ezyang

19 ms·

151.
by ezyang 15y ago
'Imagine a physicist or a mathematician calling a theory "too powerful". It explains too much! You can prove too much with it!' Actually, I can perfectly reasonably imagine a physicist complaining that a theory is too powerful. If a theory
152.
by ezyang 15y ago
GHC 7.2 is a technology preview release, and thus not really appropriate for a Haskell Platform release.
153.
Interactive demonstration of zero-knowledge proofs for graph 3-colorability(web.mit.edu)
2 points by ezyang 15y ago|0 comments
154.
by ezyang 15y ago
This is easy to check in the source. memory_get_usage() calls zend_memory_usage(), which accesses the size field on a global structure mm_heap, which is updated by PHP's memory allocation system (e.g. if you call *_zend_mm_alloc_int)
155.
by ezyang 15y ago
My experience trying to convince my friends to start blogging is that the absolute worst thing to happen to a blogger is for them to spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking their blog setup, and not actually writing. So yes, if you blog
156.
by ezyang 15y ago
Is this about hidden-variable theories? I thought Bell's theorem already nuked those...
157.
by ezyang 15y ago
There are two things here, one is lack of funding, and the other is lack of technical talent working on the project. To a certain degree the former can compensate for the latter, since if you're a company and you believe enough in your lang
158.
Ebury, a sophisticated new SSH trojan(blog.sesse.net)
2 points by ezyang 15y ago|0 comments
159.
by ezyang 15y ago
There's an important difference you are missing here, though, which is that even if you don't know what specific type context a function is being used in, you still have some very precise information about what the function may do. For ex
160.
by ezyang 15y ago
Not really... you're perfectly capable of reading Python code: x = foo() y = bar(x) baz(y) Knowing that any of these functions could throw an exception. How is it any different, from the reader's perspective? (Yes, it's /very/ di
161.
by ezyang 15y ago
OK OK, "Bind and fish" operators. :-)
162.
by ezyang 15y ago
I can't tell if you're trolling. GHC Haskell has first class pre-emptive concurrency support. You don't need Twisted because we give that all to you, out-of-the-box, without needing to do anything fancy.
163.
by ezyang 15y ago
Consider 'chomp', which to a first approximation removes trailing whitespace from a variable. If you don't pass it any variables, it modifies the $_ variable. Better hope you know what's in there. Furthermore, it's behavior depends on what
164.
by ezyang 15y ago
Trust me, it's better. Perl achieves conciseness by using global metavariables (e.g. $_, $/, etc.) which are silently updated by functions and that you have to keep track of. Everything here is explicit; there are just lots of symbols...
165.
How many Twitter users follow Justin Bieber and The Economist? 46,000.(ethanzuckerman.com)
4 points by ezyang 15y ago|1 comments
166.
by ezyang 15y ago
Yeah, my pre-readers jumped on that too.
167.
by ezyang 15y ago
Duck typing means lots of things. I've replaced it with something which I think is more representative of what I was trying to evoke.
168.
by ezyang 15y ago
I think the crux of the issue here is "triviality." I claim that it is nontrivial to embed dynamic types in a statically typed language. Usually this is due to the need to add lots of explicit coercions in order to interface with all of the
169.
by ezyang 15y ago
Disagree. Intuitively, the difference is that an "obviously correct" methodology changes the way you write code, whereas tests don't. Tests have to be run; the mere existence of a test doesn't mean your code is correct. But, crucially, th
170.
by ezyang 15y ago
I think this is missing the point. On a practical level, most of these "obviously correct" methodologies have escape hatches: i.e. FFIs for memory safety. On a theoretical level, by embedding dynamic types in a statically typed language, yo
171.
by ezyang 15y ago
Interestingly enough, I was talking to Quora engineers about the problems they were facing scaling their website, and there was no doubt about it: CPU was one of the big problems. Yes, yes, I know, don't overengineer your systems in the beg
172.
by ezyang 15y ago
Note that this doesn't work if items is a generator.
173.
by ezyang 15y ago
Sorry, that doesn't actually work. ezyang@ezyang:~$ cat Test.hs import System.IO.Unsafe unUnsafePerformIO = return main = do let a = unUnsafePerformIO (unsafePerformIO (putStrLn "boom")) a a ezyang@ez
174.
by ezyang 15y ago
I suspect that certain types of people (including myself, at times), actually want continuous backups being taken on the state of their working copy prior to actually performing a commit. Bugs or not, Git doesn't do very well with unversio
175.
by ezyang 15y ago
The author is misguided about (1) the technical details behind Git (all commits are hashed, so if you cryptographically sign a particular commit tag, it will definitely point to that commit and its attendant history), as well as (2) the obv
176.
by ezyang 15y ago
They're poking fun at the formal methods community, which spends a lot of time doing research in this direction. Percolation of these techniques back to industry has been... less than stellar.
177.
by ezyang 15y ago
FWIW, dropping http landed in Firefox trunk a few weeks ago, so you can expect it to show up fairly soon. Though, it'll probably be toggleable in Firefox :-)
178.
by ezyang 15y ago
That's the problem: the internals of Python are not thread safe. Essentially every library backing up Python is written without thread safety in mind, and this is precisely why the GIL is necessary.
179.
A Taxonomy of Socialization on the Internet(blog.ezyang.com)
2 points by ezyang 15y ago|0 comments
180.
by ezyang 15y ago
That is for all(?) of Y Combinator, whereas you might be interested in new posts with some criterion (keyword, points, etc.)

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