camccann

35 ms·

271.
by camccann 17y ago
Isn't ending up back where you started the whole point of using a Y combinator? Fortunately xmonad is written in a language with lazy evaluation, otherwise the recursion would never terminate and we'd overflow the stack. Sorry, too much fun
272.
by camccann 17y ago
Actually, parts of it look frighteningly similar to the Heighway dragon curve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve I can't even begin to fathom what kind of connection there might be, but the degree of resemblance seems to go beyond
273.
by camccann 17y ago
I would submit that that would perhaps be a sign of a bad manager . The purpose of management, in theory, is to (by whatever means) enable the people they manage to more efficiently create value for the company. Someone who would rather dr
274.
by camccann 17y ago
standards of reliability of the software industry Standards of reliability? Are you talking about the same software industry I'm familiar with?
275.
by camccann 17y ago
Ouch, pretty harsh. Any OCaml fans around want to counter some of those complaints? Are these things that don't bother most programmers, or can be avoided by proper idiomatic code? I've heard good things about OCaml elsewhere, but my experi
276.
by camccann 17y ago
I'm still hoping for a Space Race Victory...
277.
by camccann 17y ago
"Computer science" is, unfortunately, often used as a catchall term for "everything related to software and programming". Not to mention that computer science, in the narrow sense, isn't about computers and isn't a science. Three cheers for
278.
by camccann 17y ago
A calculated gamble on the new language becoming popular in the next several years? It's like investing in a company; the smaller it is when you throw in your lot, the better placed you'll be when it grows big. Imagine that Go becomes the N
279.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, auto-generating cross-language bindings so that you can make function calls between code written in arbitrary languages would be a good start. Limited subsets of this exist, usually variations on "how to call C libraries from other la
280.
by camccann 17y ago
Peer review and such is more of a quick sanity check than anything else--in principle it's about verifying soundness, in practice it's more a quick and dirty filter to remove absolute rubbish. It'd be nice if things were more rigorous, but
281.
by camccann 17y ago
The way any science is presented to the public is rubbish, and most of the public wouldn't understand it anyway even if it was explained properly. Welcome to the way things are, I'm afraid. And, frankly, I don't have the expertise to act
282.
by camccann 17y ago
With all due respect, if you're going to take ESR to task for being politically biased and point out his use of right-wing catchphrases, you slightly undermine your point by using the term "teabagger". ...not to say that ESR isn't detache
283.
by camccann 17y ago
Okay. Yes? The statistics I mentioned basically support your point about tribalism, which I happen to agree with. Pointing out a prominent exception doesn't really disprove the demographics involved; if you know a person has a characteristi
284.
by camccann 17y ago
To turn matter into biochar requires heat input - so generally this means burning some sort of fuel - which releases CO2. Leaving the matter as it is, or burying it does not require this fuel, hence the CO2 "savings" are even greater. To d
285.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, the graph you link to doesn't include error bars or any other indication of uncertainty. Leaving out error margins and plotting only the mean is unfortunately common when presenting scientific results to general audiences; but that do
286.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, for views on climate change by political affiliation in the USA: http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1550 For choices of "human-caused warming", "warming for natural reasons", and "not warming", opinions are split 30%/43%/24% for
287.
by camccann 17y ago
Since when did the science go from attempting to discern an objective truth to advocacy? Advocacy of what? Shouldn't it be the duty of a scientist to be an advocate for better understanding of objective truth? Do you really think resear
288.
by camccann 17y ago
If you don't understand the actual reasons that the deniers exist, which have absolutely nothing to do with your approach to the science, then you haven't got a hope of actually dealing with them. So what is the correct way of dealing wit
289.
by camccann 17y ago
This is a good point. If the goal is to get mothers returning to work, why not make it easier for mothers to work instead of worrying about whether they'll have a specific job that apparently many decide to abandon?
290.
by camccann 17y ago
Why limit it to maternity leave? Just make a general-purpose "valuable employee vanished without warning" insurance. Could apply equally to someone quitting, dying, enlisting in the army, running away to join the circus... For a company lar
291.
by camccann 17y ago
It's better than the U.S., but hardly a socialist utopia gouging out the soul of the hard-working noble capitalist, or whatever the linked article was trying to say. What the article was trying to say is that placing burdensome restrictio
292.
by camccann 17y ago
Aside from the carbon sequestration aspect, "burying" charred biomass is very interesting from a standpoint of improving soil quality, as mentioned briefly in the article--though it's not really burying so much as churning it into the topso
293.
by camccann 17y ago
Find? Look at his other submissions--I think he's the author. A lot of the other articles are excellent too.
294.
by camccann 17y ago
For the section titled "LINQ? Return expressions, not results", the query returns an 'Iterator'/'Query' and not an 'Expression Tree'. They are completely different things. The underlying point is valid that it makes sense to return the que
295.
by camccann 17y ago
A basic human right is not the same thing as a shared moral obligation. The language of "rights" is often reserved for "categorically permitted acts", such as the right to think and speak as you wish. A lot of people are resistant to using
296.
by camccann 17y ago
If you enjoy interesting, just-crazy-enough-to-work, will-never-actually-happen solutions to the health care problem, take a look at this one: http://hanson.gmu.edu/buyhealth.html the author of that piece has some interesting perspectives
297.
by camccann 17y ago
I note that there are many examples of solutions to problems in legislative circles done in a direct fashion -- I'm not certain this is as much a requirement of legislative solution-creation as much as a certain style of decision-making.
298.
by camccann 17y ago
I might hazard some informed response on that, as a native speaker of English and student in classroom instruction at various times of German, Russian, Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Literary Chinese, Biblical Hebrew, Attic Greek, Bib
299.
by camccann 17y ago
Making things happen in politics typically requires convincing at least some threshold number of largely disparate groups that they each stand to benefit (in some tangible, direct way) from your proposal, or at least won't be harmed by it.
300.
by camccann 17y ago
Four out of five of the most difficult languages are east Asian; not too surprising there. The fifth, however, is Arabic, which I didn't anticipate. Anyone know why it's apparently dramatically more difficult for a native English speaker to

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