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nx | 16 years ago

He also implies nobody would write a foreword if it wasn't for the prestige. I would be honored to write a foreword for people I admire, I'd do it even if my name wasn't on the book.

nx | 16 years ago | on: Brainfuck compiler in brainfuck

Awib is an optimizing compiler:

o) Sequences of '-','<','>' and '+' are contracted into single instructions. E.g. "----" is replaced with a single ADD(4).

SUB(4)?

nx | 17 years ago | on: Triangular buttons key to touchscreen typing success

Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than you’d find on a standard Qwerty layout. Consequently, users are more likely to press the correct key each time they tap.

Or less likely to press any key at all?

nx | 17 years ago | on: Wolfram Alpha: The Wikipedia Killer

I really want to believe that, but we'll have to check later on. I'd like to see the OS community triumphing over commercial solutions.

nx | 17 years ago | on: Coding Horror: Has The Virtualization Future Arrived?

I hate Jeff, but this post makes sense: instead of being constrained by the backwards compatibility requirement, one can just pack every past version of the software on each release, just like HTTP clients and servers do when they ask for the protocol version.

nx | 17 years ago

It would've been twice as cool if it could take voice instructions.

nx | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: Are you an active or reactive leaner?

I usually can understand abstract concepts, but also need, or prefer, to work all the way from the bottom up, just to make sure it works like I think it does. I can't just believe something the teacher tells me, I have to prove it works that way, based on past knowledge. But it is necessary to be able to function in higher levels of abstraction, I understand matrix multiplication as a bunch of dot-products, not as sums of products of numbers, for example, and from that easily derives the need for equal number of columns/rows.

nx | 17 years ago | on: What Stack Overflow Can Teach You

I'm not a native speaker of English, I've studied the language for seven or eight years, and a couple of months ago I signed up on Hacker News and Reddit. I've learned a lot about establishing strong and rich discussions by reading and writing comments and messages. Generalizing, this idea could be boiled down simply to "practice is good." Of course, all the years I took formal English classes were very useful, but we must not underestimate the power of putting our knowledge to use. Theory without practice is meaningless, knowledge without use is, well, useless.

nx | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

Exactly, that's why I assume everyone who is on Hacker News is aware of the Linux branch of operating systems, and at least isn't naive enough not to consider them in this kind of choice.

nx | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

I'd argue that "PC" has two meanings then. I'm going for "non-Mac PC", since that's what the title implies by separating Macs from the rest of PCs, and because I don't feel sensitive to exclude a huge set of possibilities.

nx | 17 years ago | on: Ask HN: MAC vs PC for a developer?

It's not the same. If you say "Mac or PC", it is understood that you mean "Apple computers, or other type of general-purpose personal computers, i.e., non-Mac PCs". But if we interpret "PC" only as "Windows computer", then there's this huge number of OSes we're not taking into account, since we're just considering OS X and Windows.
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