PaulAJ

32 ms·

271.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
I think PG is conflating the personal spite of Internet trolls with the ruthless drive to acquire wealth that marks out investment bankers, warlords and drug dealers. The latter might do some very nasty or underhanded things, but they regar
272.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
In a conventional language you have to decide when something gets evaluated, and whether to cache the value or recompute it every time. These decisions get baked into your code early on because the control and data flow are intertwingled. I
273.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Paying the legal fees of claimants who win would not be out of order.
274.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
This article is a distraction from the real issue. Most of the spending (including the oft-repeated $225 for "Sparkles the clown") is legitimate. The process of civil forfeiture, on the other hand, is a clear violation of the cons
275.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
We're clearly at the very beginning of this. Using someone else's gut flora in the hope that it will sort out yours is on a par with pre-scientific herbal medicine: trial and error, and it often worked, but you don't know why
276.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
To be clear, 2 litres per day is the amount of water you are supposed to consume, including all the water in your food. Obviously anyone working out is going to need more to compensate for sweating. Anyone drinking 2 or more litres of soft
277.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The decline in violent crime only exists as long as you exclude all of the violent crime that happens in prisons.
278.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Could the electromagnets involved in microwave generation be interacting with the Earth's magnetic field?
279.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Somewhat reminds me of Terry Pratchett's habit of attributing his education to his local public library.
280.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The maze becomes copyright once it is fixed in tangible form. The license does not include commercial use (which this clearly is), so it is unlicensed.
281.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The problem is that for the rest of his life this will come up when someone googles his name. Whether he is applying for a job, going out on a first date or looking for venture capital, the words "accused of rape" will be hanging
282.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
What you say is true, but the Court's language in this case strongly suggests that it would find a similar privacy right in documents held in the cloud independently of cellphones. This is contrary to Smith vs Maryland, which the gover
283.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Not exactly minor wounds. Life threatening and life changing injuries. Even if he survives, his parents are going to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the aftermath. Why isn't this headline news across America?
284.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
I hoped to find a discussion of the tension between the formulations of freedom in the "Cyberlibertarian" and "Left" viewpoints. But this article just asserts that because cyberlibertarianism doesn't agree with the
285.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The problem is that the languages don't limit the side effects; they leave that to the programmer.
286.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
For instance, in Haskell a value is a value. If I have a value of type Integer then it definitely exists; if I want to say that it might not exist then I use the type "Maybe Integer", which expresses that idea precisely. Same goes
287.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Instead, how about a pure functional way of doing MVC? http://www.haskellforall.com/2014/04/model-view-controller-h...
288.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The trouble starts when you try to get your mixed paradigms to fit well together. The original article was making the point that the cost of mixing functional with imperative code means that the functional code is crippled. And I've ne
289.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Excellent summary. Yes, I did indeed conflate these two meanings of "pure" because I didn't want to get my post side-tracked into a discussion of this point. Unfortunately if you want a language with industrial strength tools
290.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Quote: "You call 'Aversion to Extremes' a cognitive bias [... but] the more extreme a language pursues a theoretical concepts, the less used it typically ends up being in practice." Yes, people use languages with solid t
291.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks for the clarification, although I think the term "beauty contest" trivialises the issue. Its not about beauty, its about buggy software.
292.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
Its an example of the "blub paradox": if you haven't used a pure functional language then its hard to see what the problem is. The crucial thing about pure functional languages is that they decouple the logic of the program f
293.
by PaulAJ 12y ago
The software engineering world is in danger of repeating the mistake it made with objects two decades ago. Back then there were legacy "structured" languages like C and Ada, and new exciting "object oriented" languages l
294.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
The standard deviation example conflates two questions: 1: Why can't we use standard mathematical notation instead of strings of ASCII? 2: Why do we need lots of control flow and libraries when implementing a mathematical equation as a
295.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
I went through similar stuff in the 70s and 80s, although nowhere near as extreme. Bullying is physical and psychological child abuse. The fact that it is perpetrated by other children instead of an adult makes no difference to the victim.
296.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
Haskell will tell you that toRational 0.1 = 3602879701896397 % 36028797018963968 toRational 1e50 = 100000000000000007629769841091887003294964970946560 % 1 Both of those values are precise, although I admit the first isn't
297.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
"It boils down to this: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money." And when exactly did we sign up to be your vassals?
298.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
This is standard political bull. Everyone is convinced the government wastes huge amounts of money, and therefore the solution to the problem is to cut this waste. Hence this "cut the fat" rhetoric goes over well. However as soon
299.
by PaulAJ 13y ago
As I understand it, if you are doing mining as a business then you treat your mining hardware, electricity costs etc as business costs to be subtracted from your income when figuring your profit. If you buy some BTC at $100 and sell at $150
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by PaulAJ 13y ago
I can just hear Hermione Granger saying "Its 'legoMEnon'"

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