joppy

42 ms·

391.
by joppy 8y ago
Isn’t a DSL a separate language? Libraries sometimes cannot do what new languages can, or can only mimic it in a very very cumbersome way, I think this is why the author advocates for separate languages, rather than libraries. The other thi
392.
by joppy 8y ago
Something I see a lot is bright students taking easy courses for the marks. And these students are not lazy, don’t have many other time commitments, are generally very pleasant and engaging to talk to, and ace the material. But when I sugge
393.
by joppy 8y ago
I think this is partly the fault of how electorates work. Imagine an election where every electorate votes 30% party A, and the remaining 70% of the vote split somehow between parties B and C. Then you get only members of parties B and C in
394.
by joppy 8y ago
Using unsigned indexes would be fine if the program automatically throws an error on wrapping. Otherwise, it’s an accident waiting to happen, since you have to code all of your arithmetic keeping in mind the fact that the numbers are trying
395.
by joppy 8y ago
I do know how to manually cast, although in my case I'm usually casting to Integer. I was arguing that a cast from Num to Float, Double, Int etc is a lossy operation, and breaks the semantics of arithmetic, and so should not be done
396.
by joppy 8y ago
I think that the rationale for using int for array indices and lengths and so on is to avoid shooting yourself in the foot with wrap-around arithmetic (again, my thesis being that when 99% of people use integers, they expect them to behave
397.
by joppy 8y ago
This is a great system for tying in new number types with existing ones, but the lack of explicitness about casting exact types (Integer, Rational) to inexact types (Int, Float) has led to many bugs and confusions for me. Coupled with the f
398.
by joppy 8y ago
I think the question though is that if “int” were an actual integer, would you still default to using int32/int64, and for what reason? There are valid uses for fixed-width types, but beyond domain-specific number crunching (crypto, im
399.
by joppy 8y ago
Arrays, slices, hashtables, and channels are not supported natively by the processor, but Go still has them as primitives. Why not also add a number type which behaves in a sane, easy-to-understand, useful way?
400.
by joppy 8y ago
I’m hoping that https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19623 will come through, and we’ll get a native “true integer” type (and hopefully a rational one as well, though maybe this is pushing it a bit). This is r
401.
by joppy 8y ago
It’s not so surprising, since once you have a compass, straightedge, and a line segment you call “unit length”, you can construct all of the integer valued points in the plane.
402.
by joppy 8y ago
The number of citations is not a measure of quality (does anyone really think so?). Having 17,000 citations means that in 17,000 papers, people found some reason to cite that work, meaning that it had a massive overall impact . Terrible pa
403.
by joppy 8y ago
I feel like this is the sweet spot for the editor to do some of the heavy lifting, for example being able to type "\alpha" and have the editor automatically transform it into the symbol α. I write a lot of LaTeX, and I would absol
404.
by joppy 8y ago
Don't partial commits run the big risk of commiting code that may not work, since the partial commit on your own computer will be tested against your working tree, wheras after it's committed it run with a different view of the fi
405.
by joppy 8y ago
So you spend a long time considering a change, and then you care about a 15 second difference in the time it takes to apply that change?
406.
by joppy 8y ago
It’s a good observation, and the slug(slug(x)) = slug(x) property means that if you have an x and you’re not sure it’s a slug, it’s always ok to slug it to be sure it is. This property can be really handy in building robust systems, where y
407.
by joppy 8y ago
Why post a link which is not clickable?
408.
by joppy 8y ago
The “gender pay gap” absolutely does exist, look up any results from any census ever. Even the myriad ways of “explaining it away” which you can find on the Wikipedia page [1] cannot fully account for the gap (regardless of whether these ex
409.
by joppy 8y ago
None, because a two-dimensional bar graph can’t trap any water? This is completely irrelevant to the article being discussed.
410.
by joppy 8y ago
PhD by publication is usually an (unofficial, unadvertised) option in many UK/Australian universities. If you published four or five good papers, that would more than fulfil the requirements for the degree (if the university technicall
411.
by joppy 8y ago
Does this have anything to do with constructive mathematics though? I still don’t see the connection.
412.
by joppy 8y ago
It’s called Beamer, which is a LaTeX template/package which generates a PDF slideshow rather than an academic-looking paper.
413.
by joppy 8y ago
“Something to do with adjoints” is hopelessly vague, and what do you mean by transitive? In regular mathematics there can be nonzero numbers whose square is zero (for example, the “dual numbers”). But I don’t see how this has anything to do
414.
by joppy 8y ago
How is constructive mathematics closer to Lie groups than regular mathematics? From what I read in that presentation, a bunch of basic assumptions in calculus (such as the intermediate value theorem) no longer hold, and the theory of Lie gr
415.
by joppy 8y ago
The point of university is to learn, not to already know the course content by the time you get there. Plenty of high-school students may not have taken any computer science subjects during school, but may wish to get a degree in computer s
416.
by joppy 8y ago
I think some of the third option, and also it’s fun to go to the trouble of digging out a lesser known word from the depths of your dictionary/brain to show just how much you appreciate something.
417.
by joppy 8y ago
A lot of open problems in mathematics boil down to trying to analyse "matrices of a specific form" - I think while this viewpoint is important to recognise (essentially: quaternions are a finite-dimensional real associative algebr
418.
by joppy 8y ago
Yes, and the proof only uses linear algebra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frobenius_theorem_(real_divisi...
419.
by joppy 8y ago
The non-commutativity of rotations can also be seen directly: rotating something 90 degrees about the x then the y axis is not the same as the y then the x.
420.
by joppy 8y ago
The fact that the quaternions “work” (are a finite-dimensional real vector space with an associative real-bilinear multiplication, and a division operation) is quite special. In fact there are only three objects satisfying this criteria: th

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