edmccard

32 ms·

271.
by edmccard 13y ago
The one that made monads finally 'click' for me was "What the hell are Monads", from 1999: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~antoy/Courses/TPFLP/lectures/MONADS...
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by edmccard 13y ago
I think they are claiming that they are not using deterministic encrpytion[1], which can be used to allow searches of encrypted data, not that their software is "non-deterministic". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_encryption
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by edmccard 14y ago
Sure. Just find two billiard balls that are indistinguishable unless God exists. Give them to your Bible-blind friend, and try to guess whether he switches them behind his back or not.
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by edmccard 14y ago
>In fact, copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on my right to view their work. I don't think there's such a thing as a "right" to view someone's work, unless it's granted by the copyright holder. (Where else would you get such a
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by edmccard 14y ago
OK. It's probably more common in folklore than in real life, but I was thinking of the situation where mass production was the hard part, for example, where a lone inventor comes up with a process or design, but does not publicly disclose i
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by edmccard 14y ago
>Copyright solves the incentive problem when "writing masses of software" is the hard part. That seems backward to me--when you've already figured out what to make, and the hard part is producing mass quantities of it--isn't that what p
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by edmccard 14y ago
>Then people just shouldn't say what's on their minds? Well, there's "shouldn't because someone said so" and "shouldn't because it's counterproductive." So maybe not? >Suppressing opinions doesn't get rid of them Refraining from exp
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by edmccard 14y ago
When the whole trend of "irony has only one meaning" start? Every dictionary I've looked at includes something like "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result" (I've got an old Webster's
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by edmccard 14y ago
>So the idea is to create special events for women in tech so that they are not special any more? In the sense that once there are more women in tech, being a woman in tech will be normal, instead of noteworthy or "special". >Gender
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by edmccard 14y ago
>It refocuses the issue to gender and suggests you're special in tech... I think one of the purposes of these kinds of separate events is to make it so that women in tech are not "special". >I think this devalues the accomplishments
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by edmccard 14y ago
>Each generation of CS pioneers includes a few more women with passion and intellect like Hopper or Bryon that cannot be ignored, So your message to, say, young women who are facing barriers to success in CS is "Be one of the most excep
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by edmccard 14y ago
Do you think they will result in fewer women in CS? Or is it some other kind of harm?
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by edmccard 14y ago
Those definitions of rationality are useful _because_ they are narrow. If you redefine "rational" to mean "how the brain operates", you might be able to stop using the word "irrational", but...all the phenomena that previously fell into the
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by edmccard 14y ago
No, it's just the more reasonable. Most likely it's not any kind of artifact, but we have a lot more evidence for the existence of man-made spacecraft than we do for alien spacecraft, and Mars is a lot closer to Earth than it is to anywhere
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by edmccard 14y ago
Yeah, that's why I mentioned that headrests didn't become common until the late Sixties. My overall point was that maybe cars were _not_ the cause of the hat-wearing decline.
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by edmccard 14y ago
For brimmed hats, the problem in cars (at least in my experience) is not crown-to-roof clearance, but the fact that the brim hits the headrest, forcing you to lean forward uncomfortably (or to squish the brim). Looking through car advertise
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by edmccard 14y ago
There is little difference between "structural typing" in go, where function signatures reference named and separately defined interfaces, and "static duck-typing" in F#, where function signatures using constraints effectively define an ano
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by edmccard 14y ago
I'm no expert either, but I was under the impression that the paleomagnetic record is pretty good for at least the last thousand years. So a magnetic variation which could cause a 20-times-normal variation in the production of carbon-14 (fr
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by edmccard 14y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "resolution"; the site doesn't claim that a browser fingerprint is unique among all instances of all browser software ever run, just that (for example, to quote from my test results) "Your browser fingerprint a
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by edmccard 14y ago
>I haven't done the math, but I have a feeling it just keeps dividing... Why would it have to use division, or for that matter, any kind of math at all? I imagine that as each new visitor is recorded, they simply count how many other vi
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by edmccard 14y ago
>What more do you need? Well, when you've got a large list of things stored on a computer, and you want them displayed in a certain order, automatic sorting (after you assign a priority) is a lot more useful than having to rearrange the