I tried to do this not too long ago, but (at least in the US) all of the mobile networks are switching to LTE, and shutting down their 2G and 3G networks. I was unable to find any "dumb" phones with LTE support. The…
The decision I most regret was moving to a city without many tech jobs (Philadelphia). The difference in number of available jobs, salaries, working conditions, and even the intelligence of coworkers is kind of…
In Cambodia, I got what I assume must have been a less serious case, because I didn't have any vomiting or diarrhea, only the worst headache I've ever had in my life. Luckily the lack of air conditioning wasn't a big…
If you want to parse complicated strings using only a POSIX tool, and put the results into an array, you're better off using Awk.
When I converted a CPU-intensive program from OCaml to MLton-compiled SML, without changing any of the algorithms, I got a 30% speedup. That was more than 10 years ago though, and both compilers have seen some…
I wrote this for parsing CSV in Awk: http://yumegakanau.org/code/awk-csv/ It maybe doesn't handle all the CSV out there, but the cases you mention (quoting and commas) it does handle. I usually load CSV data into…
I never had a Facebook account.
For political science, these are not exactly textbooks, but they are by far the most useful I've ever read: The Art of Political Manipulation by William H. Riker Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber
Well, I majored in both political science and computer science. I don't think the two cases are different at all. I find it very irritating to deal with both political people who don't understand any math, and computer…
Your wife could move to the US, get even a minimum wage job, and sponsor you for an IR-1. This would require living apart for probably at least a year. Or, if she has any family or friends in the US, they can sponsor…
x86-64 replaced the stack with registers. So this article, while interesting, is not of much practical use anymore.
"Vim is, without question, the worst C codebase I have seen." From the example you give, I agree it must be bad. But if you want to see something worse, check out PHP. No, not the billions of programs written in the PHP…
I guess this is talking about price-to-book? In some other countries, price-to-book is usually close to 1, or even below it, which always struck me as strange. Either something is wrong with their stock markets, or…
Another issue, comparing the MLton FFI and the Ocaml FFI, is that the FFI in MLton is somewhat slower. When I converted an Ocaml program to SML, I discovered that a small portion written in C ran much faster when I…
I am American and my wife is Cambodian. We live in a Cambodian neighborhood in the United States. We have a daughter, born in Cambodia, who is now 4. I speak to her in English and her mother (and everyone else in the…
Given that by far most of the water in California is used for growing food, an interesting question would be: at what point is it cheaper to grow the food somewhere else where water is more abundant? Of course the…
When I was living in Cambodia, I heard someone talking about how you could buy citizenship there. I assumed that it would be involve bribing a government official, since that's the kind of place Cambodia is. But I found…
This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard…
I live in South Philadelphia (7th and Oregon), and while I have neither Comcast nor Verizon service, it seems like I can get either. They both mail me at least once a week, and occasionally come to my door, asking me to…
I think a better title might be: I Missed the Obamacare Open-Enrollment Deadline, So I Fly to Britain for My Medication. There are exceptions to the open-enrollment deadline. The author is not completely clear on his…
Here is my anecdote: I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the…
Well, the cause of death for someone dying from their addiction is not always "drug overdose", but things like accident, murder, or suicide, which in fact are the top three causes of death for young adults.
I agree about some tropical fruits (mangoes and durians especially), but I've had bananas straight off the tree in Southeast Asia and they really didn't taste any different to me.
Most of the people using pay-per-ride cards don't have credit cards (or debit cards). The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly unlimited cards. And most tourists in New York, believe it or not,…
As an executive at a nonprofit, I was renting an apartment several blocks from my office. The apartment building was purchased by a developer who proceeded to convert them to condos. I was offered some money (I think…
I tried to do this not too long ago, but (at least in the US) all of the mobile networks are switching to LTE, and shutting down their 2G and 3G networks. I was unable to find any "dumb" phones with LTE support. The…
The decision I most regret was moving to a city without many tech jobs (Philadelphia). The difference in number of available jobs, salaries, working conditions, and even the intelligence of coworkers is kind of…
In Cambodia, I got what I assume must have been a less serious case, because I didn't have any vomiting or diarrhea, only the worst headache I've ever had in my life. Luckily the lack of air conditioning wasn't a big…
If you want to parse complicated strings using only a POSIX tool, and put the results into an array, you're better off using Awk.
When I converted a CPU-intensive program from OCaml to MLton-compiled SML, without changing any of the algorithms, I got a 30% speedup. That was more than 10 years ago though, and both compilers have seen some…
I wrote this for parsing CSV in Awk: http://yumegakanau.org/code/awk-csv/ It maybe doesn't handle all the CSV out there, but the cases you mention (quoting and commas) it does handle. I usually load CSV data into…
I never had a Facebook account.
For political science, these are not exactly textbooks, but they are by far the most useful I've ever read: The Art of Political Manipulation by William H. Riker Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber
Well, I majored in both political science and computer science. I don't think the two cases are different at all. I find it very irritating to deal with both political people who don't understand any math, and computer…
Your wife could move to the US, get even a minimum wage job, and sponsor you for an IR-1. This would require living apart for probably at least a year. Or, if she has any family or friends in the US, they can sponsor…
x86-64 replaced the stack with registers. So this article, while interesting, is not of much practical use anymore.
"Vim is, without question, the worst C codebase I have seen." From the example you give, I agree it must be bad. But if you want to see something worse, check out PHP. No, not the billions of programs written in the PHP…
I guess this is talking about price-to-book? In some other countries, price-to-book is usually close to 1, or even below it, which always struck me as strange. Either something is wrong with their stock markets, or…
Another issue, comparing the MLton FFI and the Ocaml FFI, is that the FFI in MLton is somewhat slower. When I converted an Ocaml program to SML, I discovered that a small portion written in C ran much faster when I…
I am American and my wife is Cambodian. We live in a Cambodian neighborhood in the United States. We have a daughter, born in Cambodia, who is now 4. I speak to her in English and her mother (and everyone else in the…
Given that by far most of the water in California is used for growing food, an interesting question would be: at what point is it cheaper to grow the food somewhere else where water is more abundant? Of course the…
When I was living in Cambodia, I heard someone talking about how you could buy citizenship there. I assumed that it would be involve bribing a government official, since that's the kind of place Cambodia is. But I found…
This is not really my area of expertise, but is the Harvard CS department actually in the same league as Stanford? When I think of top CS schools, I think of MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley. Neither Harvard…
I live in South Philadelphia (7th and Oregon), and while I have neither Comcast nor Verizon service, it seems like I can get either. They both mail me at least once a week, and occasionally come to my door, asking me to…
I think a better title might be: I Missed the Obamacare Open-Enrollment Deadline, So I Fly to Britain for My Medication. There are exceptions to the open-enrollment deadline. The author is not completely clear on his…
Here is my anecdote: I wanted to know more about my representative to the state legislature. First I went to Wikipedia. It had a stub page, with only basic biographic information. Checking elsewhere, I found that the…
Well, the cause of death for someone dying from their addiction is not always "drug overdose", but things like accident, murder, or suicide, which in fact are the top three causes of death for young adults.
I agree about some tropical fruits (mangoes and durians especially), but I've had bananas straight off the tree in Southeast Asia and they really didn't taste any different to me.
Most of the people using pay-per-ride cards don't have credit cards (or debit cards). The credit card-only machines are mostly for disbursing monthly unlimited cards. And most tourists in New York, believe it or not,…
As an executive at a nonprofit, I was renting an apartment several blocks from my office. The apartment building was purchased by a developer who proceeded to convert them to condos. I was offered some money (I think…