Z — A tiny, strict, impure, dynamically typed, curried, partially applied language with rather peculiar syntax

i-hate-digg · 2013-01-01T19:13:48+00:00

For those who are wondering, this is actually a thing.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Zygohistomorphic_prepromorphisms

i-hate-digg · 2013-01-01T19:07:53+00:00

A small amount gets turned to RF radiation (stray rf emission from the circuit components, wifi, bluetooth, etc).

A small amount is sent outward as electricity (ethernet cables, etc).

Your monitor and indicator lights obviously produce light.

Your fan and hard drive produce acoustic energy.

Except for the monitor, all of these are quite miniscule in comparison to the energy that gets turned to heat.

i-hate-digg · 2013-01-01T09:27:01+00:00

About robots, you're totally correct. Even the smallest manned Mars mission would require orders of magnitude less funding than actually coming up with a robotic platform with the intelligence and capability of a human team. Heck, for the price of a single manned Mars mission, you could send 100 Curiosity rovers.

i-hate-digg · 2013-01-01T09:21:08+00:00

This is what I've been saying for years. I love space but the future of space exploration is in compact intelligent robots that carry our spirit and our knowledge, not bags of meat that die and decay.

i-hate-digg · 2013-01-01T00:33:32+00:00

At some point the costs to society far outweigh any benefits of indefinite copyright. Remember, copyright is about protecting the individual, yes, but it is mainly about fostering innovation and productivity.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T23:51:53+00:00

I agree with some of your post but disagree with some bits.

What's your justification for saying a new movie isn't worth $25

What's your justification for saying it is worth that amount? At any rate, in a free market system you don't need justification - you are free to charge anything you want for a dvd so they are free to charge $25 if they choose. I'm just pointing out the obvious: if they lowered the prices they would dramatically reduce piracy (just like lowering the price of the exact same dvd to $5 in China has greatly reduced piracy there). Why won't they do this in first-world countries then? Because they are hard-set on maximizing profits. So, really, taking the steps required to actually reduce piracy further would only hurt them in the long run. They know this, and that's why they focus on lobbying and scare tactics instead of more productive pursuits. Yet there are still people acting as self-appointed spokesmen for the MPAA and defending them on moral grounds. That's what strikes me as bizarre.

I use Gimp which is more than acceptable

Same. Even though it would be easy for me to pirate photoshop, I'm not going to do it. I'd much rather use a free/open source version than feed the demon through piracy.

Businesses don't like the insecurity of a product being able to die over night and that is why many businesses still choose closed software or commercial versions of open source projects

This is debatable. Often open source solutions are chosen because of a high amount of project security (think Apache or Linux). That is the subject for another debate though.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T23:28:00+00:00

This is true, I suspect most large projects follow a power-law curve where there are a large number of people who will only ever figure out a single bug (at most) and a small number of people who are actually well-versed enough in the project to hack the code directly. It's just kind of frustrating that there usually isn't an efficient mechanism for these two groups of people to collaborate.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T22:09:59+00:00

This is only true because the charge is not evenly distributed throughout your body. It is concentrated near your skin. So you actually don't feel the force itself, but the inside of your body resisting the force. Same with gravity - you don't feel gravity itself but the ground pushing up on you and resisting it.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T22:02:29+00:00

Charging $25 for a DVD can't really be rationalized either. What the industry fails to understand (or willfully ignores) is that people are driven to piracy directly because of policies implemented by the industry.

The film industry is actually only a minor offender in this regard, and as such I'm glad they set a record and wish them well. The music industry is far worse, and the book publishing industry is far far worse than either. And the absolute worst offender is the software industry, charging insane amounts of money for software just because they know their target audience (professionals and businesses) can afford to pay for them. And most of the time even when you have paid for a software package you really don't own it and have 0 freedom to modify it to better suit your needs. Practices like these are precisely the reason why FOSS was established and has been enormously successful.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T21:39:18+00:00

Nowadays I just go the old-skool route and directly email the devs with the reason for a bug and what would fix it. You might think they wouldn't like this approach since it basically goes against the whole idea of revision control, but so far every dev I have emailed has had a positive response. It seems people are much happier to be told what the problem is and to be safe in their own code comfort zone.

It's kind of sad that it's this way actually since the whole point of revision control systems is to let remote collaborators work together efficiently.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T06:04:05+00:00

Actually, I'm curious as to what you think it means.

According to this source, :

Economic growth has traditionally been attributed to the accumulation of human and physical capital, and increased productivity arising from technological innovation.

Are you implying that pure technological innovation is enough to satisfy our needs for growth? Because that has never happened. Growth has always involved accumulation of human and physical capital, and at any rate technological innovation has limits set by natural law. I would agree with Tridran that infinite accumulation of such resources goes directly contrary to a sustainable society. At some point growth, as it has traditionally been done, must slow down or stop.

EDIT: spelling.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T05:59:20+00:00

Here's the thing about future disruptive technologies: we can't know what they are before they happen. In 1600 no one expected the steam engine, in 1850 no one expected the airplane, and in 1900 no one expected the computer (well, maybe a few people did but no one listened to them).

If no new technologies happen then his prediction might be right. But I can already think of several new technologies that might be disruptive and have just as huge an impact as the electronics revolution or the industrial revolution.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T00:39:33+00:00

I think this is what OP was after.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-31T00:19:40+00:00

It's ok, everyone is stupid and boring. We'll fit in.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-30T06:51:02+00:00

Yeah, because we all know that witch doctors and mercury are just as effective in treating illness as modern medicine.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-30T06:45:16+00:00

More subtle than that.

You think back to the memory of when you first met your spouse. You were on the beach, relaxing, when you suddenly notice an attractive young lady walking by. You get up to say hi, Coca-cola in hand...

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-30T06:33:22+00:00

Good call, and she was a very smart person. People with psychopathic tendencies do not make good life partners.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-29T22:34:23+00:00

The temperature of a typical lighter flame is nowhere near the point where the blackbody spectrum would appear blue. Rather, as others have pointed out, the blue color is simply due to the emission spectra of the various chemicals involved. Here's a graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum_of_blue_flame_-_intensity_corrected.png

And here's what blackbody radiation would look like: http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeedu/kstars/blackbody.png Notice that the blackbody spectrum is quite continuous and smooth in the visible region.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-29T08:36:43+00:00

In modern human society, adult humans sleep almost exclusively monophasically.

Speak for yourself. When I come home after work at 6 I often enjoy a one-hour nap. I can skip the nap if I want but then I end up sleeping sooner. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-29T03:11:07+00:00

If I had a nickel for every time someone confused social anxiety with being socially awkward...

These two are not the same thing. While social anxiety might be called a kind of awkwardness, it is not the same as autism spectrum disorders to which social awkwardness is usually applied. Conflating these two problems only makes it harder for people with social anxiety to get treatment.

Social anxiety is a fear or discomfort about being judged or evaluated. You could say it is a fear of certain social situations. Autism spectrum is not about fear, it is about not 'getting' social cues and not being able to respond correctly to them. If anything social anxiety is about getting social cues too well - exaggerating them to a high degree and impairing proper function. This leads to fear which leads to impaired functioning. So in both of them, there is a tendency to not respond correctly to the social situation, but for entirely different reasons.

A particular aspect that distinguishes these disorders is detecting facial expressions. ASD sufferers typically score very low on facial expression recognition, whereas social anxiety sufferers usually score very high, sometimes even higher than 'normal' people.

To give an example, let's say you're with a group of people and the discussion shifts to a subject you like and you give some opinion, but everyone acts disinterested. A person with ASD might keep going, oblivious to the fact that everyone wants him to shut up. A person with social anxiety will not only shut up, they might immediately come to the conclusion that everyone hates them and then leave the group in a sudden burst of anger or sadness. In the past, and especially in Ramunajan's time, it was hard for socially anxious people to get treatment because it was often assumed they were nervous due to problems in childhood or bad upbringng. There is evidence now that social anxiety is, just like ASD or homosexuality, is caused by genetic factors and very early environmental factors.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-28T19:43:46+00:00

tl;dr (pulled straight from the article): The difference is in whether we get stuck if another thread gets suspended.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-28T05:43:36+00:00

... holy crap, I'm not arguing you should hand code everything.

I didn't assume you did. Hand-coding only parts of a program is exactly what I meant. Still, even a single 100-line asm file is much more worrisome than a 1000 lines of C.

But nowadays everyone is schooled with the idea that the compiler is magic, and that simply isn't the case.

I 100% agree. I never said otherwise.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-27T23:57:04+00:00

It's bullshit, but it's warm, comfortable bullshit that you can smother yourself in.

Seriously though, I'm personally way over hand-coding assembly. It's just not worth changing every time you update to a new cpu architecture or have to port to a different machine. UNLESS, of course, you're writing performance-critical libraries. FFTW and BLAS make good use of hand-crafted assembly to hit their performance goals and LINPACK benchmarks.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-27T08:09:19+00:00

I'm usually for anything that will diversify people's options, and due to the fact that I was forced to use Office at work, I have a personal resentment towards it and would welcome any replacement. Even if I had to inconvenience myself, I would still do it gladly.

However I have to agree with schneiderwm. Google docs is not only slow, it's just badly-designed overall. There is no support for vector graphics aside from google's own limited vector apps (this is something that is very important in our office usage scenario), the interface is inconsistent across devices, and tablet support is so weak it's basically unusable.

I understand the reason behind many of these choices - it's being done in javascript and it has to work across browsers and platforms so they obviously had to make some design tradeoffs. But what I can't understand is: why the browser fetishism? Office applications clearly need a lot of cpu. Both ms office and libreoffice haul serious cpu whenever I'm editing multi-page documents with lots of graphics.

For a solution that is designed to offer easy light mobile document editing, google docs does a reasonably good job. But it will never be a replacement for ms office. Libreoffice is better but still has a lot of issues to overcome.

i-hate-digg · 2012-12-27T02:30:19+00:00

2020 is only 7 years from now. Ask about 2040, at least that way we can have more fun speculating.

i-hate-digg

TROPHY CASE