janderson3's comments

Oh my. I had a GBA that me and my dad modded to be backlit. Boktai was so good on that system. I didn't think about how lucky I was that I could play the game pretty easily.

Into the Breach. It's an excellent tactics game where each mission only has about five turns, and every move matters.

Microsoft to buy a communications platform? I guess today's Microsoft isn't the same one that bought Skype but this comedy video of the "Skype CEO" is terribly relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E

Absolutely agree.

What's your preferred terminology? I like "Forward" and "Reverse" for positive and negative number and "Lateral" for the imaginary unit, since it is just perpendicular to the Forward and Reverse numbers.

> How can you cut 10% of the workforce in Huntsville when the representative sits on the Armed Services committee? (I don't know that, but just for example...)

Close. Alabama Senator Shelby is the Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations and the Chairman of its Defense Subcommittee.

Edit: My apologies. Was the chairman. See nobody's comment below.

Interesting. Python is my go to teaching language. It beat the snot out of learning programming with Java. As a newbie, what does "public static void main" mean? So what's your choice for a teaching language? Maybe Lua or Scheme? They seem to have few surprises which is good for teaching.

This paper might be useful [0]. It measures the thickness of a tissue. If you do that over time you can detect the parts that aren't moving. I studied under Yezzi for a while. Cool dude.

[0] http://iacl.ece.jhu.edu/~prince/pubs/2003-TMI-Yezzi-Thicknes...

I find it fascinating that in that ad the schlubs that are sitting there watching the television are Fortnite default skins and not say, replicas of the characters that hold the same position in the original Apple ad. This really supports Dan Olson manufactured discontent assertion[0].

Even if you support them and play their game, if you don't spend money for skins, you're still in Big Brother's audience. The wildest thing is that the Jackboots behind the hammer thrower are approximate replicas of the Apple Ad.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

I have some friends in the employ of the federal government, who was raised Catholic. One time we were having a conversation that started about the Catholic church. He said is that some of the decisions of the Catholics are odd and slow because they are making decisions on the scale of a hundred years. They intend to be around by then.

The USA Feds seem to be on a similar plan, but it's more like a 10 year lag, and it finally seems to them like this HTTPS thing isn't just a fad.

Funnily enough the official website for the Holy See is also not HTTPS encrypted. (http://www.vatican.va)

Also in math, you spend a majority of your time not understanding things. As soon as you understand something in math, you immediately move on to the next thing you don't understand. As opposed to say engineering where you tend to get good at a particular process and applying it. In math confusion is the default state.

Toki Pona.

It it's a constructed language that has recently hit the front page of HN a couple of times. It's been fun. Helps reorganize your thoughts a little bit and it's good practice for learning a more complicated language.

Ada as a language is super cool. It's tasking model is neat, and was built into the language in 1995. You can use arbitrary Enums to index arrays, it has bounded numerical types, it's just a neat language.

Ada's main drawbacks, aren't Ada's. It's that the US Army pushed it so hard, it's terminally "uncool." Also many people and organizations that use it are defense contractors, so being half-decent at Ada is seen as a "competitive advantage." This makes learning Ada a challenge. It's good to see that there are some more resources for learning Ada! I really wish that the learn.adacore.com was up a few years ago. I could have used it.