camccann

10 ms·

31.
by camccann 17y ago
"Socialism", in simplest terms, means control of the "means of production" by workers or the general public, as opposed to a more limited group of owners. Note that an otherwise unrestrained free market economy wherein all corporations are
32.
by camccann 17y ago
No, an ad-hominem would imply an attack on the character or worth of Rand personally. gnosis's comment was merely a bald assertion about the novel, though indeed not an argument as such. Of course, your Rand quote was also pretty much just
33.
by camccann 17y ago
(is there IO Monad in Coq?) To the best of my knowledge, no. If memory serves me, Coq actually isn't even Turing-complete, being a typed lambda calculus with no general fixpoint operator (specifically, a variant on the Calculus of Constru
34.
by camccann 17y ago
I don't see what even needs explanation. Really, monads are just a monoid object in an endofunctor category. [0] What's the problem? [1] [0] http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monoid#examples_6 [1] http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-i
35.
by camccann 17y ago
Physicists can intelligently contribute to economics. I remain to be convinced that economists can, in general, intelligently contribute to economics. At least physics gets results...
36.
by camccann 17y ago
Type-level computation is actually quite limited by default in GHC; it becomes quasi-Turing-complete only when using the UndecidableInstances extension, and even then it has a very shallow stack by default, though you can increase it if you
37.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, presumably, there's rather a lot of people paying good money for access to this professor's time and would prefer not to have class disrupted by inconsiderate people coming and going for no good reason. Being a paying customer doesn't
38.
by camccann 17y ago
Speaking only for myself, I have to say I actually find your point-free version of "sum" more readable. The extra argument is just visual clutter. Pointless style only gets really confusing when you end up with a bunch of composition operat
39.
by camccann 17y ago
From the comments, an alternate form of the (.) . (.) operator: foo = fmap fmap fmap Nothing says "welcome to Haskell!" like an inscrutable pile of fmaps. Oh, pointless style, how beautiful you are. In all seriousness, though, there
40.
by camccann 17y ago
Another possibility is that this site has a higher than usual percentage of nippophile users, Come now, you're not even trying. If you're going to be smugly derogatory toward people who enjoy some bit of Japanese popular culture, the tech
41.
by camccann 17y ago
constipating That is not a word that should ever exist... yet I cannot imagine a better description.
42.
by camccann 17y ago
Merely "clever" doesn't seem quite strong enough. Taking something already well-known and useful in some specialized context, thinking of a way it would be useful for some non-specialized target market, and then successfully marketing it to
43.
by camccann 17y ago
For stochastic algorithms you will probably use the same trick as with monadic I/O --- you can make the description of the algorithm purely functional, but not its execution. Certainly possible, but how well this works depends on how, and
44.
by camccann 17y ago
If you had a replicator that could produce anything, why would you need money at all? Even if manufacturing becomes effectively free, resources won't. You'll still need energy and raw materials. There wouldn't even be markets as we know
45.
by camccann 17y ago
Brief nitpicking: "persistent" and "purely functional" are not really the same thing. On the "purely functional" end, any stochastic algorithm is by definition not pure in the "referentially transparent" sense, so that's right out, and buil
46.
by camccann 17y ago
Who says you need a legal basis to sue someone? Winning is another matter, perhaps, but baseless litigation is a popular pass-time in the USA.
47.
by camccann 17y ago
As an interesting counterpoint, one of the comments gives an excellent definition of a good software development manager: a bi-directional bullshit filter to keep the techs and suits from scaring each other (and in general being a single
48.
by camccann 17y ago
Claiming that the stricter building codes would stimulate the economy is arguably also the same fallacy, just without the obvious net-negative of the "broken window" case. On the other hand, even disregarding the risk mitigation, it's also
49.
by camccann 17y ago
Ugh. My experience is that insurance companies are one of the few institutions that somehow manage to be even more bloated and bureaucratic than the government.
50.
by camccann 17y ago
Actually, my apologies for the overly brief comment earlier, I was on lunch and typing on a smartphone. I suppose you understood my point, but I'll elaborate for posterity: Conway's Life is Turing complete, with the conceptually unbounded g
51.
by camccann 17y ago
The function you're looking for would be a variation of the Busy Beaver function, I think. On an infinite grid, the question reduces to the Halting Problem.
52.
by camccann 17y ago
Definitions have nothing to do with truth, they serve only to clarify communication by establishing a common language; and mathematics as a whole makes no claim regarding the truth of axioms, only what a set of axioms do and do not entail.
53.
by camccann 17y ago
I've heard it proposed that we could try and work with this instead of against it, by "domesticating" diseases. Take some harmful bacteria, breed a strain that's mostly benign and moderately contagious, then let it loose to displace the m
54.
by camccann 17y ago
In general, folks tend to produce things that other people are willing to pay for. Why should pharma be any different? And why is this wrong? Because having individuals with limited resources independently pursuing their own goals doesn't
55.
by camccann 17y ago
Not if you enable compiler errors for inexhaustive matches. Are there any compilers for mainstream languages that can flag all possible segfault/NPE locations as errors?
56.
by camccann 17y ago
I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like "any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government". Of course, by that s
57.
by camccann 17y ago
For context, Sirlin is the "Playing to Win" guy. He's pretty much the patron saint of games that reward real player skill instead of rewarding "wasting a lot of time doing the same thing over and over". Unfortunately, I have yet to be convi
58.
by camccann 17y ago
The Postal Service and the Patent and Trademark office have had net positive cash flow some years. Not for the last few years though, I think.
59.
by camccann 17y ago
If nothing else, a reasonable person's certainty in any hypothesis must be bounded above by their (presumably finite) degree of confidence in their own sanity. Absolute certainty is all but nonsensical.
60.
by camccann 17y ago
The link in the article to the actual paper appears to be broken, but there seems to be a copy uploaded here as well: http://files.meetup.com/411954/Intelligence.pdf Skimming the article, seems to be a lot of discussion of statistical cor

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