brianberns

12 ms·

61.
by brianberns 6y ago
I'll never know for sure, since I can't run the counterfactual. It's certainly possible that the outcome might have been similar if I hadn't been accelerated. That said, girls tend to mature faster than boys, and I can a
62.
by brianberns 6y ago
Here's my data point to the contrary: I entered college a few weeks short of my 17th birthday in the early 1980's. I was about 1.5 years younger than others in my class, on average. I made many good friends, but my relative lack o
63.
by brianberns 6y ago
It loses a little mass due to water boiling off, but other than that the mass has to stay exactly the same (barring nuclear reactions, which typically don't make for good quinoa).
64.
by brianberns 6y ago
How is this fluff at the very top of Hacker News? Edit: And a few minutes later, it's gone from the front page. I wonder if the author gamed the system somehow?
65.
by brianberns 6y ago
> Instead of Haskell we should be thinking of programming language research and how to get the best ideas into our mainstream languages. How do we make immutability easy and ergonomic and get rid of nulls in C#? F# pretty much plays this
66.
by brianberns 6y ago
Agreed. I’m also dubious about the control group who were merely “reminiscing”. Seems ripe for researcher-induced bias.
67.
by brianberns 6y ago
EEOC says "In most circumstances, individuals who are partners, officers, members of boards of directors, or major shareholders will not qualify as employees." https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-2
68.
by brianberns 6y ago
It seems that the neural net just spits out an answer, rather than deriving it step-by-step like humans do. That's interesting, but would still get you an F on a real calculus test.
69.
by brianberns 6y ago
Eyes are still much better at extracting 3D info from paintings (e.g. paint thickness, texture, etc.). This could potentially be replicated by photographing each point on the painting from two angles.
70.
by brianberns 7y ago
"Oops... there was an error generating text The server encountered an error and could not complete the request. Please try again after some time."
71.
by brianberns 7y ago
That’s incredibly short-sighted. This is a lethal disease that’s spreading rapidly across the entire world. Even if you personally don’t die or even feel sick, you could easily pass it on to others who do.
72.
by brianberns 7y ago
As an F# developer with just enough category theory to follow along, I think this is really great. I find the workaround for existential types in .NET particularly interesting, but it seems so verbose. Is there no way to do it with plain fu
73.
by brianberns 7y ago
At that point, the only thing to do is set up 20 playing cards and offer them a prize of $100 for every $10 they wager.
74.
by brianberns 7y ago
Off topic: I’ve had success explaining the Monty Hall problem by generalizing it to, say, 10,000 doors, where Monty opens 9,998 of them before allowing you to switch. People seem to intuitively understand that it’s extremely likely that the
75.
by brianberns 7y ago
This seems to assume that all the relevant data is present in memory on the client, but this is often not true (e.g. due to paging issues). What happens if you try to sort listings by price and the actual item with the lowest price hasn&#x2
76.
by brianberns 7y ago
I’m confused. SARS and COVID-19 (the current coronavirus outbreak) aren’t the same, right? Which one are we talking about here?
77.
by brianberns 7y ago
This looks awesome. I’m an F# developer and I agree with your intro paragraph 100%: “One of the ironies of today's computer programming landscape is that functional languages directly inspired by the declarative languages for expressin
78.
by brianberns 7y ago
I don’t think that had anything to do with why Slashdot faded into obscurity. Slashdot refused to allow users to post stories, so Digg (and then Reddit) ate its lunch.
79.
by brianberns 7y ago
I think that might’ve been a problem in the pre-Google era, but surely it no longer is.
80.
by brianberns 7y ago
I agree, but isn’t the remote access “feature” a big part of the marketing for these devices? E.g. check on your pet when you’re at work.
81.
by brianberns 7y ago
Um, no. Distance and time are related by the speed of light, which travels 1 light year (distance) in 1 year (time). If space wasn’t expanding, the distance to a stationary object (in light years) would be exactly equal to the travel time o
82.
by brianberns 7y ago
No, the object is now 46b light years away, but we can’t see what it looks like now at that distance. We see an image of it when it was much closer and younger.
83.
by brianberns 7y ago
I don't think it's physically possible to make a wall like this that's more than one brick thick (without using an absurd amount of mortar).
84.
by brianberns 7y ago
My point is that if someone is directing a powerful laser into your home, you are in imminent mortal danger, which is worse than whatever the smart speaker can do.
85.
by brianberns 7y ago
If someone is willing to blast your possessions to bits using a laser, I think the security of your smart devices is probably the least of your immediate concerns.
86.
by brianberns 7y ago
Yeah, the verbiage says that his typing is merely the "basis" for the resulting password, so you're probably right.
87.
by brianberns 7y ago
This is cute, but I'm dubious. It generated "y3aEmic8B217" as my password. Kid just happened to hit the shift key while also pressing E and then B? It looks a little too random to me. When I pound on the keyboard, I get resul
88.
by brianberns 7y ago
Yeah, that's a small example, so it's fine either way. But larger examples with lots of parentheses can be overwhelming (see: Lisp).
89.
by brianberns 7y ago
You're right, and that's why it's usually called "function application" instead of "backward pipe". However, using $ as an operator is confusing because the associativity is ambiguous if you're not al
90.
by brianberns 7y ago
Thanks. That's a good blog. The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell. F# uses <| to indicate a backward pipe, which I find much more intuitive. For example: print <| even <| 4 * 2 This means: Take the result

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