brianberns

> The second is a gross demonstration of "anecdotes are not data."

The second one doesn't even support the premise. Video games aren't more "technical" than Facebook.

Classic relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

They probably add more entries over time (and maybe update/delete old ones), so you’d have to be careful about keeping the local DB in sync.

But electrons are considered to be point particles, so they would have infinite momentum in this case?

When I was a kid in the 1970’s and early 80’s, my grandparents would drive 100’s of miles along I-95 to visit us from Florida and arrive with the grille and windshield of their car absolutely splattered with bug corpses. You can make that same drive today without killing a fly.

Side note: We also used to see long caravans of migrating birds flying south in the fall. Thousands of them at least, traveling overhead in a steady stream for 15 minutes or more.

OK, but from a functional programming point of view (where structural pattern matching comes from), "case" should bind a value to a name, not mutate the value of an existing variable. That seems nuts to me.

The good reason to get rid of it automatically: It takes up space.

Is there any good reason to keep it? (The fact that it was "created by some user" doesn't seem like much of a reason.)

IMHO, creating an index should be atomic: Either you end up with a valid index, or you end up with nothing.

> REINDEX INDEX CONCURRENTLY index_name;

> If for some reason you had to stop the rebuild in the middle, the new index will not be dropped. Instead, it will be left in an invalid state and consume space.

Well, that sure sounds like a bug in PostreSQL to me.

Type checking turns run-time errors into compile-time errors. This results in a huge improvement in code quality.

Yes, but on the other hand, all the Linux source code is publicly available, and it's still considered secure.

Yes, it’s lock-free, but it doesn’t actually work.

> your worst enemy could simply never schedule that thread again

That seems too extreme to me. If the scheduler itself is potentially malicious, then no multi-threaded implementation is safe, since we can't assume that any thread we start will ever actually run.

At least two syllables are easier than three. (And "OK Google" is particularly tongue-twisty due to the repeated "oh" sounds.)

This is a good point. Perhaps they meant to say "if approximately the upper half of p and q's bits are identical"?

> Are void functions not considered functions in functional programming?

There's usually a "Void" type that's inhabited by a single value to handle that case. In a void function, all inputs are mapped to that value.

> Statement expressions ... allow you to embed a compound statement within an expression. The value returned by the last expression is the value returned by the entire statement expression.

> You might ask "Why would you ever want to do such a thing?"

I just want to mention that expressions are crucial in functional programming, where even an if-statement returns a value. Statements that don't return a value don't make any sense in a pure functional world, because they aren't functions.

So hopefully that answers the "why?" question. (Of course, abusing expressions in switch statements, as in this article, isn't something you can do in FP.)

Not to mention that exhaustive testing only works when you already know the correct result for each input.

And it was probably true for most of them. The stakes for humanity keep rising, so "now" is usually the most important time in history.

No, we know that our planet has the right conditions for life. The conditions on Venus are very different.

It does seem like some aspects of QM point to reality being simulation that tries to avoid the expense of unnecessary calculations.

Saved you a click: "During an eclipse, the ground cools," said seismologist Martin van Driel of ETH Zurich. "It deforms unevenly, which tilts the [seismometer]" a small amount.

Those aren't the only two options. You can have public property that isn't anarchy. That's how national parks work in the US.

BTW, the other weird thing about this scenario is that if you look backwards along your trajectory, you will see a movie of your journey playing in reverse!

Also, in regard to your edit: this doesn’t really have anything to do with relativity. Newton would’ve come to the same conclusion.

I don't think this is right. You leave at t=0 and arrive at your destination at t=1 year. It then takes two years for the image of your arrival to travel back to Earth, where it can be perceived at t=3 years.

However, when you arrive at your destination, you can look back at Earth and see an image of yourself 1 year prior to your departure.

Try using the Apollo app instead. It's a clean, pleasant experience.

https://apolloapp.io/

In F# (which is very similar to OCaml), you’d have to explicitly cast the return value to “obj” to get this to compile.

I'm an F# developer, so I'm usually psyched to see F# articles on Hacker News. In this case, though, I can't even tell what this is supposed to be or why I should care.

I'll never know for sure, since I can't run the counterfactual. It's certainly possible that the outcome might have been similar if I hadn't been accelerated.

That said, girls tend to mature faster than boys, and I can assure you that most 18 year old females are not very interested romantically in younger males (in that era and place, at least). A year makes a huge difference in that regard. I suspect the study in question didn't account for this.

Here's my data point to the contrary: I entered college a few weeks short of my 17th birthday in the early 1980's. I was about 1.5 years younger than others in my class, on average. I made many good friends, but my relative lack of maturity still had a huge impact on my emotional well-being (especially when it came to dating). I'm now in my 50's and still dealing with the psychological repercussions of my parents' decision to accelerate me.

It loses a little mass due to water boiling off, but other than that the mass has to stay exactly the same (barring nuclear reactions, which typically don't make for good quinoa).