mafribe

63 ms·

541.
by mafribe 10y ago
From what I understood, Babbage invented his computers himself. Lovelace was helpful to him because of her high-society connection. He was hoping to popularise his work and get more funding.
542.
by mafribe 10y ago
Of course science evolves in small increments. The point of my original post was to be an antidote to the extreme hyperbole of "3 women who radically ...", and to set the recored straight.
543.
by mafribe 10y ago
Grace Hopper didn't invent the compiler in the sense that we understand the term now (a semantics preserving translation from a source language to a target language). What her team did, was to produce a linker, the A-0_System. It is al
544.
by mafribe 11y ago
the poverty line as the 40th percentile of income [...] was absurd. It's best understood not as a honest attempt at understanding poverty, but as a political manoeuvre. In the past (19th century and before), the socialist&
545.
by mafribe 11y ago
The article is informal about intelligence and then comes up with a couple of ad-hoc examples where computers beat humans. It's unclear that they have much to do with intelligence. The following definition of the term has been propose
546.
by mafribe 11y ago
That wouldn't make any sense if the only reason was money. Yes, it does. Fewer Swiss would work for tech wages, because they can more easily get jobs in banking, finance, law, medical that pay better and/or are easi
547.
by mafribe 11y ago
Agreed. The rise of China can be seen in other markets too, e.g. luxury car makers increasingly factor-in Chinese taste.
548.
by mafribe 11y ago
I'd say that scientific fields being "opinion based" or forming around "mutually exclusive schools of thought" is a reaction to "the sheer dimensionality of the problem combined with the difficulty of precise m
549.
by mafribe 11y ago
wanting to emulate the music that they like. Yes, but the reason they like this music, is (to a substantial degree) because others (in their relevant peer group) like that music. Ultimately a lot of people like a specific form of m
550.
by mafribe 11y ago
There are plenty of independent bands singing in local languages. Few of them make it global. More imporant, humans are herd animals and often (not always) emulate others, especially others that have had success. If you've grown up in
551.
by mafribe 11y ago
why do British singers (at least some of them) sing in American accent? To increase the probability of appealing to customers in the (currently) largest and most profitable market. Moreover, singing with a US accent does not enda
552.
by mafribe 11y ago
This puzzles me to no end. The answer is economics. When you want to sell a product, it makes sense to fine-tune it as much as possible to the largest, most profitable market, and then re-use the product infrastructure (e.g. produc
553.
by mafribe 11y ago
PhDs in the UK are different from US PhDs. At least in CS, a US PhD in computer science is probably more like a UK PhD + a postdoc. That means the time-investment for a UK dissertation is lower.
554.
by mafribe 11y ago
Yes, you are right. Sorry. Alas, I can't edit my original message any more.
555.
by mafribe 11y ago
I don't know. The population of Arabia is probably best placed to discuss this. (Note that calling it "Saudi Arabia" implicitly accepts the rule of the House of Saud.) Understanding the mechanisms the House of Saud uses to st
556.
by mafribe 11y ago
I agree with you in many ways, and have been critical of military means that were marketed as "bringing democracy". Irak, Libya, and Syria come to mind as terrifying recent examples. Incidentally the House of Saud supported the mi
557.
by mafribe 11y ago
Mandela: Why should we have apartheid, and not equality? eric001: That is a very, very naive question tho, don't you think?
558.
by mafribe 11y ago
PR fluff piece. He's working 16 hours a day to make the world a better place? Gosh, what a saint ... I wonder how much the Saudi-Arabia's PR agency had to pay to get it into a mainstream publication. See also: http://ww
559.
by mafribe 11y ago
Are you talking about DFA on straight Python? In principle this is possible, but given the complex semantics of language terms, this will be quite complex. Typically DFA is run on intermediate code in the optimising part of a compiler. Inte
560.
by mafribe 11y ago
Vince Cerf is working on interstellar communication: http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/vint-cerf-qa-on-interstell...
561.
by mafribe 11y ago
There are quite a few formalisations of category theory for proof assistants. For a relatively recent overview, see: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/152497/formalizations-of-...
562.
by mafribe 11y ago
This strikes my as a parochial viewpoint of a bunch of people riding their first-world privilege. I suggest that you, your co-workers, hacker colleagues, and friends who are transgender spend some time in Saudi-Arabia or on ISIS-controlled
563.
by mafribe 11y ago
I agree. The fact that Scala is proper multi-paradigm, and has a first-class functional sublanguage as well as a first-class imperative sublanguage is part of its great appeal. I have mentored quite a few people over the last couple of year
564.
by mafribe 11y ago
Sure, we can always translate away state and pass it explicitly. Some people find some algorithms can be more naturally expressed using state. (And "some people" is a polite way of saying "alot".) The question of whether
565.
by mafribe 11y ago
it's precisely when values change over time that you want immutability most. Values always change over time, otherwise you could replace variables by constants. I suggest that immutability is most useful for data that
566.
by mafribe 11y ago
The US upper class tends to be liberal on social issues (e.g. gay marriage), but hawkish on foreign policy, especially as regards the middle east. Media content aligns with the political views of media owners. You can see this clearly at wo
567.
by mafribe 11y ago
Well-developed proof assistants like Coq and Isabelle/HOL are the current pinnacle in scientific rigour. But soundness of a foundational system is always a worry and will always remain so. By Goedel's 2nd incompleteness theorem, y
568.
by mafribe 11y ago
HOL is a classical rather than constructive logic. Moreover, there is less concern about soundness of the logic.
569.
by mafribe 11y ago
> mimic the actual whiteboard What do you currently use? I'm looking for a smooth way to do the same thing.
570.
by mafribe 11y ago
> No-one else gets a choice. Everybody gets the same choices, or can you point me towards a mechanism that prevents e.g. Chinese or Indians form moving? The difference is narrative : It's currently acceptable to blame whitey. Criti

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