bitdiddle

14 ms·

61.
by bitdiddle 13y ago
right, like for example Git. No one has built any commercial ventures around Git that I know of.
62.
by bitdiddle 13y ago
well sure, McCarthy worked on that when at MIT, right? That AI group was also doing a computer algebra system, so symbolic differentiation was a current problem. He is credited with the invention of Lisp though, and had a lot to do with Alg
63.
by bitdiddle 13y ago
I've always been curious about McCarthy's motivations and whether he was informed by Church's work on the lambda calculus. I heard he was schooled in functional analysis and symbolic differentiation and operator theory were what drove the i
64.
Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster(bloomberg.com)
24 points by bitdiddle 13y ago|6 comments
65.
by bitdiddle 13y ago
I think this notion of the drugs companies needing incentives for R&D is somewhat of a myth. A large amount of the research, which they avail themselves of, is publicly funded at places like NCI and NIH. That's right, we the taxpayer he
66.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
sure sounds just like it. History repeats itself.
67.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
for sure, what folks complain about the most (syntax) is where it's power is. I've been getting Guile recently and find the very tight integration with C to quite nice. It's like the best of both worlds
68.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
I haven't really thought this out, but superficially I read things like this and wonder how any investor can hold Facebook stock.
69.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
+1 - a wonderful story and very accessible
70.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Love the symbolics.com address
71.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Well the one true lisp of course was given to us by Alonzo Church, that other guy we rarely hear of :)
72.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
The one true lisp.
73.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
scheme
74.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
never time to do it right, always time to do it over.
75.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
talk about blast from the past, I spent a few years looking at a Symbolics machine, though I rarely saw that Genera login, the machine stayed up for days on end. light-table mode for emacs/common lisp would be neat. As a schemer I think wha
76.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
This reminds me of PhD work of Srinivas, using sheaves for KMP style pattern matching. It requires a bit of category theory but the core ideas are accessible. If you google "Sheaves KMP parsing" you can find it in ps format.
77.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
probably a reference to the agreement signed in 1984 by Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping
78.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Interesting, didn't know that. I used to hack on the Symbolics and recall using Statice a neat OO db he did.
79.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Interesting thought, I'm of that era, I began programming after graduate school in 1983, and remember the beginning of GNU well, as well as the fork that is called "open source". I find it interesting to hear arguments that open source has
80.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
I think this correlates closely with the observed decline in civility and quality discourse on HN :)
81.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Good point, it strikes me that with the changing landscape perhaps Eric Raymond and others who claim "open source" has won and we no longer need "free software" may want to rethink that.
82.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
I have an HP-12C financial calculator, that I use regularly, and it's still on the original battery.
83.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
We use both Erlang and CouchDB at Cloudant and have great success with both
84.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
What the "I don't trust Zuck" means to conservative investors (senior programmers, parents, and other fossils) is that management counts, in fact to old fogies like Buffett it's a major league concern. The same thing that holds true of a YC
85.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
you're absolutely correct, I can only go by what you say.
86.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
absolutely, it's at the boundary. I think Brouwer's work in topology and intuitionistic logic is a good example of this interplay
87.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Math is a symbol game? I'm sure you don't believe that any more than you believe music is a symbol game.
88.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
The current plan is to integrate BigCouch into CouchDB.
89.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
must be a slow news day
90.
by bitdiddle 14y ago
Very much so. I like the idea but the author's snarky remarks are really off putting.

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