joebergeron

Try peeling an orange with as few tears as possible, and flattening the skin against a hard surface.

I tend to disagree here. The thing that makes writing business software take a long time (using code, to be pedantic), isn't the fact that it's in code -- it's the fact that the requirements are often so fast and complex that there's no way to capture them in the application without taking a good chunk of time. If you want an application that doesn't actually meet your requirements, but at the very least, exists, get a group of competent-enough engineers together and they'll be able to whip you something up pretty quickly, I reckon. About as quickly as non-techincal people would be able to make something of equal usefulness in a non-code tool.

If you have access to only engineers, why would they learn this new non-code tool? If you want an application that meets a very sparse, loose set of requirements, just get them to create it using their normal tools -- it won't take relatively long.

If you have access to both engineers and business folk, there's no reason to have the businesspeople write such a requirement-lax application using a non-code tool, since if all you really want is an MVP that doesn't really meet your requirements, get the engineers to do it -- I'm sure they'd be happy with the freedom to throw requirements out the window. And then when you want to expand on it and flesh out those requirements, the engineers don't have to port the whole thing over from whatever proprietary non-code tool the businesspeople could have used.

If you only have access to nontechnical people, you're kind of screwed. Sure, you can have business-savvy folks whip up an MVP using one of these tools, but then when you want to expand on it, what do you do? You need technical people somewhere in the pipeline to make this work. If you didn't have access to engineers in the first place, this is the juncture at which you could hire some to port the application, but is the technical debt you've introduced worth it?

I don't know -- tools like these seem to target aspirational nontechnical people who don't have the foresight to think two steps ahead.

1. Very funny to be reading this. I grew up in Falmouth, and lived there until 2014 when I graduated highschool. I obviously wasn't incredibly attuned to this issue, but as I recall, the only people opposed to the installation of the turbines were a very small, very vocal, and very, very, wealthy minority of people who owned mind-bogglingly expensive beach houses and lived there two months out of the year. I'm fairly certain a lot of the more reasonable-sounding complaints they threw at the project were simply cover-up for their real gripe, that the turbines ruined their view over the bay. I recall an unintentionally hilarious piece of mockup art that was drafted up, comparing the horizon over the water with and without turbines, side by side. They were barely distinguishable blips. It was an interesting phenomenon. Woods Hole, a tiny community on what is essentially a peninsula near Falmouth, is both a center for oceanographic science (WHOI, USGS -- disclaimer, I've worked at both), and a summer home for the insanely rich. The scientific community was largely in support of the turbines, but all anyone ever heard about was how the turbines would be a huge disaster. As I recall, many of the noise complaints ended up being somewhat unfounded.

Given the bulk of the things you've listed here, which seem to serve very practical purposes, maybe never. I wouldn't call data structures a "technology" so much as I would label them as a theoretical underpinning to much of computer science. If your goal is to learn practical technologies (which is a good goal!) you don't really _need_ to learn data structures deeply -- they're just not a skill you need in day-to-day software life (for most people). I'm a software engineer, and the idea of implementing so much as a binary heap (which is nearly one of the first data structures you learn) at work is a preposterous idea. That said, if you want to learn about data structures, go for it! They're incredibly interesting and will give you a way deeper appreciation for computer science and the work that goes into developing complex algorithms. There's just not necessarily a "pedagogical" place to stick in learning data structures with the sorts of technologies you've listed.

Aww, thanks :)

Hey! I’m a coauthor with this guy :^). Incredibly fascinating (and extremely smart) dude. His interest in origami is what drew me to MIT in the first place, since I was interested in it as well from a young age. A few years ago I took his class on the computability/complexity theory of folding, and we ended up solving an open problem in the field and published a paper out of it [0]. If you had told highschool me something like that would happen, I never would have believed it :)

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.08564

Woah, I had no idea he designed the Green Building. It was always my favorite architecture on campus (light years better than the Stata Center), much to the disagreement of my peers.

Me and a friend came up with a similar idea of a sort of distributed file system implemented across a huge array of blog comment sections. Of course you’d need a bunch of replication and fault tolerance and the ability to automatically scrape for new blogs to post spammy-looking comments on, but I thought it was a pretty funny and neat idea when we came up with it.

It's a sort of anecdote called a "story", written on someone's personal blog. I too am astounded at the lack of dry, dispassionate reporting that I've come to expect from the otherwise dour, yet gripping world, of personal blogs.

Was this written under the auspices of Native Instruments? If so, I’m extremely impressed - they’re doing some very cool work over there.

Hitting screws with hammers, eh? Ever drive a nail with a drill?

Ah, I have fond memories of staring at pages of Xv6 code. I took the OS class, 6.828, which uses Xv6 as a reference, while an undergrad at MIT. While relatively simple compared to most anything else you could think up, it gave great insight and intuition into code style and idiomatic OS patterns for working on JOS, the more substantial OS you end up writing in that class.

If anyone is particularly attuned with making music in DAWs and has never experienced vertically scrolling trackers, I highly recommend checking out any of the Fast Tracker/Pro Tracker derivatives that have popped up for modern hardware, namely Milkytracker or OpenMPT, or Renoise for a more modern DAW-like tracker.

Can't help but think that the 1996 models look a bit like the old little toy Casio keyboards from back in the day, complete with tinny speakers protected by plastic grating. :-)

Huh, this is not what I expected. Ana Bell is my undergraduate advisor at MIT. I do not think that these choices are particularly the best for someone with no programming or computer science experience whatsoever, as others have said. What strikes me as particularly odd is that I believe she teaches 6.0001, which is a relatively new "very much a complete intro" half-semester course for programming, taught in Python. I suppose I would have expected more truly beginner-friendly material in her recommendations.

Presumably because whitespace is stripped between command arguments, so something like "KICK <USERNAME>" would be useless.

Don't know if anyone has suggested it here (I'd honestly be surprised if someone hasn't) but Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin, affectionatey known as "Baby Rudin" is a classic book. It's known for being relatively difficult and dense if you're just beginning with analysis, but if you go through the book and complete a fair number of exercises, it's an incredibly rewarding experience and definitely grants a ton of mathematical maturity.

Is "Power 9" purposefully a Magic reference? Or just a coincidence?

Is there a more compact or well-defined way to phrase this? Does "elementary" mean that by removing any arbitrary n cells, this structure won't exhibit the intended behavior? Or it won't exhibit any "interesting" behavior at all? Or does it mean that no subset of the cells exhibit any interesting behavior on their own?

If anyone is interested in exploring this style of music in more depth, I recommend looking into "Third Stream" music. It's meant to be a sort of fluid combination of both jazz and classical styles, and is often pretty interesting. There's a whole lot of things that third stream music /isn't/ (and famously, a list that attempts to define the genre in terms of what it's /not/ supposed to be), and as such, many people who try to write third streammusic end up creating music that's a lot less subtle.

It's not really my cup of tea (more of a jazz guy), probably because there isn't a huge repertoire of third stream music out there, but it's definitely worth checking out if you think you might be interested.

To the moon, boys. To the moon.

Anyone at TITS right now? :) Helped set up all day.

This gave me a (stupid) idea. 2D to 3D seems possible to implement reasonably well with enough time and effort, given that it involves taking data and extrapolating it into another dimension -- for example, giving depth to sprites, etc. But what about the other way around? Taking 3D games (to keep things simple-ish, say from one particular platform) and automatically mapping them to 2D games. This sounds kind of absurd. Instead of instrumenting 2D game data with a little something extra, you'd have to compress/project the 3D data down into two dimensions -- in a way, stripping down the information contained in the original game. This is almost definitely impossible to pull off automatically for all games on a particular (3D) platform, at least in a way that isn't 100% awful to play. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of how it might be done, though.

This is the kind of rhetoric and narrative-pushing that give laypeople a skewed image of "robots". Technological optimism is blatantly alive and well in tech circles (that's a whole other problem), but it's sensationalist quotes like this that give everyone else ammo. Skepticism is important, but it's also important to recognize when something resonates you mainly because it re-affirms or rationalizes something you believe strongly.

I've since updated the article and code on Github to reflect this discssion. Thanks HN as always for teaching me something new.

Do you mean Michael Artin's Algebra? Just took his Algebra I (18.701) at MIT last semester. An incredibly challenging class, but he's a really excellent lecturer and a very likeable guy. Still really sharp.

I actually looked this up after reading this comment. Best I could find after a quick google search was this: http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first-steps/

which is certainly not an easy tutorial to follow. Seems like more robustness tends towards a greater barrier to entry.

Done!

Thanks for giving it a look! You're certainly right about UEFI. I figured it would be easier and informative enough in the long run to just write a simple MBR bootloader instead of an EFI-format one.

Either way, it was definitely fun.

I mean realistically it would be best to simply return "unknown location" or something of that nature. But barring that -clearly absurd- idea, set it to some place that's obviously incorrect. I propose the moon.