brianberns

How is this fluff at the very top of Hacker News?

Edit: And a few minutes later, it's gone from the front page. I wonder if the author gamed the system somehow?

> Instead of Haskell we should be thinking of programming language research and how to get the best ideas into our mainstream languages. How do we make immutability easy and ergonomic and get rid of nulls in C#?

F# pretty much plays this role within the .NET ecosystem. Almost all of the important advancements in C# over the last few years originated in F# (and FP in general).

Agreed. I’m also dubious about the control group who were merely “reminiscing”. Seems ripe for researcher-induced bias.

EEOC says "In most circumstances, individuals who are partners, officers, members of boards of directors, or major shareholders will not qualify as employees."

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-2-threshold-issue...

It seems that the neural net just spits out an answer, rather than deriving it step-by-step like humans do. That's interesting, but would still get you an F on a real calculus test.

Eyes are still much better at extracting 3D info from paintings (e.g. paint thickness, texture, etc.). This could potentially be replicated by photographing each point on the painting from two angles.

"Oops... there was an error generating text The server encountered an error and could not complete the request. Please try again after some time."

That’s incredibly short-sighted. This is a lethal disease that’s spreading rapidly across the entire world. Even if you personally don’t die or even feel sick, you could easily pass it on to others who do.

As an F# developer with just enough category theory to follow along, I think this is really great.

I find the workaround for existential types in .NET particularly interesting, but it seems so verbose. Is there no way to do it with plain functions in order to avoid all the explicit type signatures?

At that point, the only thing to do is set up 20 playing cards and offer them a prize of $100 for every $10 they wager.

Off topic: I’ve had success explaining the Monty Hall problem by generalizing it to, say, 10,000 doors, where Monty opens 9,998 of them before allowing you to switch. People seem to intuitively understand that it’s extremely likely that the prize is behind the other door.

This seems to assume that all the relevant data is present in memory on the client, but this is often not true (e.g. due to paging issues).

What happens if you try to sort listings by price and the actual item with the lowest price hasn't even been fetched by the browser yet?

I’m confused. SARS and COVID-19 (the current coronavirus outbreak) aren’t the same, right? Which one are we talking about here?

This looks awesome. I’m an F# developer and I agree with your intro paragraph 100%:

“One of the ironies of today's computer programming landscape is that functional languages directly inspired by the declarative languages for expressing abstractions and equations of logic and mathematics, have been sidelined for mathematical and scientific computing in favor of imperative, dynamically-typed languages like Python and Julia.”

Sadly, I’ve found that every road leads back to Python when it comes to deep neural nets. I tried using TensorFlowSharp from F# but found it very frustrating. Only Python seems to have full bindings to the TF API. Would love to give your wrapper a try.

I don’t think that had anything to do with why Slashdot faded into obscurity. Slashdot refused to allow users to post stories, so Digg (and then Reddit) ate its lunch.

I think that might’ve been a problem in the pre-Google era, but surely it no longer is.

I agree, but isn’t the remote access “feature” a big part of the marketing for these devices? E.g. check on your pet when you’re at work.

Um, no. Distance and time are related by the speed of light, which travels 1 light year (distance) in 1 year (time).

If space wasn’t expanding, the distance to a stationary object (in light years) would be exactly equal to the travel time of light from it (in years).

No, the object is now 46b light years away, but we can’t see what it looks like now at that distance. We see an image of it when it was much closer and younger.

I don't think it's physically possible to make a wall like this that's more than one brick thick (without using an absurd amount of mortar).

My point is that if someone is directing a powerful laser into your home, you are in imminent mortal danger, which is worse than whatever the smart speaker can do.

If someone is willing to blast your possessions to bits using a laser, I think the security of your smart devices is probably the least of your immediate concerns.

Yeah, the verbiage says that his typing is merely the "basis" for the resulting password, so you're probably right.

This is cute, but I'm dubious. It generated "y3aEmic8B217" as my password. Kid just happened to hit the shift key while also pressing E and then B? It looks a little too random to me. When I pound on the keyboard, I get results that look more like "fjlsd;lasf".

Yeah, that's a small example, so it's fine either way. But larger examples with lots of parentheses can be overwhelming (see: Lisp).

You're right, and that's why it's usually called "function application" instead of "backward pipe". However, using $ as an operator is confusing because the associativity is ambiguous if you're not already comfortable with it.

Thanks. That's a good blog. The $ operator is definitely confusing in Haskell. F# uses <| to indicate a backward pipe, which I find much more intuitive. For example:

    print <| even <| 4 * 2

This means: Take the result of 4 * 2 and send it to `even`, then take that result and send it to `print`. Or you can write it with forward pipes to make it even clearer:

    4 * 2 |> even |> print

The thing about backward pipes is that they're often used to avoid parentheses, which is IMHO a good idea. It's just that thinking of them as "function application" is confusing. F#'s operators makes the data flow clear.

[Side note: The mathematical symbol for function composition is the circle operator, ∘, which is also confusing for the same reason. Does (g ∘ f)(x) mean g(f(x)) or f(g(x))? Personally, I can never remember. If math used F#'s >> and << composition operators instead, there'd be no doubt that f >> g sends the output of f to g, so (f >> g)(x) means g(f(x)).]

I don’t have a problem with it. This prevents a private entity from monopolizing a possibly world-changing invention. The government can auction licenses to create competition, or even give it away for free.

How did you create a data set large and accurate enough to be useful in training a model?

Holy cow, I was not expecting that. Thank you.