mark-t

Right. Maybe sophisticated would have been a better choice of words. I just mean that it should have been obvious that they would be highly adapted and competitive, considering the ways some plants interact with specific birds and insects.

I posted a different version of this story a few days ago: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolut...

This really struck me, since I'm so accustomed to thinking of plants as little more than scenery and nutrition. However, when you think about it, it's obvious that plants should exhibit very complicated behaviors, since they've been evolving for so long. I just never really thought about it.

Wow. That guy is really bad at Tetris.

I would guess it's because of the JIT compiler to generate machine code (see the Tamarin project in firefox). Writing a compiler for many different platforms requires a significant amount of work. I can understand that they'd want to work on other platforms before the 64 bit processors, since those can still use the 32 bit version.

They're probably avoiding git because it's GPL. They're awfully picky about that sort of thing. But yes, I had the same reaction. There's bound to be some modern VCS that would be better for them.

Actually, I live in an area with Comcast, Charter, and reasonable DSL. Holy moly! Yeah, they'd still get away with it.

Heck, I should add that to mine.

I realize this is a somewhat unpopular thing to say here, but I don't care about startups. I have little interest in being in a channel where that's the only thing people talk about. I'm here for the general tech news.

There's a #news.yc channel on freenode, but it's been just me and one other guy for the past few months.

I don't find reading well-written code any more difficult than reading a math book. But of course it is an order of magnitude harder than reading prose. You have to force yourself to slow down and understand what each part is saying. As opposed to ordinary text, every word is important, and you need to know what it's doing there.

Some of this is just proficiency in the specific language, but it's more about the concepts and idioms of programming in general. I've fixed a bug in an open source python project, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" program in python without a reference.

But do note that "well-written" is mandatory. If the code isn't well-written, it will take you a lot longer to figure out. The code I wrote in high school was pretty bad.

Variables should be named to describe what they represent. You should have a reasonable number of comments, not too many or too few (ironically, this amount changes as you get better). Divide your code into manageable chunks and split them into subroutines. Within subroutines, separate the chunks with at least one blank line.

I strongly disagree. USAMO problems range in difficulty quite a bit. I can solve some but certainly not all. Not so for IMO. And nowadays I generally solve all of the Putnam problems in the time allotted.

By the way, the early years of the IMO were very easy, by today's standards (only a few countries were involved at that point). They would probably be approachable to people comfortable with the AIME problems.

Maybe instead of trying to change everybody else's behavior, you could just solve the problem and move on. If you subscribe to news.yc's rss feed, write a filter. If you visit the front page, write a greasemonkey script. This is not a hard problem.

I also subscribe to steve yegge's rss feed, raganwald's, jeff atwood's, joel spolsky's, paul graham's, xkcd's, TED's, and so on. It would be ludicrous to try to get people to stop posting links from all the sites I subscribe to.

Now and then I work through problems on projecteuler.net without anything more than a basic calculator. I've gotten 17 of them so far (1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 52, 63, 76, 164, 190, 191).

Also, there are a bunch of contest problems on John Scholes's website: http://www.kalva.demon.co.uk/ . It seems to be down at the moment, but I'm sure it'll be back soon. Of the contests I'm familiar with:

AIME is for fairly advanced high school students (say, on average, one person per high school might take it, and most won't get any of them right)

USAMO is a step up from AIME -- the top ~150 high school students in the US take it each year

IMO is a step up from USAMO -- basically, don't even bother

Putnam is an exam for US university students -- it's generally considered difficult, since the median score is usually 0, even among those willing to take it in the first place, but A1 and B1 are usually pretty easy on every test; I would say it's between AIME and USAMO

Here's a familiar looking idea from 18 Apr 06:

I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you "you should make more money." LA tells you "you should be better looking." Rome tells you "you should dress better." London tells you "you should be hipper." The Bay Area tells you "you should live better." And Cambridge tells you "you should read some of those books you've been meaning to."

Until a few months ago, we hosted our svn repository on berlios.de . It went down every few weeks, so I don't recommend them. We started using them when sourceforge only had cvs. Nowadays sf.net supports svn, so you might look into that.

Somewhat recently, we switched to git and started hosting ourselves, but you might look into code.google.com .

If you don't actually want your code to be public, just get some free online storage. Do you really need more than 5GB?

I covered that. There is no "absolutely accurate" in a finite number of bits, no matter what data type you use. In N bits, you can't store more than 2^N distinct numbers, and there happen to be a lot more than 2^N distinct numbers, even between 0 and 1. You have to choose your margin for error and be prepared to live with it (or use a variable width format).

I'm afraid I don't understand the downside of nanoseconds since epoch. What accuracy problems and rounding errors? Are you suggesting that nanoseconds are too coarse of a measurement? You could use picoseconds. No matter what, if you're storing arbitrary real numbers in a fixed number of bits, you're going to have some rounding error. Choose enough bits to make your representation "good enough" or, say, "better than your instruments, anyway". Then use integers. They're simpler and much more efficient than floats/doubles.

Oh no, not again.

The best situation is probably for the parents to disagree, actually.

That's strange. I seem to recall watching Sussman write a Scheme interpreter in about an hour.

All things equal, I would rather see a girl, and I'd wager about 90% of the people here are in the same boat. My guess is that your audience is pretty similar to this one.

But note the first three words: all things equal. You should choose the best person for the job.

Who's your audience?

Computer programming is something that you have to do for a long time to be good at. Almost all good programmers started well before college, and a lot of them go on to study something other than CS. My BS is in Electrical Engineering, and I have an MS in Math, yet I still consider myself a desirable candidate for programming jobs.

That actually happens a fair amount with non-native speakers, since our uncommon words are sometimes very similar to their common words. For example, an italian recently called me ascetic, and I had to look it up.

Yahoo! pipes does seem to offer the desired functionality. My first impression, though, is that the interface is too mouse heavy (admittedly my main complaint about everything that requires the mouse). I should be able to create a filter without drawing a circuit diagram. And I worry that I won't be able to keep using it without having to tell Yahoo! my password every other week.

http://www.filtermyrss.com looks much more to my liking, although it's a bit low on features. My feeling is that it's about a 10 line perl script: fetch xml with LWP, apply regex, print.

I've actually been looking for something like feedity, but I need control over the code, since I'd want to use it for sites that require authentication. However, my feeling's that this one's about a 20 line perl script with LWP and Algorithm::Diff, so it's not a big deal.

Maybe I'll combine them into a 30 line perl script and get rich!

For my personal site, I use rsync, and I keep the command in a makefile so I don't have to remember it (I also use the makefile to generate the static pages from templates). It looks like this:

  sync:
  	rsync -az --progress ./ user@host:public_html/

  .PHONY: sync

But for anything significant, I use a VCS, currently svn or git.

That might be accurate for shrink wrap software and maybe even shareware, but it's not for free (as in beer) software. I'll grant that it was never specified, but I got the impression this project was being freely distributed -- otherwise he probably wouldn't bother with bugfix releases.

In the free (as in speech) software world, major versions indicate major changes in the software (e.g. gtk+1 vs. gtk+2). A series of minor features, no matter how long, doesn't warrant a new major release number.

Then what would you do when you got to version 11? You'd have to wait for Apple to figure it out.

You should name it 0.10, like almost every other project would. How do you think the linux kernel got to 2.6.25?

How did this comment end up in the rss feed?

Interestingly, the "comments" link for it points to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196342 -- the original post without any comments shown!