest all the time. If the site author neglects to even have this sort of basic functionality, I tend to consider it a bad interface.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Wow, I'm really liking Songite. Great work keeping it simple -- not enough of that these days.

Edit: Just noticed something playing around with it. Is there a way to correct its results if it doesn't happen to get them right? For example, I searched for All That You Are by Mudvayne, and the only result that gets queued is an 8-second intro.

I like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" simplicity, but there should probably be a way to fix the choice -- e.g., a button on the song for "not the right one" that expands a list of search results.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

You don't know anyone who's seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

No toon can resist the ol' "Shave and a Haircut" trick!

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

If you own a domain that's an OpenID provider, you won't be able to use that.

Aren't there OpenID users who host their own identities exclusively for themselves? Is there danger in letting people do this? (I seriously don't know much about OpenID practices.)

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

I must be out of the loop, but I was surprised to read that Guillermo del Toro was going to be directing this one. Peter Jackson is still closely involved, it seems: http://derhobbit-film.de/facts.shtml

I wonder how much the different director will influence the movie.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Somebody's used to reddit's markdown syntax. :)

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Never something I thought to read about, but definitely entertaining.

Now somebody needs to do a writeup on the history of Nerf guns!

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

Interesting. I wonder how technical you could get by taking a Socratic sort of approach. Perhaps you could get people to understand basic first-order logic, or at least that logic can be codified. When I start off by trying to define first-principles like implication and Boolean algebra, eyes start glazing over. But in my head, the conversation could be steered by acting like a human REPL while talking about a hypothetical first-person shooter or something:

"When does the player die?"

"When their health is 0."

"When do you decrease their health?"

"When they get hit by bullets."

"So, you tell the computer: if the player gets hit by a bullet, then you should decrease the health. If the health is 0, then the player's dead. How much damage should they receive from a bullet? What if it hits their head?"

etc., descending into further complexity until they get the idea of how much they take algorithmic thinking for granted (which I think is probably the most essential thing to realize about programming).

Of course, actual conversations consist of me yakking about over-the-top technical details, amounting to the usual response: "Magic. Got it."

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

As a competitor (albeit one who's none too serious or good), it's remarkable how precisely you've reflected my attitude about programming contests.

Here's a written sample of my numerous (or just repetitive) rants from an old reddit discussion (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6xrpc):

I participate in the ICPC, my school's local programming contests, and, in a minimal way, this year's ICFP (I had midterms to study for and was fed up with their buggy sample server). They're very fun, and that's pretty much all you should expect. The contests are a lot more social than people give them credit for. Hanging out in the computer lab, kicking over chairs as you miss the deadline for a problem, getting friends to participate for the first time, the exhaustion of failure, the thrill of finally getting that message about passing all the tests, post-game pizza party, high-fiving each other for solving 0 problems each, going over solutions, reading each others' hilariously frustrated code ("Fine! Let's brute-force this fucker!"), exchanging tales of respective challenges on each puzzle, stories about cranking out solutions to a problem while sitting with your laptop in class, intermittent bantering about using conversation as a desperate distraction mechanism, breaking out the Binky (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3796146278554348828&...) for help with pointers, offering Emergency High Fives (tm) to the crowd of fellow ICPC competitors as they shuffle out of the building, golfing down the solutions for days after the end of the contest, last-minute submission races, weighing whether to use the scant prize money to get a Scrolling LED Belt Buckle (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7c60/) set to display a well-intentioned insult to the person who normally wins the contest, ... the list goes on.

The rankings are incidental, though most people don't seem to think so. At times it felt like our group was the only one at the ICPC that wasn't taking the contest so fucking seriously. Certainly good programmers can win contests, but winning contests doesn't make one a good programmer. The problems are short, artificial, and moreover a lot of fun! I don't quite understand the hyper-competitive students who make it their life to win the contest, as little as it counts for anything. I'm just happy to kill an afternoon messing around with puzzles and a group of friends; plus, free pizza.

fallintothis

17년 전discuss

How is it any different than Digg/Reddit/HN?

Here's an obvious one: TechCrunch items get posted on Hacker News. Digg/Reddit/aggregator items, not so much.

fallintothis

Submissions

Ask YC: Does anyone have the full-text to "Anatomy of a Lisp Machine"?

comments