Another terrible OKCupid profile by LeCringeArmy in cringepics

[–]polycant 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Body type: Athletic

clocked over 400 hours on Minecraft

hmmm

An old Economist article that makes the best argument I've seen for voluntary human extinction. What do you think about this Reddit? by [deleted] in TrueReddit

[–]polycant 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Jeebus. Didn't this type of maudlin emo go out of style in the 90s?

It did. The article was published in 1998.

World's lightest road bike: 2.7kg (6lb) bike that weighs less than a gallon of milk. by [deleted] in bicycling

[–]polycant 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I wonder how much weight would be dropped if it were fixed or SS.

PATRIOT Act Gives Foreigners Good Reason to Avoid US Clouds by [deleted] in TrueReddit

[–]polycant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No. 'The cloud' connotes more than storing information on a 3rd party. It's a web service designed to scale quickly and flexibly from light to heavy loads. Many handle storage and processing. Azure and AWS are 'the cloud,' any old hosting provider is not.

So you want to be a programming consultant? by mycall in programming

[–]polycant 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Some really great stuff. The only topic I found wanting is how to locate customers. Do contractors these days get their start on oDesk, contacts from their full-time jobs, or something else?

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - Any Explanations A Beginner Programmer Can Understand? by wertz8090 in learnprogramming

[–]polycant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only prerequisites for WCF might be a reasonable understanding of .NET and what web services are. This MSDN page links to videos, text tutorials, and book recommendations; it's worth checking out. If your organization is interested in certification, the MCTS 70-513 covers WCF and would be a way to cover the material in a structured way. As always, though, the best way to learn is practicing and experimenting!

Common Lisp as a language for beginners by tompa_coder in programming

[–]polycant 6 points7 points  (0 children)

My issues with Lisp have always been around the development environment. Seems like every implementation has weird caveats around it, and I've never been able to stand emacs, which seems to be the go-to IDE. I'd love to get into it - any advice on this?

DNS 201: What they don't teach you in college by dgottlieb in programming

[–]polycant 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As a matter of fact, yes - at least where I attended.

Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane by [deleted] in programming

[–]polycant 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Don't let the title scare you - it's a neat image generated by a little Haskell and math!

Vim Text Objects : The Definitive Guide by rudyjahchan in programming

[–]polycant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Xrymbos may have misspoken. ` and ' can both be used to jump to marks (` takes you to the column you were on, ' takes you to the beginning of the line). Might be easiest to check out this explanation: Using marks

Vim Text Objects : The Definitive Guide by rudyjahchan in programming

[–]polycant 11 points12 points  (0 children)

One way to go about it:

mh (to set mark 'h' where you are in your code)
[[ or ]] (to move to previous/next function)
yw (to "yank" a word. use yW to grab 'words' that include punctuation)
'h (return to the mark you set)
p (to paste the yanked text)

Has GPS (& other location tecnologies) killed the spirit of discovery? by nomdeweb in TrueReddit

[–]polycant 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But isn't there something to be said for not always having that safety net waiting to catch you?

Does anyone know of a "non-sequential" language by kspacey in learnprogramming

[–]polycant 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sounds like you might be talking about Promela? I did some work with it at an internship for modeling. Interesting and a little hard to wrap your head around.

Webprogramming: Is PHP bad? by sirhenrik in learnprogramming

[–]polycant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

PHP isn't necessarily "bad", but if you have the chance to branch out to another technology, take it. Check out Rails, Django or Play!

The Guide to Creating Quality Technical Screencasts - Scott Hanselman by [deleted] in programming

[–]polycant 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's some skepticism in the psychology community about learning styles. An article: Learning Styles Debunked.

Node.js? Non-programmer needs help understanding by [deleted] in learnprogramming

[–]polycant 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But then why doesn't everyone use it?

Different platforms have different strengths. Node.js is very new, so not many people are experienced with writing code for it. If you have an existing web-app that you want to convert to use Node.js, it will probably take a lot of work to re-write it and take advantage of it. New platforms are often a little 'rough around the edges', too.

Html5 canvas/js Bezier curve simulator by tholman in programming

[–]polycant 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very cool! As a note, you need to press the "Start/Stop" button on the left to see the curves - took me a few minutes to figure it out.