rwallace

44 ms·

451.
by rwallace 10y ago
> You sure sound like you're quoting Trump almost verbatim. I'm making true statements. If Trump or whoever agrees with them, good for him. If he doesn't, too bad. I'm not going to start supporting falsehoods just bec
452.
by rwallace 10y ago
As it happens, I'm not on either 'side' - not American, and if I were, I'd be voting Libertarian, not Republican or Democrat. My claim is that, just as people shouldn't have believed Republicans when they invented s
453.
by rwallace 10y ago
Given the absence of evidence that it was the Russians, this looks like the Iraqi WMDs all over again. However, suppose for the sake of argument it was indeed the Russian government. One thing nobody seems to be pointing out is this: if the
454.
by rwallace 10y ago
What ranking of language popularity do you think is more accurate than Tiobe?
455.
by rwallace 10y ago
Such theories can easily be tested with a simple thought experiment: suppose there were a similar bug at the other end of the pipeline, in the subscribe feature. How long would it take for the bug to be fixed?
456.
by rwallace 10y ago
Try the Tiger Book instead (a.k.a. 'Modern compiler implementation in C', or there are Java or ML versions if those are more to your taste). It has a better balance: more to the point treatment of lexing and parsing, leaving more
457.
by rwallace 10y ago
The intended goal is that the empty bottles be returned, and that goal is being achieved. It doesn't matter whether it gets done by the people who used the bottles or by someone else.
458.
by rwallace 10y ago
If a mugger is caught, I'm very much in favor of giving him a hefty prison sentence. However, if you want a sustained decline in the violent crime rate in a whole society, law enforcement is only part of the picture. You absolutely do
459.
by rwallace 10y ago
Okay, but then it's important to understand your problem is not actually a technical one of bugs in the software, it's a political problem of your boss being a sadistic bully willing and able to ruin your life, plus a financial pr
460.
by rwallace 10y ago
All sorts of things are possible from this post as from any other that one isn't in a position to personally verify. It's possible that the entire post was created by Mossad as an experiment in memetic warfare; not that that'
461.
by rwallace 10y ago
One more thing: always remember that it is not your job to protect your employer from the consequences of their bad decisions. It is their job to give you incentives that align with their own interests. If your employer is putting pressure
462.
by rwallace 10y ago
> This isn’t an impostor syndrome. Sure it is. Impostor syndrome is defined as the state of affairs where your emotional assessment of your competence is lower than your actual competence. The definition does not depend on which aspect o
463.
by rwallace 10y ago
Or it might not. It might make the populace more isolated, bitter and paranoid, more likely to stand by the leader against the perceived evil of the rest of the world. Decades of sanctions against Cuba and North Korea just entrenched the re
464.
by rwallace 10y ago
If the proposed solution is to scatter a zillion tons of lead around the place, I suggest we go back to burning coal instead. It would be less environmentally damaging.
465.
by rwallace 10y ago
If handoffs were really the reason, a few seconds thought suggests ways to deal with that. For example, assign fewer patients per doctor, and let the doctor grab short bursts of sleep in between seeing patients. Yet somehow, I feel confiden
466.
by rwallace 10y ago
Nature uses much less power in a much more compact package because it took the path of inventing molecular nanotechnology. I agree, we should do that too! But in the meantime, the neural networks we build are pretty good for what they do an
467.
by rwallace 10y ago
It's a political philosophy sometimes called 'realpolitik' that basically says never mind morality, just do what is in the interests of your own country. It has a certain emotional appeal, but when you take a cold and practic
468.
by rwallace 10y ago
Imperative unhygienic macros are what Common Lisp has, right? So you're pretty much guaranteed you'll be able to do whatever you want to do, the tradeoff being that you are responsible for watching out for unwanted name capture?
469.
by rwallace 10y ago
Sorry, nope: back in my student days, I tried that combination on more than one occasion and greatly enjoyed it!
470.
by rwallace 10y ago
Yep. But even if we could build a particle accelerator capable of reaching GUT energy level, it wouldn't spawn new universes, would it?
471.
by rwallace 10y ago
I've always been curious about that as well. Suppose you took a small region of the universe and reheated it to be unification temperature today, presumably you would restore the symmetry, but presumably when you let it cool down, the
472.
by rwallace 10y ago
I agree with your points 1 and 2. Not sure what you mean by your last paragraph, though. Train who to do what? Old people to stop expecting to have money after retiring? Managers to stop letting their monkey brains harm their company's
473.
by rwallace 10y ago
What do you see as the most important differences (or, what are the main kinds of macros for which syntax-rules is inadequate)?
474.
by rwallace 10y ago
I have met people who were already earning a paycheck as professional C programmers, who didn't fully grasp what it meant to return a value from a function. If I were teaching beginners these days, I would do what SICP does and tackle
475.
by rwallace 10y ago
The impression I have of pilot wave theories is that when you look closely at them, the pilot waves are doing basically all the work with the particles just along for the ride. At that point it's tempting to delete the particles and se
476.
by rwallace 10y ago
Leah McGrath Goodman, I could almost swear I've seen that name before somewhere. Google... oh yeah, she was the one who did that story about that Japanese-American guy being the inventor of Bitcoin, the one that turned out to be a rath
477.
by rwallace 10y ago
Irishman here. I think you've heard correctly. Over here, everyone either has or knows someone who has some kind of mental health problem, in the same way that everyone either has or knows someone who has some kind of autoimmune diseas
478.
by rwallace 10y ago
I saw that movie around the same age, back in the day. Good for your biology teacher! There's a really worrying trend in recent years of politicians and the media carrying on like they'd stopped being scared of nuclear war. How t
479.
by rwallace 10y ago
Many programmers don't need to deal with Unicode simply because they aren't dealing with natural language text in the first place. Programs that need to support Unicode input are precisely the ones that have natural language text
480.
by rwallace 10y ago
I don't think there is a factual disagreement here, just a terminology issue. Mathematical jargon is not quite the same language as plain English. In the former, 'solved' by default means you have found the mathematically per

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