crntaylor

19 ms·

121.
by crntaylor 14y ago
> Romney, McCain, Hillary, Kerry They probably just didn't want it enough. If they'd really thought positively, if they'd just visualised themselves in the position they wanted to be in, they'd all be president now. And if you're goin
122.
by crntaylor 14y ago
If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything. Except compute an uncomputable function. Or transmit information faster than the speed of light. Or simultaneously measure the speed and momentum of a particle with errors whose product
123.
by crntaylor 14y ago
Keep in mind that this quote is from a stand-up comedian , so is almost certainly not serious.
124.
by crntaylor 14y ago
You're "annoyed" with a useful service that you didn't even know existed until five minutes ago?
125.
by crntaylor 14y ago
"Ron Conway will invest in mobile cat neckbeards."
126.
by crntaylor 14y ago
This is the distinction between scalable and non-scalable. I first read of it in one of Nassim Taleb's books (where he advises people to pick a non-scalable career, since the outcomes are more certain and the risks lower) but I'm sure it's
127.
Robot juggles two ping pong balls.(notebook.kulchenko.com)
9 points by crntaylor 14y ago|0 comments
128.
by crntaylor 14y ago
My thoughts exactly. I don't know a whole lot about information theory or quantum mechanics, but my PhD is in dynamical systems and I've never heard tem described as 'random' or 'information producing'.
129.
by crntaylor 14y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is a very valid point. We've had speculative bubbles for as long as we've had financial markets - I don't see any reason why this one should be different.
130.
by crntaylor 14y ago
I disagree with his example of 'unintelligible' code. He suggests replacing match list with | x::xs -> ... with match list with | head::tail -> ... to make it clear what the names are referring to. But
131.
by crntaylor 14y ago
James's answer had had a better effect on the teacher ;)
132.
by crntaylor 14y ago
A commenter on Reddit pointed out that quasigroups require both left and right division operators \ and /, and that even though they are not associative, the axioms x \ (x * y) = y x * (x \ y) = y (x * y) / y = x (x / y) *
133.
by crntaylor 14y ago
There are algebraic objects for which inverses are defined, but which aren't groups: namely groupoids, quasigroups and loops. In groupoids the binary operation isn't total, i.e. there can be pairs (a,b) for which a <> b is not defin
134.
by crntaylor 14y ago
There are many ways to swap two variables without using a temp variable, as long as the type of the variables is a mathematical group[0]. If the group operation is denoted <>, with identity e, and the inverse of 'a' is 'inv(a)' then
135.
A naming scheme for blocks in Tetris, Pentris, Hextris, etc(math.stackexchange.com)
2 points by crntaylor 14y ago|0 comments
136.
by crntaylor 14y ago
I don't have a voice in my head. When I learnt from reddit discussions that most people experience their inner thoughts as an inner monologue, I was flabbergasted. If I heard a voice, I would think I was going insane. I think that's prett
137.
The Algebra of Algebraic Data Types, Part 3(chris-taylor.github.com)
7 points by crntaylor 14y ago|0 comments
138.
by crntaylor 14y ago
I would be interested to know if HN still uses the same ranking algorithm - I can think of a lot of interesting analyses that could be done!
139.
by crntaylor 14y ago
That's why functional aficionados love to work with higher-order functions!
140.
by crntaylor 14y ago
You know 'some' of language A and 'barely any' of language B, and you thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post comparing them and post it to HN?
141.
by crntaylor 14y ago
It would have been more compelling if the author exhibited two code snippets that do the same thing. In the Clojure example, he adds two numbers together, defines a function that modifies a string by prepending "Hello " and defines a consta
142.
by crntaylor 14y ago
I thought about italicising OCaml as well, but I'd hesitate to call it an object-oriented language. It's more like a functional language that happens to have an object system. Likewise Common Lisp has an object system (CLOS) but I wouldn't
143.
by crntaylor 14y ago
According to a message he posted[0] on the erlang-questions mailing list, since 1967 he has written in Fortran, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk , Erlang, C, C++ , Java , Python , Ruby , Lua , Javascript , Haskell, ML and OCaml. I italicised
144.
The Algebra of Algebraic Data Types, Part 2(chris-taylor.github.com)
8 points by crntaylor 14y ago|0 comments
145.
by crntaylor 14y ago
Does it help if I tell you that types form a semiring[0]? Note that the natural numbers also form a semiring (with 0 as the additive identity and 1 as the multiplicative identity). The natural numbers can be embedded in the semiring of type
146.
by crntaylor 14y ago
Indeed, it's not the whole story. Infinite types and recursive types will come along in part 2! As to the practical advantage - does there have to be one? Isn't the fact that it's intellectually gratifying enough? If you insist, though - I
147.
by crntaylor 14y ago
Yup. I deliberately ignored ⊥ to simplify the presentation (and I make no apologies for doing so!) There are a couple of posts by Dan Piponi where he explores how to count inhabitants of types when you properly account for ⊥: http://b
148.
by crntaylor 14y ago
"This guy who is discovering it by himself" is me (the OP) about a year ago! Derivatives of types to come in part II or III (or just watch the talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YScIPA8RbVE )
149.
by crntaylor 14y ago
This is currently on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5192656
150.
The Algebra of Algebraic Data Types(chris-taylor.github.com)
116 points by crntaylor 14y ago|24 comments

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