Recent submissions

Comment · 9 years ago
Clojure doesn't just "strongly prefer" immutable data but syntactically ensures that all data is immutable unless governed by one of four concurrency mechanisms. Persistent data structures aren't just a popular convention in Clojure--the language is literally built around them.
Comment · 11 years ago
Oh, I'm not asserting that it is, just that it sounds like it might be, based on the description in the Github README. If you're actually familiar with Perl 6 and don't view that to be true, I'd trust your assessment over my hypothesis!
Comment · 11 years ago
Except that Ruby's translation into English was literally the cause of Perl's decline.

Perl was intended to be a highly concise shell-like language that excelled at text processing. Partly in order to achieve such concision, the syntax overloaded various symbols to mean completely different things in different syntactic contexts, which made it very difficult for humans to parse quickly unless they worked in it very frequently (I recall the authors of either the llama or camel book estimating five times a week as the minimum). As Perl grew in popularity, objects were added on, and the whole language felt cobbled together. Perl users mainly used it as a shell replacement or for CGI scripts. Larger projects tended to be the domain of Python (or Java if concision was no longer a requirement).

And then came Ruby with syntax that was friendlier to Perl programmers than Perl itself, yet was semantically consistent, had built-in object support, and could rival Python for projects of any size, while surpassing it for the "quick and dirty scripts" that Perl excelled at. The conversation stopped being about Perl vs. Python and became Ruby vs. Python. People stopped using Perl 5.

So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5.

Comment · 11 years ago
The bulleted description sounds almost exactly like a description of Ruby, and I don't mean this sarcastically.
Comment · 11 years ago
Pretty sure it used to be <$20k for the same ~7%. The main value of YC has always been the training, network, and vote of confidence, not the funding. Not everyone finds it worth it for their particular situation, but many do.
Comment · 11 years ago
Nope it's very clear once you know what to look for, as long as you're looking at something highly polarized. I still have this superpower about five hours later.
Comment · 11 years ago
Took me an hour but I got it! Staring at a solid background on my Nexus 5 on full brightness in a pitch black room did the trick. Horizontal linear oscillation was more noticeable for me than vertical for some reason, which meant holding my phone in landscape mode. The brush pattern is significantly fainter on my laptop than my phone, and I seem to lose the effect every few minutes when using my laptop. I've been able to bring it back by glancing back at my phone in landscape. This is really, really cool by the way.
Comment · 11 years ago
I'm not sure who the poet was, but here's an old Chinese poem that I love. My translation doesn't quite do it justice, but...

少小離家老大回 鄉音無改鬢毛衰 兒童相見不相識 笑問客從何處來

I left my hometown as a young boy and returned as an old man.

The local speech hadn't changed, but the hair on my head had.

The children looked at me but recognized me not.

Laughing, they asked from where this visitor had come.

Comment · 11 years ago
It would seem they also have far better short-term visual memory than typical humans. Or maybe that's the result of practice. Time to find out...
Comment · 11 years ago
VimFx too - It's basically a clone of Vimium for Firefox, meaning it alters Firefox far less than Vimperator/Pentadactyl. There was previously a Firefox add-on that shared the name Vimium, but it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.

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