xtho

Maybe it would be less creepy if there were more young women interested in statistics, machine learning etc. and who commented in a similar fan-girlish manner on male lecturers. But then again ...

Video doesn't load. I wish those people where using some other well tested video platform.

c-[ is Escape (displayed as ^[ in vim). Also, it isn't obvious for beginners where c-[ is located on non-English keyboards. And it's two keys to press. I'd still prefer Esc. The fact that the key is usally located outside of the main typing area reflect its meaning. Get me out of here.

He converted to OpenOffice.

With the right intonation & context it could also mean "stupid woman/girl" but not whore.

Doesn't python have sorted sets? Oh, what a pity. Does python only have one single implementation of sets? Too bad. Is the runtime behaviour of that implementation documented? Let's take a look ... I'll be back. This could take a while.

Since charging for support is a common "business model" with OSS, you're implying that the incentives are wrong with OSS in general.

Counterpoint: You know and can use the code before you pay anything. If you decide to prefer a certain library over another, this decision is based on real-world experience with that library. This decision might imply that you pay for support later on -- where support sometimes means implementing requested features.

IIRC Java has removed features in the past by marking them as deprecated for several releases and then removing them.

AFAIK JVM byte code isn't guaranteed to be backwards compatible. They also introduced new byte codes that didn't exist in earlier versions. In that sense, there also are different versions of the JVM.

Ironically, IIRC I found that list through an earlier post on hn. Such a thread should already exist.

Isn't it the very idea of the yield "command" that you don't have to generate a list in advance but create it's values as needed? Hence, a statement like "you don't need ... but you have to ..." sounds funny to me.

It's somehow the same list of books over and over again. This reddit is probably better suited for a collaborative approach: http://www.reddit.com/r/csbooks/

na.rm is a argument name, na.omit a function, na.action an attribute. They are not the same thing.

Anyway, you're right with respect to the lack of standard way. One thing I personally find most annoying is function naming. Some functions use the dot convention (do.this), some use camel case (doThis), some use underscores (do_this) etc. And what is most annyoing: this is even true for novel functions that were just introduced in recent releases.

How many function objects are created to generate that result? From a certain point of view, that is interesting too of course.

The example in the article is a good example how such thought experiments are sometimes turned into jokes for bored misanthrope/misogynist/latent homosexual men. At first, the situation could be interpreted as an exchange of a years of happy life for sleeping with somebody she considers attractive and would probably sleep with anyway. This problem then is turned into what would be her price if she slept with men for a living.

If this is your understanding of philosophy, I'd say you're misusing philosophy for dealing with personal problems.

I assumed that only the Gulf of Mexico was loaded in the current buffer, not the world. The operation also had the side-effects of preventing any turmoils.

%s/oil//g

Done.

7200 rpm: It seems they forgot about the noise.

AFAIK the "theory" in clojure also stems from the scala world in that clojure data structures are based on work done for scala or by scala affiliates.

BTW, vim is the perfect editor for tablets and similar devices with a shrunken keyboard.

Probably the most disturbing thing about the article is the original title: "Programming like it's 1995". I'd feel better if he had said "OOP is like so 1980's".

It's not that simple. Some people say that in the reverse acronym the W was originally expanded to World.

  Question: W to F?
  Answer: F the W(orld)!
  Chorus: W the F! ... (repeat)
  Hero: For the win!

I personally like to use tinymode[1] for such things in order to reduce map pollution (if such a term exists).

[1] http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2223

A "thinking job" usually doesn't mean commenting on this or that without knowing what they're talking about (well, there are people who do that but those are in the top 0.1% of the population). Most "thinking jobs" require you to conduct tedious research, getting engaged in discussions, being flamed in front of an audience etc. And most "thinking jobs" limit your expertise to one tiny bit of reality which means that you spend the rest of your life with thinking about inane details hardly anybody really cares about. (Again there are exceptions because once you get famous you can easily pass as expert for everything.)

> Everybody wants to be the one deciding what should be done; very few people want to be the ones actually doing it.

I'm going to tell that a colleague of mine who wants to quit his current job because everything he does is talking and negotiating (i.e. deciding or rather preparing decisions) without ever getting anything done.

This has little to nothing to do with the current situation in ruby.

> That said, "convert everything to your native Unicode format at the edges and reconvert it back out at the edges" is at least a tolerable answer.

It obviously isn't for the ruby developers. If it were so they had chosen utf8 as internal encoding, which they didn't because they didn't consider this a tolerable answer. Even though you can get ruby 1.9 to work this way, this approach could still cause some headache.

The sooner? ruby 1.9 is around for more than a year??? now. 1.8 is still the standard in ubuntu and about everywhere else.

With respect to performance boost: Startup time didn't improve. And IIRC the same is true for certain string operations. Both are important in the field where ruby originated and where I personally still find it most useful -- scripting or rather as perl-replacement.

Like lisp or c (although back then 20 years ago, I actually prefered modula 2 & oberon)?

If you turn visual effects on/off, you're back to the original settings though.

It's somehow interesting that their previous acquisition was 3com. It's as if Palm returned to a previous home but in a different city.