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mjdwitton Why We Procrastinate

It does indicate a concept of future. What it doesn't do is use a different tense—the key verb is the same as when talking about the present. It's a subtle distinction, but he is arguing that this lack of differentiation in verbs has an impact on internalizing future events.

And while you very well could make the translation from whatever the original was to "It will rain tomorrow," it might not be a literal one that preserves the original tenses, which would obscure exactly what he was trying to point out.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Little hacks that make your life easier?

Moreover, pressing alt while in insert mode causes the next key to run as if pressed in normal mode. I usually use this instead of escape for those times when I don't want to go into command mode.

One caveat, however. I recently switch to OS X and have yet to figure out how to get alt/option to behave this way. Really my only major gripe about OS X vs. linux.

mjdwitton What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

Because in SL, they can be the person that they really want to be in the real world.

mjdwitton Leaving Go

Indeed. Which is why pcwalton is answering Thomas' conjecture about C++'s STL containers.

mjdwitton Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?

Because there is equally no reason that the statement should be false.

mjdwitton Chrome treats DELETE requests as GET and caches them

I may be mistaken, but I believe that Chrome uses ctrl+shift+R to refresh everything.

mjdwitton Open-Source High-quality PDF of SICP

Glad I could help. Scheme is great for introducing oneself to many concepts not commonly present or used in more common imperative languages. That, and the SICP is just a ton of fun.

mjdwitton Open-Source High-quality PDF of SICP

TCO refers to tail call optimization, which is a useful optimization for languages such as Scheme which encourage heavy use of recursion. TCO allows the interpreter to reuse the current stack frame when a tail-recursive[1] function calls itself instead of creating a new stack frame for each recursive call.

Because javascript lacks this and many other features of Scheme/Lisp, I wouldn't really recommend using it for SICP.

[1] Tail recursive functions are recursive functions which merely return the result of their recursive call to the caller instead of further processing those results before returning. In pseudocode:

    // non-tail
    expt(b, x):
        if x == 0: 1
        else: x * expt(b, x-1)
    
    // tail-recursive
    tail-expt(b, x, ans):
        if x == 0: ans
        else: tail-expt(b, x-1, x*ans)

For these definitions:

    expt(2, 3) == tail-expt(2, 3, 1)

mjdwitton High school teacher tells graduating students: you’re not special

Those social promotions are clearly screwed up, especially as old as eighth grade. As a counterpoint anecdote, however, my mother is a kindergarten teacher who holds back (on average) two students a year for failure to understand the material or social immaturity that would prevent them from learning anything in first grade. And this is in a state (Indiana) in which kindergarten is voluntary.

mjdwitton Meet the ‘worst’ 8th grade math teacher in NYC

> a lot of assessments (too many, IMHO)

I definitely agree there. Just the other day, one of my mother's kindergarten students was drawing pictures of her and her teaching assistant and decided to caption the assistant's with "she helps us with our work" and my mother's with "she tests us."

mjdwitton The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

Of course that class would be worthless. Not all (and in my experience, almost no) classes, however, are like that when one selects a college which has a quality program for the degree of interest. Furthermore, I would go so far as to lay much of the blame for a poor education on the student who fails to select a good school for their degree.

mjdwitton The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

Similarly, at least in much of the US, teaching special needs teachers requires extra certification on top of a normal teacher's license. Without all kinds of extra classes on the various psychological and physical disorders that they deal with in their classrooms, the extra classes seem pretty justified.

mjdwitton Show HN: Spacetime locates a contact on a map by texting them a link to click on

Text posts are always grayed out here. If you check out the Ask[1] portion of the site, you'll see that all of those are as well. There's no meaning to it, unlike when a comment gets grayed out due to downvotes. It seems like a silly design choice to me, but all of them are that way.

[1] Clickable: http://news.ycombinator.com/ask

mjdwitton "Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints"

I didn't start using Linux (and therefore LibreOffice) until after I stopped using Office 2003 on any computers, so I don't know about its support for ODT.

2007 did do fairly poorly from what I remember as well. 2010 though is much better; I go back and forth between those fairly regularly. Fonts are obviously an issue, and complex formatting isn't quite right all of the time, but each suite seems to open most of the other's file types fairly well.

mjdwitton "Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints"

Office can open Open Document types pretty much universally. More complex formatting is generally screwed up though, just as it is when opening MS types in LibreOffice.

mjdwitton The Best Birth Control In The World Is For Men

Looks like schiffern answered that an hour ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3774010

mjdwitton Apology from Geeklist

You're missing a lot of information here. Design Like Whoa is the person who made the racy video in question. The woman who got pointed out the sexism on Twitter is Shanely Kane, who works as a developer for Basho and has nothing to do with Design Like Whoa's website.

mjdwitton Ask HN: How to run arc web app in the background?

I don't know the answer myself, but if you head on over to http://arclanguage.org, I bet the people there can point you in the right direction.

mjdwitton A neat way to fold a sheet of paper

I'm just guessing, but it would make sense for large paper maps not to use this fold so that you can partially unfold it and look only at the portion in which your are currently interested, instead of having a giant unfolded piece of paper. This would be especially nice in a small car where you would lack room to move a completely unfolded map around.

mjdwitton CrypTweet: Strong Encryption for Twitter DMs

The level of care and thought put into creating a secure encryption scheme doesn't matter if the cryptography is broken. There's a reason you constantly hear cryptographers telling everyone to never invent their own crypto-systems; it's extremely difficult to do right.

mjdwitton "White hat" Facebook hacker gets 8 months in jail

Facebook, Mozilla, Google, and lots of other companies encourage this with exploit bounty programs.

mjdwitton Unix as IDE

Ah, so instead of having to hand-roll your own really complex regex that would limit the scope every time, VS automatically limits the scope of the renaming for you. That is pretty nice.

mjdwitton Unix as IDE

How so? I haven't used VS since a couple of versions ago and never got to know it very well, so I based my above comment on the OPs description; if there's more to the feature than I could easily be wrong.

mjdwitton Unix as IDE

"* no easy refactoring. In VS i love how i can just hit F2 on a method name, rename it, VS shows me all the places where it will rename it and pressing OK. This works flawless everytime and makes refactoring so much more painless than working with a scripting language and a text-editor only"

Using vim (or sed for whole directories of files) you can do the same thing using a search and replace regex.

    in vim:
    :%s/<find>/<replace>/gc

mjdwitton Monads in C++

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752553

mjdwitton Super Cheap Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting

Because AWS's prices have to be more expensive in order to offer the huge increase in flexibility and instant scalability that you don't get with these cheaper VPSs.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Where to start reading on security?

Awesome, thanks a ton. The Amazon link is pretty much the mother lode.

mjdwitton Time to end the war on drugs

Rather, I think he means that the US judicial system is currently swamped. Therefore, if drug cases no longer required court time, the load on the system could be brought down to a more manageable level.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

It'd be interesting to respond to the ad with an entirely anonymous resume and portfolio from some one-off email address. See if you get a response/request for more information.

mjdwitton Ask HN: Does this kind of arrogance get job applications?

So you think that a YC-funded company posting a job posting on news.ycombinator.com is... _lying_?

No. Rather, I have no information that I trust to convince me one way or the other as to their honesty, so I choose to ignore that data.

I had not, however, considered that they have already been vetted by PG and YC. Perhaps I have a small reason to trust their claims. Even so, I'd give it the same weight in decision making as known hyperbole, at best. I'll only completely trust the claim if I have verifiable sources.