danarmak

25 ms·

181.
by danarmak 10y ago
Even without full-blown reflection, the problem is that you don't have an "is instance of" operation for unerased types. Which is crucial to case/match as used in Scala and functional programming in general.
182.
by danarmak 10y ago
The soundness of Dotty (or at least of DOT) was formally proven. In the process they also demonstrated exactly what makes Scala 2 unsound. Links: http://dotty.epfl.ch/blog/2016/02/03/essence-of-scala ht
183.
by danarmak 10y ago
Once the enemy is weak enough, the reaction dies down. What indicates a strong enemy? According to the article, among other things, its media presence. In the past, if academia and mainstream media didn't give a platform to a view, it
184.
by danarmak 10y ago
It is a regular process, but when it works normally, it is self-limiting. The idea is that recently it hasn't been successful, the political opposition hasn't been silenced (it merely moved outside the Overton window), and so as t
185.
by danarmak 10y ago
Did you just seriously claim that Muslims invented alcohol ? That no-one brewed beer or made wine before the 7th century?
186.
by danarmak 10y ago
Unless someone gets a design patent on "rounded rectangle without bezels".
187.
by danarmak 10y ago
What do you mean, what's unique about that? Lots of people can read 2000-year-old Latin and Greek inscriptions, too. Biblical Hebrew is probably more similar to modern Hebrew than late-classical Latin is to modern Italian, but it'
188.
by danarmak 10y ago
People keep asking this about programming all the time. There are many movements that aim to teach everyone (kids or adults) to program.
189.
by danarmak 10y ago
Fermi estimates require at least some knowledge of the quantities you're using as inputs. Are the students expected to know these, and tested on that, or are they allowed to state any values they like for the inputs? Do the teachers an
190.
by danarmak 10y ago
Do applications motivate students? Personally I would expect examples like these to de-motivate, since they make clear that the subject does not, in fact, apply to the students' idea of real life. If you teach abstract mathematics an
191.
by danarmak 10y ago
You can publish wireless / Internet data on where the bus is, but keep the driver pressing buttons as the source of the data.
192.
by danarmak 10y ago
That's more expensive because the cost (installation and servicing) scales with the number of bus stops. Also, there are things you want to do that this doesn't cover. For example, announcing the next stop when you pull away from
193.
by danarmak 10y ago
Most naturally dangerous asteroids (near passes) are being publicly tracked, so people would notice you attaching a rocket and nudging it off course. Bringing a whole new asteroid from the belt is feasible (or will be soon), but it takes a
194.
by danarmak 10y ago
Non-top-level names are subject to the rules established by their TLD manager. This is iiS for .se domains, and PIR (the Public Internet Registry) for .org. Each such managing organizations is more or less free to establish its own rules an
195.
by danarmak 10y ago
A railgun still obeys Newton's third law. The gun would need a mass much larger than the bullet, or it's the gun that will fly away from the earth (so it won't be reusable for future bullets). This makes putting the gun into
196.
by danarmak 10y ago
We don't really need a full swarm, at least not until we can use it to compute something useful. Even Mercury, the smallest planet, has enough raw material to build more space stations and power-gathering sats than we know what to do
197.
by danarmak 10y ago
> The only copy being made by the user is the transient "copy" in memory. I'm not talking about that. The user is making a permanent copy on disk when downloading. IIUC this has been ruled by various courts to require a co
198.
by danarmak 10y ago
Yes, of course, some things are illegal and cannot be agreed to in contracts. I'm not saying contracts should be sacred. I'm saying the contract's meaning should be as clear as possible so courts will agree the license mea
199.
by danarmak 10y ago
> None of those licenses are for the user of the software Of course licenses are for the user! Without a license, copyright law forbids you from downloading and running an application, let alone copying it to your other PC or emailing a
200.
by danarmak 10y ago
"Clicking means agreement" at least makes sense, even if it might not be enough to satisfy contract law in some countries. "Keeping doing what you were doing anyway and ignoring me means agreement" is clearly nonsense. I
201.
by danarmak 10y ago
> No services really requires data transmission. Some services do. For instance, Waze builds live traffic maps because all its users upload their locations / speed / etc. > It's just the owners have decided to run it th
202.
by danarmak 10y ago
The GPLv2 contains 2400 words. The AGPLv3 contains 5090 words. They aren't enough for casual non-technical users to read and grok. And they can't be greatly simplified without changing their meaning. Licenses are long and complex
203.
by danarmak 10y ago
That's interesting, but from the copy on the page it seems to target micropayments for reading content published on websites. Which is an important and hard problem. On the other hand, paying a dollar a month to use a service like emai
204.
by danarmak 10y ago
> Why? What if the "desired purpose" (desired by the company) is illegal? My comment was badly worded. What I meant was that, if the license's meaning was disputed in court, the court should agree that it meant what the co
205.
by danarmak 10y ago
I don't think this is very useful in most cases. Suppose a service requires data transmission to operate, either intrinsically, or it just chooses to require it. It displays a checkbox, unchecked by default, and unless the user checks
206.
by danarmak 10y ago
How? If the TOS text is displayed, and the user clicks OK, how can the service provider make sure the user actually read it, let alone understood it correctly? Should the user be required to correctly answer some quiz questions about the TO
207.
by danarmak 10y ago
This is a real problem. What's the alternative? The TOS does need to express the desired purpose and to hold up in court if required. Some licenses are much simpler than others, but some are necessarily complex. The GPL is much shorter
208.
by danarmak 10y ago
I would gladly pay for every single service I use - email, messaging, social networks, various sites - in exchange for no advertising and no user data collection.
209.
by danarmak 10y ago
Users already opt into using a service like WhatsApp. They are presented with TOS on first use / account creation. Whatsapp changed their TOS and presented the new TOS to existing users when they first opened the app after the change.
210.
by danarmak 10y ago
I never said that tech is different from other fields. If I implied that, it was unintentional. Quoting my reply to you from a different comment: > Finally, I don't know how much the US tech industry is different. I have a feeling i

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