stiff

27 ms·

181.
by stiff 13y ago
This paraphrased quote was quite ambiguous to me, but the conclusion of having preferred Ruby in the end without further commentary makes it seem like the nice syntax is worth the complications, while I would say those "intuitions&quot
182.
by stiff 13y ago
I don't think the ability to write expressions similar to natural language like "2.days.from_now" should be called "expresiveness". Real expresiveness is about what SICP calls "means of abstraction" and &q
183.
by stiff 13y ago
Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. This is so silly it reminds me of the time when XML was praised in computer magazines as the approaching revolution in how everyone, including d
184.
by stiff 13y ago
There is also a very nice documentary on Erdos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA
185.
by stiff 13y ago
I will try to explain. When I came to emacs as a user, a "buffer" seemed just a weird way of saying "tab" without displaying actual tabs. The word choice only started making more sense once I wrote non-trivial amounts of
186.
by stiff 13y ago
In common understanding of emacs, its use of lisp recieves perhaps too much attention, while its overall wonderful architecture is underappreciated. Emacs isnt just an editor with embedded lisp, its more a vm for bootstrapping editors. You
187.
by stiff 13y ago
It is surely dying among those folks who only build one page apps and post them to blogs...
188.
by stiff 13y ago
Yes, it explains clearly a lot of the mathematical concepts that are subjects of some examples in SICP, and it is as rich in insights. Those are my two most favourite books ever, and studying them over a period of few years gave me as much
189.
by stiff 13y ago
I have spent the last 3 or 4 years self-studying mathematics, and what got me interested in it is essays from PG, articles by Yegge, and most of all reading SICP (and then reading "What is mathematics?", which in a lot of ways see
190.
by stiff 13y ago
If you are into things like this, I also recommend: http://www.cargalmathbooks.com/
191.
by stiff 13y ago
This is just a very bad excuse for doing ridiculously shitty systems that stay shitty way after the startup phase. If you at all bother to understand your problem domain, and are not just a monkey at the typewriter, writing down a good doma
192.
by stiff 13y ago
They are definitely not easy to understand, at least for me, they are just easy and pleasant to read, but it's deceptive. Once you go to the exercises and try to work out what Feynman meant really precisely and how it applies you reali
193.
by stiff 13y ago
Would love to read a good interview with the guy, in the spirit of "Coders at work", say, which was really good at this sort of thing. There are some nice bits in this article, but in the end it's a bit like reading a CV.
194.
by stiff 13y ago
If TED isn't successful, how then would success look like for a conference of this kind? I don't think any conference at all is by itself a serious engine of innovation, and the more academic ones are much worse than TED talks, in
195.
by stiff 13y ago
I think it boils down to what you consider an "analogy", is a markov model really an analogy between computer science and biology? I would consider that simply a mathematical concept that finds applications in both Computer Scienc
196.
by stiff 13y ago
Do you understand the difference between a digital code and a computer program? I know information theory and coding theory can be used for studying DNA, when you make the models account for the physical and chemical complications that aris
197.
by stiff 13y ago
The statment "biology is a Turing machine" does not make any sense to me, so I won't discuss whether it is true or not. Just pursue the analogy of DNA as a program for a few steps more and you will see how it goes. If DNA is
198.
by stiff 13y ago
I would not consider every digital code immediately a program, and even treating DNA just as a digital code can be confusing, since there is so much chemistry and physics happening until DNA is expressed as a protein, that you can't ju
199.
by stiff 13y ago
Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear someone comparing DNA to a computer program I fall into pieces. I recommend "Mo
200.
by stiff 13y ago
There are plenty of people who live lives they would never be able to live without medication, and without many of the harmful side-effects being discussed. As far as I know, almost all people taking medications for serious mental illness
201.
by stiff 13y ago
My layman's impression is that the current generation of drugs for serious psychiatric diseases does more to help family and society in general to live with the patient, than to help the patient itself. Our understanding of the brain i
202.
by stiff 13y ago
I think a great many of astronomers were in fact "data scientists". For example, Kepler's life's work in the end amounts to finding the simplest possible model that could plausibly account for Tycho de Brahe's data.
203.
by stiff 13y ago
There are two assumptions here that are untrue and changing them would change the order of magnitude of the answer: - That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else - That every pageview on
204.
by stiff 13y ago
I didn't claim anywhere formal methods are worthless or have zero real world impact. I said that the dream of formalizing all reasoning turned out to be a pipe-dream, and it did, as in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x2F
205.
by stiff 13y ago
Dijkstra advocates creating programs by doing formal transformations of specifications written in mathematical logic, and computers just do boolean algebra on strings of bits, so it's not that Dijkstra advocates formal methods because
206.
by stiff 13y ago
The example proofs he gives in the article have nothing to do with the way he taught to do programming, they are merely illustration of some of his minor points. Later in the article he says: On the other hand, we teach a simple, clean, im
207.
by stiff 13y ago
Do you understand the difference between "formalizing all reasoning" and just formalizing something?
208.
by stiff 13y ago
Futhermore, judging by the discussion, many people here do not understand at all what Dijkstra is saying, using informal everyday interpretations for technical terms. When he says things about being "formal", it isn't just a
209.
by stiff 13y ago
His proposal from this EWD was actually realized, when people trying to reduce mathematics to mathematical logic and purely formal manipulation introduced the "New Math" movement, and it was a disaster. Even mathematicians don&#x2
210.
by stiff 13y ago
I am more than eager to see all the beautiful programs you inferred using predicate transformers and hear about your experiences doing software engineering this way in teams of size more than 1.

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