mxyzptlk
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1 year ago
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on: Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?
I came here to recommend Warcraft 3 also. It's how my son started on the path to coding. Being able to add to an existing platform gave his early efforts some polish that encouraged him to continue.
mxyzptlk
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1 year ago
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on: Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park
In deer, it could be a case of chronic wasting disease
mxyzptlk
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2 years ago
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on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died
Another atlast fan here. I used it as an extension language for SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and wrote games for the GP2X handheld in a Forth-like language. Everything should be scriptable.
mxyzptlk
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4 years ago
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on: Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
We tried it with just PostgreSQL and struggled with missed jobs. We tried it with Redis + PostgreSQL and haven't looked back. I'll take the blame for not engineering the first version adequately (this was before upsert) but Redis has been useful in so other ways that I'm glad it ended up in our architecture.
mxyzptlk
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6 years ago
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on: Ask HN: Best resources to gain math intuition?
Take a look at "A Book of Abstract Algebra" by Charles Pinter. It's published by Dover, so very affordable. I've seen it criticized as too verbose, but that worked for me.
mxyzptlk
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6 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What Neural Networks/Deep Learning Books Should I Read?
Check out "Linear Algebra and Learning from Data" by Gilbert Strang. It includes a nice introduction to Linear Algebra, touches on relevant statistics and optimization, then puts them all together in chapters on neural networks. It's a textbook, so exercises are included.
mxyzptlk
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7 years ago
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on: Waffle House Vistas
My wife and I lived in Florida but drove home to Virginia every year for Christmas. Work schedules being what they were, we had to be back in Florida on January 1st or 2nd. We rang in quite a few New Years toasting Waffle House coffee somewhere along I95.
Edit: She just reminded me, no one else in the restaurant ever seemed to care.
mxyzptlk
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7 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What do you do in your 1-on-1s with your direct reports?
AS someone that recently transitioned from engineer to engineering manager, I don't feel like I'm doing less. Quite the opposite. Is the work as worthwhile? It is mandated by the company. So no real engineering would happen without it. Is the work as rewarding? Not yet and that makes it feel more like "work" than my previous job. I hope that changes as time goes on.
mxyzptlk
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8 years ago
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on: JavaScript Isn't Scheme (2013)
Matz didn't change puts. It seems trivial, but I suspect making print a statement again would do a lot to speed up the Python3 adoption rate.
mxyzptlk
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8 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
I enjoyed sabremetrics 101 at edX. Some statistics, light coding (SQL and R), history and baseball.
mxyzptlk
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9 years ago
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on: Ask HN: Does anyone here have an art degree?
BFA in illustration. Started off designing web sites, then moved to programming to make them dynamic. It seemed like a natural step. Now I work with some pretty large data sets and have gone back to school part time to study math and machine learning so I can get more out of them.
mxyzptlk
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10 years ago
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on: Watson for President
A point in their favor.
mxyzptlk
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10 years ago
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on: Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down (2009)
They seem to agree. From the article, "...after you've read something once, you've gotten what you're going to get out of it, and then you need to go out and start applying the information."
mxyzptlk
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11 years ago
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on: To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself
And the box the refrigerator came in is the best toy of all.
mxyzptlk
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14 years ago
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on: The Microsoft Update mechanism has been used to spread malware
mxyzptlk
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15 years ago
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on: MapReduce: A major step backwards?
We're using both. Vertica is amazingly fast. Hadoop helps us analyze some very big data sets. I wouldn't want to lose either one.
mxyzptlk
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15 years ago
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on: Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
I tried, quickly got lost, and started learning calculus as a result. I still need to get back to SICM.
mxyzptlk
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15 years ago
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on: Scheme from Scratch to be continued
If you like this type of stuff, check out the book "Lisp in Small Pieces".
mxyzptlk
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15 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How did you quit smoking?
> After trying to quit several times
I think that's an important point. Even if you don't quit this time, you have to keep trying.
I tried to quit at least six or seven times before finally succeeding eight years ago. The last time, I used nicotine gum for about a week. Before that, I had quit for up to a month, more than once, with help from either the patch or gum. All my relapses came during social situations.
mxyzptlk
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15 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What's been your best investment?
"Programming Perl" (the first edition) by Wall and Schwartz. Reading that book helped me land my first programming job.
