mbrock

88 ms·

871.
by mbrock 9y ago
Some combination of: 1. A tinkering mentality a la DIY as educational institutions fail to keep up with accelerating progress; as developing world grows more important on the world stage; and as kids in the affluent world get bored. 2. Mach
872.
by mbrock 9y ago
A common strategy for implementing compilers for continuation-enabled languages is transforming code into "continuation-passing style" (CPS). That means, basically, converting it into total "callback hell", so that funct
873.
by mbrock 9y ago
Functional programming is also a family resemblance thing: you can't necessarily give a strict definition, any more than you can define "blues music". I'd say functional programming is a tradition that draws from sources
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by mbrock 9y ago
That sounds very difficult. How would you make such a smart contract?
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by mbrock 9y ago
The Bongo media player for GNU Emacs works very well with a well ordered file hierarchy. It uses an external backend for playback (mpg321, mplayer, VLC, etc). It also has a fun feature: a playback item can be an "action", such as
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by mbrock 9y ago
How so?
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by mbrock 9y ago
Also, recursive definitions using "rec" which become nasty in JavaScript.
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by mbrock 9y ago
I tend to write JavaScript that looks a bit like Nix... but in general, the imperative constructs aren't suitable to the lazy evaluation strategy of Nix.
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by mbrock 9y ago
I dig Guix, but Lisp is also one of the most commonly reviled syntaxes, so it's hard to say it's clearly better, or that Nix would enjoy more adoption with S-expressions.
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by mbrock 9y ago
I love the Nix language and I generally distrust aesthetic feelings about programming languages. Neither SML nor Haskell are optimized for expressing deeply nested records with many string literals, for example. The multiline interpolated s
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by mbrock 9y ago
In Haskell, such a function can definitely blow up. > :t read read :: Read a => String -> a > read "10" :: Int 10 > read "x" :: Int *** Exception: Prelude.read: no parse Haskel
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by mbrock 9y ago
Indoors vs outdoors; focusing vs relaxing; earning vs spending; customers vs family; profit vs nonprofit; etc.
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by mbrock 9y ago
Duh, haven't you read "Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey" by Joshi, Bhattacharyya and Carman? https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03426
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by mbrock 9y ago
I'm a resident in a "neighborhood activist collective" and I made a self-hosted web site for the house. Now it's expanding into a web app that's a tool for the organization (planning, etc). It's also being set
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by mbrock 9y ago
WebAssembly in itself is not an enemy of freedom, as even Richard Stallman would agree. The bigger problem, which is also a problem with web scripts in general, is that browsers and script distributors generally make no effort to inform use
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by mbrock 9y ago
I think there's a misunderstanding. Russ Roberts is saying in that sentence you quoted, basically, "USD and EUR can be produced in huge amounts just because the monetary authorities want to". Are you sure you think he's
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by mbrock 9y ago
Look at steemit.com (steem.io) for a glimpse of the application of blockchain to social media. Basically: the blockchain's ability to represent value turns upvotes into microdonations. Suddenly writers of popular content are rewarded i
888.
by mbrock 9y ago
Monetary policy in the sense of the Fed can easily be implemented in cryptocurrency; an Ethereum token can be trivially minted and burned according to its owner's wishes. Decentralized and semi-autonomous monetary policy is an emerging
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by mbrock 9y ago
Russ Roberts, the host of EconTalk and economics professor, also doesn't think that Bitcoin's fixed supply would lead to destructive deflation. > Isn’t a fixed supply of money dangerous? > It’s certainly different. “Elaborat
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by mbrock 9y ago
What exactly do you mean by "Turing complete" and why do you believe this property to be dangerous?
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by mbrock 9y ago
The top comment in this thread is very informative: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1rhtv1/eli5... The "pump & dump" dynamic is extremely important in cryptotrading.
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by mbrock 9y ago
"Performance" in the sense of the "performance" of a stock is pretty well established terminology, but yeah, that just highlights how these currencies are highly speculative assets. It's definitely possible to excha
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by mbrock 9y ago
It's very easy to make a "whitepaper" about solving some important problem using Ethereum/Web3/IPFS with whatever interesting kinds of voting schemes and incentives. Whitepapers of all kinds are basically designed t
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by mbrock 9y ago
Kind of, except that ETC itself has also done a hard fork to do major protocol changes, so it's not exactly right to call it the "original, unforked chain." The original Ethereum Homestead blockchain was designed to demand at
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by mbrock 9y ago
World computer is a fairly dumbed down way to describe it. Accurate descriptions need more jargon: for example, you could call it a peer-to-peer settlement network with autonomous business logic, or something like that. Here's what I w
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by mbrock 9y ago
It seems that a better solution is to guarantee that each step of such an unbounded loop is bounded, and clearly distinguish these types of processes. For example, a kernel's scheduler should run indefinitely, but each scheduling step
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by mbrock 9y ago
It's the name for the smallest unit of ETH value.
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by mbrock 9y ago
From one of Vincent's letters to Theo: “Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. […
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by mbrock 9y ago
Here's a quote from your page: "There is nothing that is that important. As long as you believe this or that is so important, you are caught up in playing a game." Here's a quote from the article that you didn't rea
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by mbrock 9y ago
I don't know about making it the default, because there are tradeoffs with regard to the cache invalidation. That said, offline-friendly app caching with Service Workers is extremely useful, and changed the way I see and make web apps.

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