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mcartyemon Ask HN: do any of you take mental performance enhancement drugs?

President Harry S. Truman said “The C Students Run the World”

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/11/16/c-students-more-succ...

http://blog.pdus2go.com/special-edition/why-a-students-dont-...

http://elitedaily.com/elite/2012/students-run-world/

mcartyemon Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS

You'll be surprised how often logic is needed.

Can you automatically compute pixels or colors with CSS based on values of other elements in CSS? Or combined with values coming from a user's preferences?

Seemingly trivial logic can reduce presentation complexity enormously. With a powerful programming language you have a better grip over the complexity than you do with CSS.

mcartyemon Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS

why not use them?

Because they are not powerful enough.

mcartyemon Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS

http://subjectivelisp.org

mcartyemon Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS

You seem to be saying that the reason to use HTML+CSS+Javascript is that without them one would need to use HTML+CSS+Javascript. That you use it because you need it. Well, are you sure you need all three?

An alternative would be to use a more powerful language that would let you express the kinds of things you often need with CSS as macros and have no CSS at all.

mcartyemon Why Learn Scala in 2013?

Does it have macros?

mcartyemon Why Learn Scala in 2013?

Are you suggesting that the metric of how powerful a programming language is is the quantity of companies using it?

mcartyemon Why Learn Scala in 2013?

Can anyone explain in less than ten words why one should learn Scala in 2013?

mcartyemon Why Canada's productivity has been underestimated for decades

Can anyone who read the article say in less than ten words why Canada's productivity has been underestimated for decades?

mcartyemon Separation, Abstraction, and Cascading in CSS

Can someone explain why they use CSS and HTML?

Why are two presentation frameworks used with a language called Javascript bolted on top, rather than a powerful programming language?

mcartyemon Show HN: The home automation system with an API

The best solution to home automation is to have such a small home that there's no need to automate.

That's a special case of a more general solution. The best way to solve a problem is to not have to solve it.

mcartyemon Ask HN: Incentive-based task manager for parents & children

Does the end goal extend beyond getting household chores done and into educating children to intrinsically want to do chores?

You improve what you measure. Is points what you want to measure?

mcartyemon Show HN: DataFart - easy command line graphing

It's great. I wanted this literally two days ago.

mcartyemon Ask HN: Would you use a "Pandora for local artists"?

I would use it.

mcartyemon Non-Technical Questions To Ask When Hiring A Development Firm

Is hiring a development firm the best option?

mcartyemon Ask HN: do any of you take mental performance enhancement drugs?

How did you conclude the information technology age requires you to be on your a-game as much as possible? There can be advantages to being on your c-game.

mcartyemon Just made a 100K offer for a domain. Am I crazy?

Being forced to come up with a different domain name can be more valuable than 100K. It could help you rethink your entire approach to the problem you are solving.

mcartyemon Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

It's not enough to build something that's better. You also need to sneak it in like a Trojan horse into a user's fortress. You can't easily launch a frontal attack on Linux.

One of the most valuable opportunities with mobile is that current technologies can become irrelevant. A big success for L4 is that it made it into mobile phones.

mcartyemon Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

You might not be biased. It's hard to ignore Wombat demonstrating context-switching costs that are up to 30 times lower than native Linux.

The status quo of kernels is reminiscent of the status quo of programming languages in the 90s. Where people programmed in faster, static languages and looked down on dynamic ones. I wonder what we will think of monolithic kernels in 50 years from now.

EDIT: A binary injecting itself with multiple code (linkables) might not be bad. It's much like what a macro does to a program. You turn one flag on and the source gets populated with the appropriate code.

It is lack of a dynamic way of injecting it that can bite you. The inability to easily change what was injected.

mcartyemon Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

The message passing overhead issues have been successfully addressed.

http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/l4/ http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/Heiser_08lca.sl...

mcartyemon Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."

When you look back at when you started programming and where you are now, what surprises you the most?

What turned out to be the opposite of what you originally thought it would be?

mcartyemon Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."

On (1) I point out naivety in particular because it's the most transparent and one of the most shocking. It's what you do not expect someone very capable to be. Paradoxical traits of personality in creative people are common.

On (2) MacKinnon suggested the successful creative individual had an ongoing belief in the worth of their creative efforts.

I don't claim these are the only two things to predict who will become a great programmer.

http://arrow.dit.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&con...

mcartyemon Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."

Two things people who put 10,000 hours have in common are:

- They are naive and believe they can conquer the world - or are discouraged about their original inability and hide it.

- They share a sense of destiny in what they do. They can't imagine a world where they wouldn't be working any more in their medium.

So if you wanted to predict who will become a great programmer you could look for naivety and commitment. You could look for people who can't tell what they've accomplished. And which continue to obliviously work on (naively ambitious) things only because noone was around to stop them.

mcartyemon Hamming: "dubious that great programmers can be trained.."

One way in which it is comparable is you make up the program as you go along.

You do have some sense of what you are about to write. But it's not that clear. You are not exactly sure what the program will turn out to be until you sit down to start writing. Like writing, rampant thoughts pull you in multiple directions until one seduces you into following it.

It's surprising how seemingly irrelevant factors affect the program. A recent conversation with a non-programmer, a change in the weather, where you are sitting, or music are enough to set you off in a different direction. If a sense of design isn't precisely what shapes a program, a programmer would do well to pretend that it is.

The counterpoint to the binary search analogy is that there are infinite ways to avoid writing a program that needs a binary search and write a different program instead.

mcartyemon RethinkDB: An open-source distributed database built with love over three years

Are there plans for an Arc driver?

mcartyemon I don't like Bootstrap.

Moreover, a container forces elements in it to stay contained while I don't want them to be contained.

Why can't get row and span work without a container?

mcartyemon Ask HN: Why is a website being "responsive" good?

What does this rearrangement do that makes them not be in my face?

Twitter Bootstrap has been a disaster for me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4651506

mcartyemon What's your favorite CSS framework, and why not not?

Why not?

The center tag is the only tag that still centers correctly.

mcartyemon I don't like Bootstrap.

Rows being in containers fixed the resizing issue. But not the centering!

mcartyemon Ask HN: Why is a website being "responsive" good?

Why is it bad for user experience?