camccann

28 ms·

211.
by camccann 17y ago
Another consideration this article doesn't seem to touch on: Heat. Particle-beam weapons especially, but also anything carried by a ship that generates significant energy that isn't thrust, is going to generate a lot of waste heat, due to t
212.
by camccann 17y ago
Oddly, I tend to get the opposite impression: If a lot of people voted a story up, yet few people felt the need to add something, complain about it, ask questions, &c., it suggests that it's something both very interesting and high qual
213.
by camccann 17y ago
My theory, as someone admittedly inexpert in both Lisp and Haskell but having used both on occasion, is that both are so ridiculously powerful in different ways compared to "normal" languages that very few people ever even reach the point o
214.
by camccann 17y ago
Thank you for picking up on that half of my joke. Everyone else went for the type system part... Not that it isn't easy to make a candied Lisp dialect with "friendly" syntax more appealing to non-Lisp programmers, but anyone who actually l
215.
by camccann 17y ago
"Science" is, loosely speaking, a process for formulating and evaluating predictive models of the behavior of systems with unknown characteristics, based on empirical observation. Theoretical "computer science" is, most of the time, a matte
216.
by camccann 17y ago
At times, _why projected an image of the "troubled artist" archetype--either "real" or part of the _why persona, no one knew--and if memory serves me he'd had a couple disappointments recently and left some downbeat tweets. So, while I can'
217.
by camccann 17y ago
Web development is a subset of "software engineering". Computer science is not software engineering. It also is not a science and, arguably, is not really about computers. Software engineering isn't really much of an engineering profession,
218.
by camccann 17y ago
I don't know if direct contact was made, but they were definitely aware that the internet private eye squad had found their online presences. Names and locations were also found. Like I said, it was kinda creepy. I wouldn't even have been
219.
by camccann 17y ago
A few people did some internet stalking back when he first disappeared and tracked down some of his real-life friends and family. Creepy, yes, but also enough to determine that the man behind the pseudonym is alive and well. And, since one
220.
by camccann 17y ago
One of Haskell's defining features is a very expressive and powerful static type system, so yeah, compile-time type inference/checking was pretty heavily implied by "similar to Haskell". And yes, the fact that I was essentially asking for a
221.
by camccann 17y ago
He's posted several of his own articles before and acknowledged them as such (which is the only reason I know it's his!). I just wanted to make sure he gets proper credit. cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754119
222.
by camccann 17y ago
All I really want in a language is something similar to Haskell, with Lisp-like metaprogramming, easy support for Erlang-style concurrency, and syntax that doesn't immediately terrify the Blub programmers. Is that so much to ask?
223.
by camccann 17y ago
Which really goes to highlight the biggest flaw with DRM: It's an additional cost to add something that will not, under any circumstances, improve the customer's experience. It's one thing to have a black market providing illicit versions o
224.
by camccann 17y ago
I would have added "Microsoft then gives the money back after realizing that accepting it requires them to support VB6 in perpetuity."
225.
by camccann 17y ago
This is probably more accurate than most predictions you'll read elsewhere. For what it's worth, the author of this is clawrencewenham on HN, a consistent source of good content.
226.
by camccann 17y ago
I really cannot fathom the kind of confusion necessary to regard empirical knowledge as "elitist". I don't particularly like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but calling it elitist and voting for people who promise to ignore it really wo
227.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, I never claimed to have a solution. I was just remarking that "privatize it!" is, alone, not a solution either (although a viable solution might very well involve privatization). But yes, the eventual reality check of competition, s
228.
by camccann 17y ago
Yes, I realize that was the intended argument. It's a charming idea that, unfortunately, happens to be wrong. It works fine as long as you have single ownership by a relatively rational person. hyperbovine pointed out the problem with the l
229.
by camccann 17y ago
Because obviously, left to their own devices, businesses generally won't make terrible long-term decisions to gain short-term profits. Especially when decision-makers have no long-term obligations and are smart enough to cash out before pro
230.
by camccann 17y ago
San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here. Ah, yes, the time-tested principle of sol
231.
by camccann 17y ago
Depends, how many of them are just another wrapper around Gecko or WebKit?
232.
by camccann 17y ago
The filter you propose is equivalent to Strong AI. If we can do that , we'll probably have bigger things to worry about than filtering the net.
233.
by camccann 17y ago
it all seems to be based on the ridiculous agrument that we have to try something...anything...for the children's sake. This seems to be an instance of a type of reasoning known as the Politician's Syllogism: Premise: Something must
234.
by camccann 17y ago
I think you've essentially reduced free will to the Halting Problem.
235.
by camccann 17y ago
Running a restore is also a very effective way to discover that your backup procedure wasn't actually very reliable after all.
236.
by camccann 17y ago
If you're turned off by typing lines and lines of code with semicolons and complex syntax, then maybe the root issue is that computer programming just isn't for you. ...either that, or you program in Scheme. </snark> Seriously, th
237.
by camccann 17y ago
In practice, the meaning of "more highly evolved" is generally something like "more similar to the person using the phrase".
238.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, technically, "brilliant engineer changing the world for the better" and "sociopath exploiting customers" aren't actually mutually exclusive categories...
239.
by camccann 17y ago
"Force you to think" is basically the idea, yes. The goal is to catch places where your high-level conceptual understanding of the task to be accomplished doesn't match the lower-level model of "how to get from here to there" you've mentall
240.
by camccann 17y ago
Fundamental goals are neither rational nor irrational. A rational thinker with no non-rational goals would have no reason to ever do anything--including think at all. Two perfectly rational agents with the same fundamental goals would, of c

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