tac-tics
tac-tics on Hacker News
> The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
Eh? Every expert I've heard lately is fearful we're headed towards a repeat of the great depression. The one during the 1930s... not the 1970s.
I do like the square brackets. They don't require holding down shift. And when you're writing the next killer app, and in the process, end up setting the world record for the longest string of subsequent ')' characters... that saves you a ton of stress on your pinky finger ;-)
The good XKCDs deserve karma. Many of them are rather dull comics, but today's is pretty golden.
A local lisp implementation in my community saved an entire boatful of drowning puppies! Lisp is awesome!
What the fuck is with you people? 60 responses and most of theme seem to be arguing about Steve's content instead of his average blog length. After all, it's Yegge we're talking about folks!
=-P
I just want to point out an issue with a small point Paul brings up, and that issue is how Karma works on YC versus Reddit.
I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there is a tradeoff. On Reddit, you can be rude, and people can downmod you, and it doesn't matter once the post sinks. Here, if you act like an asshole, you get downmodded, and your karma suffers. But even if you make a well reasoned, but controversial comment, you often do still get downmodded because of your unpopular views.
Not that I comment here often, but I'm at four down from seven at one point, and it's really the logical consequence of such a system. It seems to work here, but I do wonder, as Paul expresses near the end of his article here, does this technique scale?
Delicious Cake. I must eat it.
The best way to learn Haskell is a combination of #haskell on irc.freenode.net and the Haskell wikibook (incomplete and often flaky, but up until the beginning of the Advanced section, a very nice introduction to the language)
A scheme isn't a scheme without continuations. It's a shame they're such a pain in the ass to implement in platforms w/o gotos or TCO.
This guy's "rants" are aptly named. He vents his frustration the way I'm sure most of us do after a bad day at work: incoherently and unconvincingly.
I've long wondered whether or not to put in the effort to learn Rails. I would be more than happy to listen to any well-reasoned praise or criticism of the Rails community. Regardless of any accuracy he may have in his arguments, his writing comes off in the same whiny tone one might expect from a 13 year old in Counter-Strike or Halo who just got sniped.
And, yeah, the IRC posts are a bit much. When you're trying to provide evidence that people in some community are a bunch of assholes, it hurts your credibility if you use an assholish tone yourself throughout your entire blog post.
Move along, nothing to see here folks.
A very good point. At the end of the day, Java 1.5 is still 98% as good as the latest release. And a language without closures (while certainly frustrating if you've been pampered) doesn't break a language.
I visited #lisp only a handful of times, but the one time I tried asking a question, I received a flamebath along with my answer. If newcomers step on your toes, channel regulars should have the maturity to deal with it respectfully. I'm not entirely new to Lisp, and I'm not stupid, so why not take the time to try and educate instead of discourage? I asked just that, and I got very close to, "why waste the energy, you'll never learn." Ten minutes in an IRC channel isn't enough time to make such a judgement.
The article above may be a bit blunt about it, but I think the term "douchebaggery" is pretty darned accurate from my experience with #lisp.
I agree. Math is extremely subtle. And despite its nature as the most exacting and rigorous of sciences, the notation used in mathematics is anything but. Each author uses their own conventions. Abuse of notation runs rampant.
Sometimes the difference between theta and phi is more than just alpha conversion... some authors use certain variable names to communicate important properties that must be satisfied in the premise of theorems -- but without making those premises explicit.
A derivative is a 'special form' in calculus when it is so cleanly expressed as a higher-order function. And indefinite integrals introduce a mysterious constant, C, when really, what you're talking about is a multivalued-function!
I think math is pretty much the coolest subject one could study, but in many of the books I've read, the difficulty in understanding is evenly divided between the concepts and the author himself.
