Viewing profile — bstpierre

I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing. Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid? The only exc…

> Some varieties of European and Asian pines have this innate resistance because they evolved alongside the fungus. However, American trees met this threat too late to develop a wo…

This is a cool project. I'm learning French and am always on the lookout for sources of books -- and especially audio -- at the right level. To others questioning the need for rewr…

Two main things I use it for: 1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading …

I accidentally built a kind-of compiler last year. It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was …

Not sure about the person you replied to, but here in northeast US if you don’t mow to keep trees down you can quickly end up with a very thick growth of trees. It’s also easy to e…

Maybe it happens a lot and nobody has mentioned it here yet, but I find live, out-of-band reviews are often very effective. By this I mean looking at a patch and asking questions o…

TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".…

In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was k…

See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like what you're suggesting. You rank movies from 0-100, which is different from rating them. Your percentile ranking sco…

Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the two, with a thous…

Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driv…

If the ticket is a direct conduit to the customer, I think you could argue that ticket management in the form of asking clarifying questions so that you build the right thing (or f…

I worked at a shop with P0, and then there were too many P0 tickets, and then you just worked on whatever the CTO told you was the _actual_ highest priority ticket when he stopped …

I once got USPS mail addressed to: My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows w…

It’s not always driven by a desire for novelty. In my experience it’s just as often driven by some amount of reflection and desire to improve on what came before. I think there’s a…

> light-hearted fun is not necessary It might not be necessary, but I think it’s sorely needed Being serious all the time is unhealthy

> It would be nice for them to add a writing version as well. Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then…

I had a 2 year streak that I recently walked away from, after 1 year of premium expired. (After having had premium, I think working without it makes the app basically unusable.) I …

I’ve only played around with lisp a little bit, what about it makes it a solo programmer tool?

I think my last round of it was second hand from myself on a pair of boots. Must have walked somewhere by it and gotten it on the laces, but didn’t actually get it on my skin, or w…

I guess it depends a lot on where you are. My real estate tax bill has separate rates and line items for town, school district, county, and state. Some places have separate assessm…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat The mice have a solution for the murderous cat: simply put a bell on the cat’s collar and then they will know when it’s coming. But… w…

Another perspective is that interviews can also be about avoiding anyone that might be a bad developer. If you have a large pool of applicants, it's "safe" to basically reject by d…

Nice resource. I especially like the mental model section because this kind of execution monitoring is impossible if you don’t have a solid understanding of what you’re actually lo…