pacala

9 ms·

61.
by pacala 6y ago
There are 4 mainstream programming styles: * Data Oriented Programming. There is data, and there are functions operating on the data. * Functional Programming. Variant of DOP, with a strong emphasis on purism and abstract algebra concepts.
62.
by pacala 6y ago
Make is a 44 year old implementation of the DAG model. It is not the only possible one, and it has plenty of flaws. At least in principle, there is room for a better implementation of the DAG model, and even different implementations tailor
63.
by pacala 6y ago
> we learned that covid may cause permament damages on patients It stands to reason that a disease that outright kills 0.1-1% of the people infected also gets a fraction of people near death, which means it damages them hard enough that
64.
by pacala 6y ago
The method itself, smashing ever more energetic particles into each other, makes it highly unlikely that any discovery will be applicable to human sized energy regimens.
65.
by pacala 6y ago
If the countries you are referring to are South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand, it may be that the rest of us have very little chance to follow suit. We are too interconnected and too diverse to counteract the exponential nature of the threa
66.
by pacala 6y ago
I've heard 'solar system size' and even 'galaxy size'. Maybe we should take a step back and realize that funding for high energy physics is rooted in the Cold War's nuclear arm's race. We already have nucl
67.
by pacala 6y ago
The 'economy' is not some abstract entity. It is us, the people, going about our business every day. A hard lockdown is destroying all of the economy. No accounting tricks can mask that. We should not play accounting tricks to beg
68.
by pacala 6y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Wrt CT scans, the frustration is that we don't know the kind of selection biases led to the respective numbers. It's a couple of studies over non-random populations. 100 cases out of 3,711 passe
69.
by pacala 6y ago
China is a big place. Imagine any possible negative health complications, we can safely assume that at least one person in China has developed it. The question is, what fraction of people have developed these complications? We don't
70.
by pacala 6y ago
I am worried about this disease. I am perhaps even more worried that I can't calibrate how worried I am supposed to be. Case in point 'There will be hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, possibly more.' Taking 'hund
71.
by pacala 6y ago
There is little hope that one day we could speak about the willful blindspots on both sides of such debates. Global warming is a major crisis with a hard tradeoff between two deeply negative outcomes: poverty now vs. climate disaster in the
72.
by pacala 6y ago
Of course there is some social aspect to CS. That being said, comparatively, the interaction loop is waaay more abstract. Just walk into a medical practice vs a software engineering office. As a medical professional, you get to interact f
73.
by pacala 6y ago
That is an interesting question. How are law and medicine different than CS career-wise? A couple additional thoughts, not intended to be exhaustive: * CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hou
74.
by pacala 6y ago
That is a fair criticism. The tone is off-putting. Partly because of the tone, I considered NKS a load of pointless drivel for 20 years. Yes, absolutely, he didn't invented graph automata. But he's the one willing to propose graph
75.
by pacala 6y ago
This is highly misleading for a disease that can exponentially explode from a handful of cases to a national emergency within a span of a few weeks.
76.
by pacala 6y ago
If we could just freeze time, then we'd have perfect safety.
77.
by pacala 6y ago
Stephen's work is intriguing. He wants a model to simulate space, time, matter and energy. Some desirable properties of such a system, from a layman perspective: 1. The model must be fundamentally simple. 2. The model must be able to p
78.
by pacala 6y ago
Everything you say is correct. Your acid test is great. And yet, we agree that the machine is stuck. 'Does your startup implement every single feature of Windows / Excel / Postgres / AWS and then some? No? Well, then g
79.
by pacala 6y ago
That's a very poor review. Given how long the incubation period is, plus the presence of asymptomatic carriers, it is impossible for the average person to accurately attribute the infection to a specific business.
80.
by pacala 6y ago
Why not? Assuming NYT has free pages and I want to access one of them, what do they need a cookie for?
81.
by pacala 6y ago
Exactly right. Building cowboy software with intense schedule pressure and best practices corner cutting it's likely to give you both late releases and bug backlog long enough to circle Earth three times. There will be more bugs, and b
82.
by pacala 6y ago
As other people mentioned, this is shortsighted. What you want to target is a balance between exploitation, 'bring value to the business', and process improvement, 'how do we simplify our processes to make it simpler to bring
83.
by pacala 6y ago
It doesn't need to have a perfect metaphor for all possible cases, just something you can picture in an instant: 'behaves like a concating variable length box sequences'. It's a mnemonic / learning aid, not a formal
84.
by pacala 6y ago
concat?
85.
by pacala 6y ago
I like the way you frame CT. Never got too deep down this rabbit hole, the terminology is just too atrocius. I wonder though how useful it is in practice. It is easier for me to take a formula and generalize it among one dimension at a time
86.
by pacala 6y ago
Most of the jargon denotes straightforward definitions. Pick the top-most frequent three terms, e.g. monad, monoid, applicative, write down the definition + a small example on a card, lather rinse repeat a few times and you're golden.
87.
by pacala 6y ago
I'm on record in this very comment section of pointing out that the SARS-CoV-2 transmission paths is likely via a non-bat species traveling between Yunnan and Wuhan. That doesn't mean that WIV gets a cart blanche or that asking fo
88.
by pacala 6y ago
The bats from which RaTG13, the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated, live in a cave in Yunnan, 1000 miles from Wuhan. To the best of my knowledge, they do not naturally occur anywhere near Wuhan. Pick your own North American animal
89.
by pacala 6y ago
Correct. The point is that the peasant mass center, so to speak, is today more distant that it's ever been.
90.
by pacala 6y ago
Do you have a source for how many research labs in China were actively working on bat coronaviruses? From what I can garner in the Western press, WIV is their #1 such research lab. If a new flu virus, quite more virulent that the usual flu,

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