Viewing profile — jeorgun

These questions seem pretty good! In the max heap question, I'd argue that add should take a parameter by value, rather than a const reference, since this prevents having to needle…

To that end, I highly recommend the command line utility 'sl', which runs an unskippable ASCII animation of a steam locomotive. Makes for great fun explaining it to the flummoxed c…

Notably, the "al" in algebra and algorithm really is the Arabic 'al-'— algebra and algorithm are latinized forms of al-jabr and al-Khwarizmi respectively.

That seems pretty harsh. From context, 'been there, done that' sounds to me like sympathizing with the article's author, not dismissing them.

If it's more than 10-20% of Dropbox users, that says pretty bad things about their market share.

Calling Scheme a "new language with a strong Lisp influence" is a bit rich. It's certainly not new, and in many respects it's more representative of Lisps-of-Old than Common Lisp.

"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++." In what sense was C++ designed for other people? IIRC Stroustrup came up wi…

Mehmed II? In any case a lot of the territory Suleiman conquered did remain part of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th century.

I think the intention is less "the tipping model makes more sense", and more "given that the tipping model is in effect, you shouldn't unfairly punish the housekeepers by not tippi…

Uncharitably, I'd say the old logo looked much more professional, and so didn't jive with Google's corporate ethos of "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible". The new o…

I wouldn't object to somebody creating, from whole cloth, an electric-stuff-free place, but I do object to people co-opting an existing community that they're not part of and insis…

I think it's undeniable that a substantial portion of the interest in XMonad came about because it's written in Haskell, but that's very different from saying that all of the inter…

Ditto in English, for that matter, although for various reasons we spell "i" with two "e"s.

If I'm understanding right, grandparent isn't saying "effectiveness(minor, frequent) == effectiveness(major, infrequent)"; they're saying "effectiveness(minor) == effectiveness(maj…

I'm going to assume from context that they're talking about xmonad.

My first language was some awful proprietary BASIC dialect. It hasn't harmed me any, so far as I can tell. Learning one language, proprietary or not, gets you about 99% of the way …

Without looking too closely at it, the infographic looks suspiciously similar to this one: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/04/lies-damned-lies-and-fa... . Does that same rebuttal…

I agree with your overall point, but you're forgetting a third effect: preventing non-current-drug users scared of more conventional venues, but not by Silk Road (which, as you poi…

Would it be possible to edit this comment and stick that in a code box or something? It's breaking the page width.

I've always loved this story. Reading it now, though, it's funny that it was written by the guy most famous for his robot stories. They seem like a pretty glaring omission. If you …

Interesting; I was recently binge-reading some old blog posts and came across this[1] not dissimilar claim from 2012. Maybe it wasn't so crazy after all. [1] http://squid314.livejo…

To add to that last point, the most important thing to keep in mind when expanding your vocabulary is knowing when and when not to show it off. Few things come across more poorly t…

That does something similar, sure, but what it in fact is is a macro. As snikeris was saying, you couldn't write anything quite like that #define in a macroless language like Java.…

Also, it seems to break swipe-left/right-to-nagivate-back/forward in Chrome and Safari. I was sure my touchpad was broken or something.

I think they mean it in the "real programmers use FORTRAN" [1], not the literal, sense. [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/R/Real-Programmer.html