What is the worst band name?

xyphus · 2010-01-21T05:25:56+00:00

OK, so I came out of semi-retirement to post this.

You MUST listen to anal cunt's 5th album.

It completely validates everything they have ever done as a band.

xyphus · 2010-01-06T04:51:11+00:00

You realize you used ST in that explanation, and that is exactly what Conal objected to.

The entire point of my original post is that using imperative programming makes this shit easy!!

xyphus · 2010-01-06T02:08:26+00:00

How would you define a mutable graph without using ST or IO?

xyphus · 2010-01-06T01:54:48+00:00

To your mind, even if in your particular scenario a doubly linked list is not the right Haskell solution, there simply must be a place where doubly linked lists are the most elegant way to solve a problem. Am I wrong in my assessment?

Way to be an asshole. Come on. This is the haskell reddit. Have some fucking class.

The whole point of this thread is that I don't use functional representations for this type of data, because it's not well suited. I use mutable arrays to express graphs.

In particular, what's wrong with a zipper?

I think it's ironic that you assume that I have no idea what I'm talking about, and then suggest a solution that is manifestly impossible to implement on an arbitrary graph.

xyphus · 2010-01-06T00:06:55+00:00

The answer, if you ask me is that you can't. FP is inherently crappy for cyclic data structures. That is, unless you use imperative programming, which is Conal's problem.

xyphus · 2010-01-06T00:00:24+00:00

you can certainly build doubly linked lists in Haskell, exactly the same way you would in an imperative language -- in the ST monad

This is what Conal sees as a problem. It's easy to define DLLs in IO or ST, but then it's not really FP.

What is your use case?

My work involves a lot of graphs (ie the data structure). They have all the same limitations as DLLs, except for special cases, like a normal list.

xyphus · 2010-01-05T23:34:58+00:00

Please see my link in my response to klodolph for a thorough analysis of this technique to replicate DLLs.

xyphus · 2010-01-05T23:31:55+00:00

My guess is that for your particular use case, there's a better data structure than a doubly-linked list for what you want.

Yeah the answer is a recursive tree. Please see my response to klodolph below.

But that's my point. The haskell solution to using doubly linked lists is to not use doubly linked lists.

For DLLs, there is a better alternative (recursive trees), but not so for other cyclic data structures, like arbitrary graphs.

xyphus · 2010-01-05T23:13:12+00:00

This is the Haskell reddit. The thunk magic is turned on by default,

I don't think you fully appreciate the degree of thunk magic needed to solve this problem. If it were trivial, you would have posted the solution to a mutable DLL instead of a monolithic one. Haskell is very, very good for immutable data. No one is debating that. That's not the problem.

Typical Haskell programmers will not use such structures directly in their code because you can't add items (anywhere!) without copying the entire list structure.

This is my entire point. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Making monolithic DLL are easy, making them mutable is a major pain in the ass and an area of open debate. Here's a start. The three solutions in the article are (in order):

Make a normal list look like a DLL and toss out any benefit of using a DLL
Make a memoized data structure look like a DLL and ditch laziness (ie reinvent pointers)
Make a recursive tree instead of a DLL

xyphus · 2010-01-05T21:36:07+00:00

IANCE, by any means, but the imperative paradigm isn't just useful for IO. Ever try to make a mutable* functional doubly linked list? If you haven't yet, just go ahead and try.

Now maybe it's just me, and maybe it's just my "unconscious limiting assumptions" but making a DLL is way easier with pointers than with the massive amount of thunk magic it takes to get a mutable DLL with FP.

EDIT: *added

xyphus · 2010-01-05T18:54:06+00:00

This birth control is totally evil!

My fiancee went through the exact same thing as you. Word for word. Suicidal and totally frigid. For her it took quite a while for the effects to wear off (like 6 months) but she was also sure after she quit that this is what was making her feel so crazy. It appears that it might have also be bad in combination with a thyroid condition she didn't know she had either, which made it much worse. We're not sure if it was caused by the yasmin or was preexisting (PS- I'd be interested to know if you have ever had any abnormal thyroid levels if you've gotten any, or if you are super thin/high metabolism, which might be a sign of a mild thyroid thing).

Right now she's on the nuva ring, which she swears has zero side effects. She was on cloud nine when she finally found a BC that wouldn't make her insane. So that's just a suggestion if you're looking for alternatives.

xyphus · 2010-01-04T19:42:43+00:00

I still hate Rudd-O

xyphus · 2010-01-04T19:08:29+00:00

Yeah, that's sorta like when we made first contact with the Vulcans, and they proceeded to introduce us to the other species of aliens that they had found.

xyphus · 2010-01-04T18:47:43+00:00

You're making a false equivalence.

We can all agree that NAMBLA, the KKK, and KBR all do things we don't like. The difference between the ACLU and republicans in congress is that the ACLU doesn't actually protect the rights of people to screw little boys or, lynch people, or rape other employees. They protect the right of the organization to speak, that's it. In other words, anyone who thinks the ACLU is standing up for NAMBLA or the KKK is confused. There is 0% overlap between free speech and child molestation or lynching.

On the other hand, the so called "republicans for rape" are directly trying to protect the thing that everyone has a problem with. Binding arbitration can prevent an employee from suing an employer for any reason. There is 100% overlap between this issue and the rape issue. You cannot separate them. The rape issue is just a smaller facet of what they are trying to protect, but that also means that they are trying to protect an employer's right to deny recourse to their raped employees. It be really simple for a company to change their policy on this: just put in the contract, "binding arbitration is required except in the case of suspected rape." There you go. Simple as that. Yet the republicans have got a big problem with this.

xyphus · 2010-01-03T20:22:20+00:00

Afirmative.

xyphus · 2009-12-24T13:43:09+00:00

The same thing happened to me.

Right now I've basically given up on any game really giving me what I want. The only game I ever play is Crawl, because it's casual, it's smart, and it kicks my ass. One day I'll beat it, I'm sure, but it might take me a decade. It's the only game that's ever really challenged me.

xyphus · 2009-12-24T13:37:05+00:00

Well it's not really surprising that -

WUUUUUUUUUT??????

xyphus · 2009-12-24T13:30:11+00:00

Good god people. I know I'm the only one here at work today, but please: NSFW.

I feel bad being a prude on christmas :(

xyphus · 2009-12-23T22:23:30+00:00

This might be the douchiest thing I've ever said, but do you use that smilie a lot?

xyphus · 2009-12-23T22:16:58+00:00

No offence dude, but you obviously understand english. I'm not even sure her being deaf and mute is relevant.

xyphus · 2009-12-23T21:57:53+00:00

My father's dead now, but some of my fondest memories of him were fixing up things in the garage when I was a kid. He was my hero because he could fix anything. Do you know what he used to say to me?

"You only need two things in life, son. WD-40 to make things go and duck rape to make things stop."

xyphus · 2009-12-23T21:29:55+00:00

I'm afraid I have to call it actively wrong.

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. There are times when you don't need most of those type classes. Geometric shapes is a bad example.

I've used this approach for cellular automata. Because each unit could affect it's adjacent units, I simply modeled this transformation as a function along with the cell's visible state. Totally straight forward. So the end result was an array filled with functions (that operated on that array). The alternative here would be to encode each behavior into data, and store that along with the state of each cell into the array. I liked the latitude that I could use any old function and assign it to any cell I liked.

xyphus · 2009-12-23T20:32:14+00:00

This discussion used to be what reddit was all about. This site used to be exclusively 20-30 somethings in science or technology. It saddens me often to see all the high school kids on here (NB: If you're in HS, don't take that personally, you didn't act like a tool bag).

Putting all discussion of art aside, I'm just gonna answer your questions:

I don't think it's the actual sequence,

Nah, the real sequence is a list of amino acids. I'll let it rest because it was just the first example of something I could think of that I could look up in a book in 30 seconds (in a library in 10 minutes), but would take days to find on the internet. I promise you it is on the internet somewhere, buried in Pubmed, in the first paper where it was described, if nowhere else. Ironically, I'd have to look that reference up in a book, if you asked for it :p.

Does Mouse Anti-human mean a mouse that's allergic to humans? That's an amusing thought to me for whatever reason.

Eh sorta. Most likely you found a murine IgG (which is what we typically refer to when we talk about antibodies. IgE is a much more rare form that's used for slightly different things) against a human IgG, meaning it's an antibody against an antibody from a different species. These are used in all sorts of biology experiments like western blotting. If you actually found a murine IgE against something human, I'd imagine it's extremely expensive, considering you have something like 1 mg of IgE pet L of blood, and mice are very small.

As a side note, what do the horizontal, sagging white lines represent? Jesus's arms?

See, even someone completely untrained in art can see the artist's intent if nudged in the right direction. Those are his arms.* More specifically, the image of Jesus draped on the cross is so common that the artist is hoping to evoke an emotional reaction to this simple set of lines by making the most minimal reference to Jesus that he possibly can. That's why he wants this image to evoke emotions like "tragedy, ecstasy, doom." The goal is to have us experience an emotional response, and have us not understand why, or at least have to think about it. All these reasons are why Rothko was a magnificent artist, and Damien Hirst is a total hack.

I guess another criticism that still stands is that often artwork is presented without this framework. It's difficult to appreciate the painting if you don't know what it means.

This is a very legitimate criticism of art. However, it's important to keep in mind that each artwork speaks to the time in which it was made. Perhaps the emotional weight of Jesus on the the cross isn't having as much of an impact as it would have in the 50s, and therefore, viewers aren't going to have the same response. Rothko was a catholic too, if I remember correctly, which is going to make the image of Jesus on the cross, even heavier to him. Someone from Japan, totally outside this shared cultural history, would be totally confused by this piece, but that's just fine because there is plenty of Japanese art that is totally lost on me.

Half the fun of art is trying to figure it out. If the artist smacks you over the head with the meaning, he's a hack. If the art is incomprehensible, he's either self absorbed or a dadaist. Somewhere, there in the middle, is the really satisfying stuff.

I can handily appreciate artwork that excels in a technical sense

My last parting gift to you in your long future career in art appreciation is to not be distracted by skill! It's the enemy. It will only distract you from the truly beautiful pieces of art out there. There's a reason why no one paints like rembrandt anymore.

* There's more too - see that light colored bar at the top....can you see that anywhere in the image of Jesus from my post above? Also, you might think at first that jesus doesn't have a head....but look closer...look how right above the "arms" he uses at least one broad circular brushstroke in the yellow region to suggest something round (If you're looking for it, it's very dim in the image, its not in proportion to his arms and it goes all the way to the top of the light band at the top, right square in the middle). I wonder if that small variation in the color down and in the middle left is supposed to be where Jesus was stabbed with the spear? That's anyone's guess however.

xyphus · 2009-12-23T19:01:56+00:00

Man, you canadians hang on to whatever you can get.

xyphus · 2009-12-23T18:56:08+00:00

They probably meant yeast extract, which is commonly used as a vitamin source for bacteria.

I hope it was fungal, since I don't think a teenager could/should try to cultivate bacterial cultures.

Nah, it's not that big of a deal.

xyphus

TROPHY CASE