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mdcox's comments

mdcox | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: You've got one month, what's your challenge?

Just a heads up, your javascript doesn't work for me in Chrome because it's assigning to a global `history` variable. `window.history` is read-only so the js errors out. If you scope your function or rename the variable it should work. Nice challenge! Good luck!

mdcox | 9 years ago | on: Vim GIFs

Funny, Sublime was my gateway drug to Vim. It has "Vintage Mode" (which gives you vim keybindings) which I enabled just for macros since they are so powerful. After a month of going directly to insert mode I started accidentally picking up more and more random keys. Eventually I was so fast in normal mode it just didn't make sense not to use vim since everything else I use is in the terminal anyway.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: Rust by Example

Not sure of the original intent, but when I started using Rust I used Rust By Example for finding snippets of things like file io where I get the gist but want to quickly see the pattern or involved parts of the stdlib.

The Rust docs are great, but having a starting point can be super welcoming so you aren't poking around blindly at different types that might be relevant.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: What I’ve learned so far from living in a Mars simulation dome

I can't help but feel we're all underestimating boredom in this scenario. Yeah, you have to survive, but eventually things will be stable enough for there to be SOME downtime, with very few options for entertainment. When sanity is involved, boredom is a massive problem and sex might be one of the easiest forms of entertainment to arrange depending on what constraints were involved when planning the mission.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: We Are Hopelessly Hooked

Humans have an amazing capacity for addiction. It may be easy to say no to micropayment games, but "products that engender addiction" is a very broad and fuzzy category.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: Want to Write a Compiler? Read These Two Papers (2008)

Veering a bit offtopic, but does anyone have any pointers to important recent work on parsing? There are alot of papers out there and I guess I don't know how to sift through them. I've heard the "parsing is solved" line before, but so much of my time is spent doing some type of parsing that even incremental improvements are extremely interesting.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: Getting to “Philosophy”

This is alot of fun. Would it be really difficult to be able to "blacklist" pages from the UI? I keep trying to come up with really disparate topics to find interesting connections, but everything is linked by "Knowledge".

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: You are the WM

Just switched to OSX for work, and i3 is the only part of my workflow I can't replace. I dearly dearly miss it.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: Hack: A typeface designed for source code

This could be really cool, but I can also see it getting distracting and increasing oversight. The >= and <= signs look nice in Fira Code and Hasklig, but I worry I'd accidentally see them as > and < when debugging. Either way, I can't really try it because neither of those are usable in vim with iTerm2 and I'm not changing my whole toolchain just to try a font.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: DeepDreamVideo

It's a combination of the fact that the source video takes place in a club with some flashes/strobe effects going on, and the fact that the algorithm looks at things frame by frame (more or less.) When it flashes it sees more/different details than when it is presented with a dark frame, and it interprets those as a dog.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: Vim Colors

What bothers me isn't the isolated color scheme, but that without a ton of work (rolling it yourself?) the javascript in .js, .html, .erb, and any other file it might be in is highlighted completely differently.

mdcox | 10 years ago | on: A year with Go

I totally agree (except for the new-grad conspiracy.) I use Go whenever I need to do something small that requires a simple server or API interaction. Especially if it requires alot of concurrency. It's still a joy to use when I need to get something churned out quickly. The biggest thing it gave me though, was something new but accessible that wasn't Ruby, Python or JS.

It made me think about pointers, and gave me insight to just how complicated strings and growable arrays are under the hood instead of just being givens like in Ruby. It simplified concurrency and parallelization enough that I was able to dive in and learn the concepts which I was then able to use to dig deeper with other languages that don't have the nice channels/select built in.

I've come to realize that, in my learning at least, there are thresholds of information that people get stuck at, but once they cross you get a flood of improvement. Go allowed me to stop thinking only within the code context, but also in the machine context. Now a large amount of my side projects are in C or Rust, and even my day job writing higher level languages has benefited greatly from the new ability to understand the moving parts. It's not going to give you a compsci education, but it'll give you that intermediate step you need to wade into that territory.

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