BartlebyScrivener - Slashdot User

Submission + - Do Slashdotters use Markdown and Pandoc?

Submitted by BartlebyScrivener on Sunday October 20, 2013 @09:16AM

BartlebyScrivener writes: I am a author, screenwriter, law prof, and a hobbyist programmer. I love MacVim and write almost everything in it: Exams, novels, even screenplays now that Fountain is available. I use LaTeX and WordPress and so on, but several years ago I discovered Markdown and the wonderful Pandoc. I searched Slashdot expecting to find lively discussions of both Markdown and Pandoc, but found nothing. Do Slashdotters look down their noses at these tools and do their work in HTML and LaTeX? I can't imagine computer geeks using Word instead of their favorite text editors. If not Markdown and Pandoc, what tools do Slashdotters use when they create documents that probably need to be distributed in more than one format: HTML, PDF, EPUB or perhaps even docx?

Submission + - The Power of the R Programming Language (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

BartlebyScrivener

on Wednesday January 07, 2009 @01:04AM

BartlebyScrivener writes: "The New York Times has an article on the R programming language. The Times describes it as: "a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.""

Submission + - The Rise of the Machines (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

BartlebyScrivener

on Saturday October 11, 2008 @09:58PM

BartlebyScrivener writes: "A Sunday New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and "quants" outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: "Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, 'Open the bank vault doors, Hal.'""

Submission + - Moore's Law For Razor Blades?

Submitted by

BartlebyScrivener

on Thursday October 26, 2006 @11:30AM

BartlebyScrivener writes: "An article in The Economist examines Moore's Law as applied to razor blade technology:

'For the most cynical shavers, this evolution is mere marketing. Twin blades seemed plausible. Three were a bit unlikely. Four, ridiculous. And five seems beyond the pale. Few people, though, seem willing to bet that Gillette's five-bladed Fusion is the end of the road for razor-blade escalation. More blades may seem impossible for the moment — though strictly speaking the Fusion has six, because it has a single blade on its flip-side for tricky areas — but anyone of a gambling persuasion might want to examine the relationship between how many blades a razor has, and the date each new design was introduced . . . [more]'"

Slashdot Top Deals