brianberns

13 ms·

91.
by brianberns 7y ago
I don’t have a problem with it. This prevents a private entity from monopolizing a possibly world-changing invention. The government can auction licenses to create competition, or even give it away for free.
92.
by brianberns 7y ago
How did you create a data set large and accurate enough to be useful in training a model?
93.
by brianberns 7y ago
Holy cow, I was not expecting that. Thank you.
94.
by brianberns 7y ago
Close, but not quite.
95.
by brianberns 7y ago
Here's a little puzzle that really puts this in perspective: I put 100 lb. of potatoes in the sun. The potatoes were 99% water by weight. After drying a while, the potatoes were 98% water. How much did they weigh at that point? https:
96.
by brianberns 7y ago
HN updated their title after I posted my comment. The title of the linked article is still misleading: "Possible Detection of a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist’".
97.
by brianberns 7y ago
The title is misleading. Just to be clear, theory predicts that blacks holes shouldn't be created between 50 and 130 solar masses, but there are plenty of black holes >130 solar masses. This is just an observation of a black hole th
98.
by brianberns 7y ago
The analogy I’d make is to bugs in software. Most software has bugs, but they’re only triggered in specific circumstances. Stay away from those cases and you’re usually fine. If you happen to hit a new bug, you might lose some data, but it’
99.
by brianberns 7y ago
> If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. There's nothing to stop our creators from doing that anyway. Simulations are often stopped, tw
100.
by brianberns 7y ago
> From the equations and models of modern physics there is no time. The universe is just a curved 4D surface with one of the dimensions having different properties than the three others. That dimension is called "time" and it d
101.
by brianberns 7y ago
I stopped reading at "single-celled protein", which indicates to me that the author does not understand basic biology. Does anyone have a better take on this?
102.
by brianberns 7y ago
I was recently tasked with making some small incremental changes to a large code base that I was not familiar with. I was successful specifically because I could see the existing implementation and use it as a template for making the necess
103.
by brianberns 7y ago
Java applet?
104.
by brianberns 7y ago
An object has to occupy a contiguous region in memory in order for dereferencing to work efficiently. We need both "this.baseField" and "this.derivedField" to directly access the desired bytes. If either of those has to
105.
by brianberns 7y ago
It's just part of the Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
106.
by brianberns 7y ago
I think mutability is fine, but there should be some syntactic difference in the usage to alert the user.
107.
by brianberns 7y ago
I’m not a Python fan and these examples reinforce my dislike for its design. 1. Caused by confusing reference semantics and value semantics, which is pretty much inevitable when a fundamental data type is mutable. 2. Boolean is a subclass o
108.
by brianberns 7y ago
It's because the engineers are on staff and you're paying them anyway. Trying to justify a separate purchase, even if would be cheaper on paper, is way harder.
109.
by brianberns 7y ago
It might not be as unlikely as you think: https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-...
110.
Show HN: Implementing power series as infinite lazy lists in F#(github.com)
2 points by brianberns 7y ago|0 comments
111.
by brianberns 7y ago
Yeah, embedded systems isn't a domain where functional programming is going to work well. Good luck with those locks! :)
112.
by brianberns 7y ago
You might be interested in software transactional memory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memor... . I believe it addresses some of the issues you mentioned in a functional programming way.
113.
by brianberns 7y ago
I don't think so. For example, sum of first 5 integers: sum i = 1 to 5 of i -> 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 15 Nothing mutable there. In functional programming this is done with a `fold`, which doesn't use mutation.
114.
by brianberns 7y ago
Can you provide an example of mutability in, say, high school or undergraduate math?
115.
by brianberns 7y ago
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. You can certainly express those statements in both FP and imperative languages, and you can prove the equivalences you mention in FP languages like Agda, Coq, and F*.
116.
by brianberns 7y ago
> The Go Core team is likely more vested in the overall success of the language than the rest of Google. I think you could say that about most teams at most companies. That doesn't mean that they have any autonomy whatsoever from th
117.
by brianberns 7y ago
> There is no meaningful sense in which Google, apart from the core Go team, makes decisions about the language. That's like saying that there's no meaningful sense in which I, apart from my brain and nervous system, make decis
118.
by brianberns 7y ago
I don’t find this persuasive at all. Over-population of humans on this planet is the root cause of the impending climate disaster. Jamming more people into cities is just going to fuel the population explosion. I think we have to find a way
119.
by brianberns 7y ago
My Ivy League school wasn’t anything like this.
120.
by brianberns 7y ago
I love SQL, but I strongly agree with this. It would be great to have a platform-specific low-level API for performance-critical queries. (Much like “unsafe” code in a managed programming language.)

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