Hacker News Reader

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

I thought this was a discussion about Asperger's, not every single mental disorder under the sun.

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

I'm not sure I understand your question, or rather it seems to be more than one question. Yes, Asperger's is a real problem. Yes, some people self-diagnose themselves. Yes, some of these people would not be diagnosed with Asperger's were they to undergo diagnosis by an expert.

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

Or, in short, somebody who doesn't have Asperger's.

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

Is that really what it means or did you just decide that's what it means?

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

I think it's fair to say the most important/relevant/defining trait is quite severe difficulties in social functioning, usually characterised by a lack of friends. This is also the one that I nearly always see left out by people who "think they might have it".

badpennyon My Life as an Autistic Wikipedian

You seem to be familiar with Wikipedia so I'll draw your attention to the article on there dedicated to the subject.

badpennyon The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

In other news, apples aren't like oranges.

badpennyon The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

Do you tell people collecting for charity that you can't contribute anything unless you're going to see an ROI?

badpennyon The Battle for Wesnoth needs help

Wow, that site has really seen better days. I notice it's still in the uBlock Origin block list as well.

badpennyon Interview: Larry Wall

Also Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

badpennyon Jshell: The Java Shell (REPL)

JDK stands for JDK Enhancement Proposal. You can get an idea about of the progress from the linked issue tracker entry.

badpennyon John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language

lisp makes you an asshole programmer. you're encouraged and enabled to write your own language for each problem, thus isolating you in a world of your own views and ideas. it's a babelian tar pit, luring programmers to their doom.
being your own tin pot dictator is quite alluring. you get to go to great feats and neat hacks to get code working. to control and manipulate the code to allow you to write what you want. every new macro and construct shapes the product in your own image and ideals, subsequently alienating other programmers.
it's like these language revisionist cranks who want to replace english with their own little concoction that's just ever so perfect and logical. a complete ignorance of social factors.
anecdotally, I know of large scale codebases and products in simpler, less elegant languages, meanwhile lisp seems to be popular with the lone hacker aesthetic.
eventually, with enough practice, you get to the smug lisp asshole stage.
this is where you wonder why lisp is unpopular, or fragmented, but assume that it's simply too good for the populace. Classics like 'worse is better' struggle with the notion that lisp maybe isn't that good. Sometimes you get a naggum complex and trot out saphir-whorf. Other people are terrible and that is why they don't use lisp.
it can't be that lisp isn't a great idea. or macros aren't a great tradeoff. at least the ruby community is coming to terms with monkey patching coming at the expense of library conflicts.

lisp is a strange beast. a simple tool that encourages complexity. purity over utility. a perfect goo waiting for the next hero to shape it and return to the mortal plain with their new, perfect macros.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=348...

badpennyon How We Moved Our API From Ruby to Go

C# isn't cool.

badpennyon Haskell Communities and Activities Report, May 2015

He specifically mentioned offline programming.

badpennyon Rust Programming Language Book

I may just be not very bright but I've read both of those plus the coverage in the aforementioned book and I still regularly find myself banging my head against the borrow checker when writing code myself. I think at least part of the problem is the use of trivial examples.

I don't seem to have any problems with any of the other concepts used by the language except where they overlap with the borrow checker (e.g. destructuring a Box using).

badpennyon How I found glaring errors in Einstein's calculations (2009)

Or maybe he was just wrong.

badpennyon Why Lisp?

A pile of shit emerging whenever programmers are lazy and try to cut corners or when they try to do things they don't fully understand is not unique to macro writing.

badpennyon PM of Singapore Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Source Code

Why?

badpennyon Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?

  An error occurred while processing your request.
  
  Reference #50.cf633f17.1427707361.40a63048

Their error messages are as good as their typography.

badpennyon TempleOS is applying to Y Combinator. Partners desired, send an email

  [15:32] <@TempleOS> stop talking to God for a minute
  [15:32] <@TempleOS> God has flooded

badpennyon John Carmack: “I just dumped the C++ server I wrote for a new one in Racket”

The only thing I've admired as much as his intelligence has been his child-like enthusiasm.

badpennyon Aaron Swartz's Thoughts on djb (2009)

I should have also stated that it's not necessarily a bad thing, it just makes certain things (e.g. creating packages) more cumbersome/involved.

badpennyon Aaron Swartz's Thoughts on djb (2009)

That and the fact they decidedly don't work "the UNIX way".