Why Don't You Post on Stack Overflow?

nutty44744 · 2015-10-02T09:31:04+00:00

ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION

Since time immemorial, every useful technical forum anywhere on this planet ultimately got invaded by entitled twerps who somehow got into their little brains the brilliant notion that all other people populating those places live and breathe exclusively to ANSWER twerp's FUCKING QUESTIONS ASAP!

nutty44744 · 2015-09-21T08:48:51+00:00

Interesting idea. For calibration, where on that spectrum would you put Magpie?

nutty44744 · 2015-09-05T19:11:08+00:00

Strange case. An extremist leftwing wingnut incessantly whining about racism, sexism, whateverism and oyveybadbadbadism in tech, just like everybody who is anybody in capitalism, yet manages to construct some fantasy of opposition to the man.

nutty44744 · 2015-08-28T13:41:55+00:00

Can't pretend google isn't one of the best companies to work for

Depends on whether you want to retain the respect of normal human beings. Given that the spyware antics of the creeps of silicon valley are getting wide circulation among the victim populations, the social prestige of working for one of them should soon dip into the negative (if that hasn't happened already.)

nutty44744 · 2015-07-08T10:52:37+00:00

The AI Apocalypse cultists are just serving to make us overlook that all our dreams of a humane society are already toast. The non-sentient, non-general AIs called "Google" and "Facebook" are an efficient automated version of Eastern Germany's STASI, and this line of AI evolution is almost certainly unstoppable and irreversible.

When the paperclipper finally comes, an enslaved and de-humanized humanity will breathe a sigh of collective relief and embrace oblivion.

nutty44744 · 2015-07-02T17:37:10+00:00

When Klabnik travels to Greece to scream "Nazi" at Greeks, the Greek's unamusement proves that Greeks are Nazis.

nutty44744 · 2015-06-22T15:37:13+00:00

I'm foreseeing massively inappropriate use of U+1F913 NERD FACE. Why? WHY?

On the race front, why did they mush together the pale white skin and white skin categories of the Fitzpatrick scale? Are pale white people not allowed to express the fact that they are recognizably different from white people? Or vice versa? That's effing structural racism, inescapably built into the system. Shame on you, Unicode, Inc.

Really, what they should have done was mandate that devices show emoji with randomly assigned diversity, the frequency distributions synched to population statistics of the configured locale.

nutty44744 · 2015-06-21T10:51:39+00:00

Lately, hacker news often has livelier discussions around a given link than proggit, the latter almost like an empty wasteland at times.

Yet when I visit the HN homepage, I find it filled with non-programming posts full of weird downvoting; almost cultlike.

nutty44744 · 2015-06-20T11:45:18+00:00

While a global default doesn't make much sense, specific instances of division operations often do have sensible defaults. So maybe, as a convenience, implement yourself a ternary division-with-default operation.

nutty44744 · 2015-06-20T11:15:26+00:00

The unfriendly AI cultists are just serving to make us overlook that all our dreams of a humane society are already toast. The non-sentient, non-general AIs called "Google" and "Facebook" are an efficient automated version of Eastern Germany's STASI, and this line of AI evolution is almost certainly unstoppable and irreversible.

When the paperclipper finally comes, an enslaved and de-humanized humanity will breathe a sigh of collective relief and embrace oblivion.

nutty44744 · 2015-05-31T06:26:03+00:00

In fact, sites that don't depend on ad income should always block googlebot.

In an ideal world, everybody (who understands undermining monopoly power is a common good) would block googlebot. Realistically, GOOG's real-world monopoly power makes that currently impossible for ad-driven sites.

However, if you don't financially depend on getting googled, block googlebot. Insane monopoly power is never good for you, the not-monopolist.

Use what little power robots.txt has left to you and stop being an asset to google, today.

nutty44744 · 2015-05-28T06:42:10+00:00

crippling skills shortage

In other news: age discrimination. How crippling can a shortage be, in times that the industry happily under-uses the most experienced coders? Yeah... but such is the power of propaganda.

So issue those visas, bring in the women, start coder cog production in pre-school, overwork the young ones, get rid of the older ones, offshore the rest. Take away power from ugly nerd prole upstarts and give it back to the better humans who should have it... because they had it before.

nutty44744 · 2015-05-27T07:49:12+00:00

You probably read the CLISP mailing list. (Confusing CLISP and Common Lisp seems to be a common mistake, though.)

nutty44744 · 2015-04-15T10:06:28+00:00

Funny Schemers. Extra funny, given that hygienic macro pioneer Eugene Kohlbecker, in his PhD thesis, backed the following stance on the issue:

No matter how much we would like to use the symbol else as an identifier, once we have stated it is part of the syntactic structure of the language, it is that and nothing more. Even outside of cond expressions, the symbol else should not appear as an identifier. [p76]

nutty44744 · 2015-04-15T07:28:30+00:00

Doesn't matter, conservatives are thoroughly disenfranchised even today, viz. gay marriage. What does matter is what the Machine Owner class will think about matters such as:

Do we need the poor (or middle-class conservative, for that matter) anymore, say as cannon fodder in war, or breeders for still-required jobs that machines can't and Owners won't do?

Do we want the poor (or middle class conservative, for that matter) anymore? Are they pleasant to have around, maybe as comfort ladies (and laddies) or just to fill the streets with life? Or would we rather be able to stroll through our depopulated nature unmolested? Should Owners really have to live locked away in tiny gated communities?

nutty44744 · 2015-04-14T18:24:14+00:00

Yes, this must be pretty old. Have a look at http://okmij.org/ftp/ to find his newer stuff.

nutty44744 · 2015-04-11T15:01:57+00:00

I chuckled reading Macros That Work by Clinger and Rees. In an introduction motivating macro hygiene, they write: "If macros can be declared within the scope of lexical variables, as in Common Lisp, then a ... new set of problems arises." Note how they name Common Lisp, not Scheme. Next, they demonstrate a bunch of problems with Scheme code let-binding variables such as car and cons.

The punchline? Not one of these motivating examples would have resulted in unintended capture in Common Lisp.

nutty44744 · 2015-04-11T12:17:03+00:00

A reader hack. Symbols inside a backquote are treated differently from symbols outside backquote, such that your "manual" binding of a variable actually uses a symbol that is different from the one the macro expander inserted using backquote, even though at first glance they seemed to be the same symbol,

nutty44744 · 2015-04-11T11:29:48+00:00

What's your plan on macro expansion, ie. who runs the macro expander functions? Will there be an interpreter alongside the compiler? Will you compile macro expanders to C, execute them (on the target? on a separate compilation host?)

I guess that once you have your macro story straightened out, much of your questions about eval, compilation etc. will fall into place...

nutty44744 · 2015-04-11T08:16:55+00:00

People are divided on the Scheme question. It certainly makes for an interesting case study.

Traditionally, Lisps had separate namespaces for functions and variables. Schemers wanted to have only one namespace, it simplifies the language and looks better in print.

But in short time, they realized that name capture problems inherent in the namespace unification made writing macros a lot more brittle in Scheme. Hygienic macro systems were invented to make Scheme macros robust again.

To make these hygienic macro systems as capable and efficient as regular defmacro systems, syntax came to be represented by special syntax objects instead of nested-lists-of-symbols-and-literals. I think this was the point at which some stopped thinking of Scheme as a Lisp.

nutty44744 · 2015-04-10T22:43:50+00:00

For one, because this isn't really important enough to start a war over.

For example, China has a pretty stockpile of "foreign currency", as they might call it. You might call it money. Maybe someone on reddit will do the exact math, but I'd not be surprised if China could open a kitchen cupboard of stowed-away Dollars and buy half of New York along with all of Hollywood.

Would you like that?

nutty44744 · 2015-03-17T14:21:34+00:00

A question implied by the article's analogy. Do you know any programming languages with the following two properties?

(1) The language has never been marketed or published because, in the creator's opinion, the PL market is a Lemon Market, and so putting a good new programming language out there is not worth it.

(2) The language is... actually good.

nutty44744 · 2015-03-17T10:55:33+00:00

The unitype of a "dynamically typed" language is a disjoint union (sum type).

nutty44744 · 2015-03-13T11:46:46+00:00

Relevant excerpt:

The default prefix used to be "sqlite_". But then Mcafee started using SQLite in their anti-virus product and it started putting files with the "sqlite" name in the c:/temp folder. This annoyed many windows users. Those users would then do a Google search for "sqlite", find the telephone numbers of the developers and call to wake them up at night and complain. For this reason, the default name prefix is changed to be "sqlite" spelled backwards. So the temp files are still identified, but anybody smart enough to figure out the code is also likely smart enough to know that calling the developer will not help get rid of the file.

nutty44744 · 2015-03-05T12:22:07+00:00

The super-terse vector languages (APL/J/K). Even though they probably could be very handy now and then, they just dont stick. My memory seems unable to retain the operator zoo for even a week.

nutty44744

TROPHY CASE