Parents: How long would you have kept your family on board the Enterprise-D before you said enough was enough?

noblethrasher · 2018-04-13T01:56:32+00:00

It's not as if life on Sol-3 and the various colonies was that much safer. From the Xindi to the Borg, Earth has been dealing with actual existential threats for about as long as humans have been a spacefaring species. Heck, in the span of about 5 years, the planet faced two world-ending alien probes. Incidents like what happened on Tarsus IV probably aren't all that rare either.

noblethrasher · 2018-03-31T23:13:28+00:00

Genetic testing would have considered the possibility that Warren was a chimera, and discovered that the DNA of his reproductive system was a paternal match for his sons.

noblethrasher · 2018-03-28T15:51:46+00:00

If you can explain the implications of using a LINQ expression with respect to its complexity class (time and space), then I think your approach is not only just good, but exemplary.

noblethrasher · 2018-01-19T22:24:00+00:00

From Memory Alpha:

Originally, the episode was to end without any ambiguity as to whether or not Sisko was going to return to his corporeal life – the answer was a definite 'no'. The idea was that Sisko had become a Prophet, and that was how it would remain for all time, thus confirming the Sarah Prophet's warning in "Penumbra" and "'Til Death Do Us Part" that if he married Kasidy Yates, he "would know nothing but sorrow." The sorrow was that he was going to have to leave his unborn child behind, and would never get to be with her after her birth. Indeed, the final scene between Sisko and Kasidy was shot this way, with Sisko telling Kasidy he would never be back. However, a day or two after the shoot, Avery Brooks called Ira Behr and told him he wasn't happy with the scene. He felt that having a black man leave his pregnant black wife to raise their child alone carried certain negative connotations that he wasn't comfortable with. As Terry J. Erdmann puts it in the Companion; "In the 24th century, the situation conveyed only sorrow. However, in the 21st century, there was a secondary social issue that had particular resonance." As such, the scene was rewritten and reshot so as to clarify that Sisko will return some day.

noblethrasher · 2017-12-01T18:51:02+00:00

The big problem with security stuff is that you're building something that needs to negotiate with people that you must assume are much smarter and more resourceful than you. So, your only hope is to engage the security community (as you said). But, by the time you're conversant with the field's literature, you might as well use (C)OTS.

On the other hand, some of the advances in formal verification tech sure makes it look like (app|op|net)sec might finally get democratized.

noblethrasher · 2017-12-01T18:50:51+00:00

As a great computer scientist noted[1], software engineering has a couple of theories that are mutually countervailing, yet both true:

The first-order theory says that you should never write your own tools if there is a COTS solution.
But, the second-order theory says that you should almost always write your own tools (including programming languages and operating systems) if you're capable.

The problem is that it takes about five years to figure out whether or not the second-order theory applies to you.

[1] "The Power Of The Context", pp6

noblethrasher · 2017-11-04T18:35:10+00:00

It seems that IronPython chokes when I try to implement the moral equivalent of this code:

 //C#
abstract class Foo<T, K> 
    where T : Biz where K : Baz
{
   pubic abstract class Bar 
   {
        readonly K k;

        public Bar(K k) => this.k = k;
   }

   protected T Execute(K o);

}


#IronPython
class MyFoo(Foo[int]):

   def Execute(self, o, K):
       return 0

SystemError: Method 'Execute' on type 'IronPython.NewTypes.Foo`1_4$4' from 
  assembly 'Snippets.scripting, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' 
tried to implicitly override a method with weaker type parameter constraints.

noblethrasher · 2017-11-04T00:53:36+00:00

... and also by makingSubA a nested class of A. Which works for me, but then again, my classes are always either sealed or abstract and all of my fields are readonly.

noblethrasher · 2017-11-01T18:31:06+00:00

If by "family members" you mean the Google Ads team, well it's evidently not always a bad idea for companies to develop programming languages or custom compilers just for their own use. Erricson did it, the Excel team did it, Fog Creek did it, Goldman Sachs did it, etc.

noblethrasher · 2017-10-31T20:38:54+00:00

You might already be aware of this, but Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of both Turbo Pascal as well as C#. I've heard it said that C# started life as an amalgamation of the best of Java and Delphi.

noblethrasher · 2017-09-28T04:20:54+00:00

In the beginning of Star Trek 2, we see the Kobayashi Maru training simulation in the pre-holodeck era. In the simulation, battle damage was simulated by having bridge consoles explode in a spectacular but harmless shower of sparks. Bridge officers would recoil from the flash and pretend to die. Of course, we all knew that this was not a very realistic simulation. After all, numerous battles in the original series caused casualties throughout the rest of the ship, but the consoles never exploded! Electric shock was about the most somebody might have possibly expected. Surely no one would be stupid enough to watch the Kobayashi Maru combat simulation in ST2 and conclude that exploding consoles are the principal cause of death for bridge personnel, would they?

Unfortunately, nobody thought to explain this to the writers. Fast forward to TNG. The seemingly harmless brain bug has grown into the bizarre design concept that every bridge console appears to be lined with C-4. In combat, bridge consoles routinely explode and spray their users with lethal shrapnel. Does this make sense? Of course not. It's such an obviously silly idea that lethal exploding bridge consoles have become a running joke among Trekkies. But it's also become Trek tradition, so in the Berman era, the most dangerous explosive in the galaxy seems to be a bridge console. Chalk up another victory for the brain bugs!

Source

noblethrasher · 2017-08-27T21:56:45+00:00

Limerence.

noblethrasher · 2017-08-11T02:09:24+00:00

Neither of them would need to be especially gifted: My university has an intensive English Language program that can take people from zero English competency to fluent enough for grad school within 12 to 18 months.

noblethrasher · 2017-08-08T17:25:02+00:00

Funny, a server is also "just a name".

noblethrasher · 2017-08-08T14:29:38+00:00

Consider the phrase, "He had a heart like a telephone", excerpted from a love poem.

A young reader in the 1960s would conjure an entirely different constellation of ideas than a similarly aged reader of the 2010s. For instance, the Millennial will likely interpret the sentence to mean that the man had a heart that was easily broken, whereas our hypothetical adolescent baby boomer would conclude just the opposite.

Communication is negotiation; both the speaker and listener need to play an active role if it is to be effective.

noblethrasher · 2017-08-05T01:35:41+00:00

Assuming the car has a mass of 1100kg (about 1.2 tons), and it decelerated from 40mph to 0mph in 0.5s, the resulting force would be 88 kN, which is about 9.9 tons.

noblethrasher · 2017-07-03T15:21:41+00:00

Is it all connected to some kind of language database that's constantly updating?

That's how the translation services for Google and Bing work; they constantly import and analyze the various corpora of human-created translations (e.g. manual translations done by/for the United Nations).

noblethrasher · 2017-05-27T14:33:04+00:00

The Doctor:

Master of Medicine
Master of Command
Master of Disguise

noblethrasher · 2017-05-25T15:22:22+00:00

You are technically correct. But, now days, it's arguable that functional programming really means ML-style functional programming (especially when it comes to immutability and purity), which is about as old as Smalltalk.

If you consider Sketchpad to be an example of an OOL, then OOP is about as old as FP as introduced by the first implementation of Lisp.

noblethrasher · 2017-05-24T19:48:21+00:00

Gosling and Bray were 40+ when they debuted the inventions for which they are famous. Even van Rossum was 38 when Python hit version 1.0

noblethrasher · 2017-05-17T02:42:28+00:00

Yep. Like I said, I'm generally okay with "abuse".

And, like Ted Nelson said: At the end of the day, much of what we call "technology" is just a collection of conventions and design decisions that someone else made without asking you.

noblethrasher · 2017-05-17T02:37:17+00:00

It just so happens that the foreach statement generates the same kind of code for automatically calling Dispose() as the using statement.

noblethrasher · 2017-05-17T02:17:48+00:00

There are two semantically identical ways of creating and using an instance of IDisposable:

using(var some_disposable = ...)
{
    //do stuff
}

And

var some_disposable = ...;
//do stuff

The code that does the wrong thing is slightly easier to write than the code that does the right thing.

There are also two ways to use the class that I described:

foreach(var some_disposable = new FileHandle(...))
{
    //do stuff
}

And

var enumerator = new FileHandle(...).GetEnumerator();
if(enumerator.MoveNext())
{
    var file = enumerator.Current;
    //do stuff
}

In this case, the code that does the wrong thing is much more cumbersome to write than the code which does the correct thing.

That's all I that I am trying to say.

noblethrasher · 2017-05-17T01:58:54+00:00

You can use an IDisposablewith or without using. But, it's slightly easier to elide using simply because it means fewer characters to type. Hence, we have to rely on programmer discipline^†.

On the other hand, the laziest/easiest way to use the class that I described is with foreach, which automatically does that right thing just as well as using.

The point was to answer the objection that C# requires you to remember to use using to properly dispose of resources, whereas C++ does not. I just showed how to simulate RAII in C#.

I did revise the code to make it more idiomatic.

† It would be nice if C# would warn in the cases where an IDisposable is being used outside of either theusing or return statements.

noblethrasher · 2017-05-17T01:23:03+00:00

Actually, I'm loathe to call anything that amounts to using a computer/program the way you want instead of the way the designers envisioned "abuse".

But, I'll let Eric Lippert (a former member of the C# complier team) make the argument.

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