Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
There are a couple of reasons why creating a self-hosting compiler can be good idea:

1. Shows to others that your language is capable of a project of moderate complexity, as well as display what an "idiomatic" version of writing code is

2. Remove dependencies on parts you can't control (once you rewrite it in Zig, rather than C++, you don't need to worry about new C++ features or deprecations between versions)

3. Writing code in the language helps catch bugs in the language specification and in the compiler's implementation of the language.

These are just the ones off the top of my head, but people with more PL-Design experience may be able to elaborate.

Comment · 6 years ago
I think I may have misspoken. What I meant to say was that, at least for me, KMM is a little easier to view both accounts and categories, and search within them.

A more accurate phrasing would have been "Filter all the payers that contain this string, and allow me to select them and see how much money was transferred to/from them."

Comment · 6 years ago
Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items

I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the ability to select multiple things and tag them appropriately.

I appreciate the article trying to explain Double-Entry bookkeeping, and I would suggest people look into KMM as an alternative to GnuCash.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
As a response to your objections,

1) It's just a syntax thing... It's still possible to make an understandable program through good style

2) I don't have anything.

3-6) I've heard Racket is a good spiritual successor to Lisp, complete with external libraries and a broad(er) userbase.

Comment · 9 years ago
I have to admit, the slightly misleading title got me. I'm currently going through SICP myself (albeit at a snail's pace), but it seems like the article's author and I both had the same initial objections to LISP, only to be blown away by its simplicity and expressiveness with a few keywords and lines of code. I'm still partial to other programming languages, but LISP holds a special place in my hard drive.
Comment · 9 years ago
Honest question: I tried using LaTeX for a homework assignment. I had already done all the work on some loose paper, but it was all over the place and thought LaTeX-ing it would help readability. It took me about three hours and I wasn't even halfway done (there were four questions and I had barely done the second one)... Is taking this long normal for LaTeX? or is it something you get better at with practice?
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
You know, I'm sort of split on what to think of the click-bait-y article title.

The guy's a PhD at Princeton, he clearly knows the Fourier Transform is more than just a trick - he even mentions that he wants to bring science/math to a wider audience at the end. From what I can tell, this article's more aimed at the nerdy middle/high schooler who likes math than engineers and computer scientists (the main target audience of this site). So while the article's title sort of tricks you into learning about this "trick", as long as people who normally can't be bothered to look at math (because for some reason it's popular to be "bad at math", ie not want to do math) are learning about the applications of mathematics in the real world, I don't see anything particularly wrong with trying to reach a wider audience.

Comment · 9 years ago
I've recently begun to think about the availability of housing and how that impacts the middle/lower stratum of the US, and it seems to me that there have been several short-sighted policies put in place that have put us in a much worse position for the future for short term gain (the article explains how subsidies for single-family homes are a reason for the shift away from small apartment buildings). Has this always been happening, or has it appeared to become more pronounced with the recent focus on gentrification? What can be done to improve affordable housing? I'm not all too familiar with this field, so anything helps!

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