TheApexTheater

From doing some cursory research, it appears the software in question is called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) and is currently being provided as a service [0].

Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."

Sources:

[0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss

[1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...

There are a couple of reasons why creating a self-hosting compiler can be good idea:

1. Shows to others that your language is capable of a project of moderate complexity, as well as display what an "idiomatic" version of writing code is

2. Remove dependencies on parts you can't control (once you rewrite it in Zig, rather than C++, you don't need to worry about new C++ features or deprecations between versions)

3. Writing code in the language helps catch bugs in the language specification and in the compiler's implementation of the language.

These are just the ones off the top of my head, but people with more PL-Design experience may be able to elaborate.

I think I may have misspoken. What I meant to say was that, at least for me, KMM is a little easier to view both accounts and categories, and search within them.

A more accurate phrasing would have been "Filter all the payers that contain this string, and allow me to select them and see how much money was transferred to/from them."

Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items

I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately.

I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.

Good job on helping to curb mindless browsing!

On this topic, another add-on I have found to be fairly helpful is called "Pluckeye" [1]. At its base level, it simply blocks all images and video from your browser. You can customize it by adding/removing websites from the blacklist, and is fairly robust to occasional cravings by having a delay on changes to the blacklist that allow a website. The only downside is that most websites now look broken, but I've found that I don't really miss being bombarded by the colorful graphics on websites.

I think there is significant work to be done on making these tools more widely known, but I'm happy with the progress being made. Good job, again!

[1]: https://www.pluckeye.net/

As a response to your objections,

1) It's just a syntax thing... It's still possible to make an understandable program through good style

2) I don't have anything.

3-6) I've heard Racket is a good spiritual successor to Lisp, complete with external libraries and a broad(er) userbase.

I have to admit, the slightly misleading title got me. I'm currently going through SICP myself (albeit at a snail's pace), but it seems like the article's author and I both had the same initial objections to LISP, only to be blown away by its simplicity and expressiveness with a few keywords and lines of code. I'm still partial to other programming languages, but LISP holds a special place in my hard drive.

Honest question: I tried using LaTeX for a homework assignment. I had already done all the work on some loose paper, but it was all over the place and thought LaTeX-ing it would help readability. It took me about three hours and I wasn't even halfway done (there were four questions and I had barely done the second one)... Is taking this long normal for LaTeX? or is it something you get better at with practice?

On that note, the size of the courses are not even comparable. If you look at "Explore Courses", a website that gives information on Stanford's course offerings per quarter, you see a massive disparity between CS106A (the intro course almost all CS majors take if they have no programming experience) and CS 106J (The new course). The "A" course, taught in Java, currently has about 560 people in it, while the Javascript course has about 40. (Source: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filt... )

I agree that Java may not be the best language to teach to beginning programmers, but to suggest there's been a wide move away from Java (as this article does) sort of oversells the situation, in my opinion.

You know, I'm sort of split on what to think of the click-bait-y article title.

The guy's a PhD at Princeton, he clearly knows the Fourier Transform is more than just a trick - he even mentions that he wants to bring science/math to a wider audience at the end. From what I can tell, this article's more aimed at the nerdy middle/high schooler who likes math than engineers and computer scientists (the main target audience of this site). So while the article's title sort of tricks you into learning about this "trick", as long as people who normally can't be bothered to look at math (because for some reason it's popular to be "bad at math", ie not want to do math) are learning about the applications of mathematics in the real world, I don't see anything particularly wrong with trying to reach a wider audience.

I've recently begun to think about the availability of housing and how that impacts the middle/lower stratum of the US, and it seems to me that there have been several short-sighted policies put in place that have put us in a much worse position for the future for short term gain (the article explains how subsidies for single-family homes are a reason for the shift away from small apartment buildings). Has this always been happening, or has it appeared to become more pronounced with the recent focus on gentrification? What can be done to improve affordable housing? I'm not all too familiar with this field, so anything helps!