civility

I'm not a type theory guy, but it seems like you could rank Rust's type system somewhere in the realm of ML, Ocaml, Haskell, COQ, Agda, ATS, or something else. If Rust uses more memory and computation than those, then it's reasonable to assume there is another reason.

I'm guessing you could have a very efficient implementation of Rust, but that it would be rewrite instead of an incremental fix. This statement is likely to be unpopular.

Thank you too for the detailed and thoughtful reply!

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You've added some things to my reading list. :-)

Not to contradict anything you've said, but my original message above was in response to something very different than I think you're talking about. I see a lot of comments where people seem to treat Science as some unquestionable list of facts and treat Scientists reverently. It's like they've made a religion out of it and don't dare question the priests - which is ironic/silly when they're refuting conventional religions.

Anyways, maybe my current view is a little too hard line on good science relying on falsification, but I still reject the notion that any scientific belief is verifiable / provable. A given theory may be the best we have, but a new piece of information could change it radically.

I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.

Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.

That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.

I think the implication is that once upon a time, Emacs had a comment/docstring which wasn't politically correct. Let the shunning or boycotting begin...

> The remarkable thing about quaternions is that you can describe rotation around any arbitrary axis! Try doing that with real rotation matrices and you will bump into a major problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix#Rotation_matri...

There's probably some truth to this, but it doesn't take much imagination to imagine how the babies could be "seeded" after a C-section birth.

To each their own, but I think there is value in seeing them multiple ways. The rows can be looked at as a system of equations. The columns can be vectors to be combined. The matrix as a whole can represent the covariance of a Kalman filter or describing a confidence ellipsoid. They can be an adjacency matrix describing the edges of a graph. They can be your entire data set, and so on. Some of these uses feel more like operands than operators.

I've never worked for a "big" company, much less one of FAANG. Although, I knew a kid who went to Apple, and he did well. I also had a friend from Intel, and he did well too.

My situation was much more than 4 years, but it was steady (exponential) growth at a nice rate, and I'm exiting in my mid 40s. Maybe I could've done better, but to the point of this topic, my one stable job did much better than the three startups I was exposed to.

First startup, I traded nearly all of my salary over four years for stock options: $0

Second startup, I was told I'd get 5% of the company (no contract though). I quit after a year without pushing the topic: $0

Third job was not a startup, but it was a fairly small company, and I've made nearly two million in tax deferred accounts having made a healthy salary the entire time. I'm retiring this year.

I learned a lot of great things at those first two companies, but I would never recommend a startup from a financial point of view. I almost joined a third startup, but I didn't, and they folded as well. I suspect you've got better odds going to Vegas and putting your salary on a number from the roulette table.

Honestly, Hacker News as a community, and you as a moderator, don't deserve to have a permanent username for contributors. Changing usernames is really the only option for participating in the discussion when dealing with people who down-vote or moderate based on popular opinion rather than the supposed guidelines. I've seen you in particular selectively apply those guidelines, so I know you don't have the moral high ground here. It's ok to be sarcastic and abusive if you're saying something that goes along with the group-think, but the hammer drops if you dare question, much less contradict, in anything but the absolute most polite tone.

I doubt you have the energy to try and enforce your one-username policy against all the users who do this, but even if you did, you're just contributing to making this place even more of a monoculture than it already is. People who keep their usernames are mostly playing a popularity contest with silly karma points. Are you sure you're incentivising the right group for healthy and enlightening discussions??

Efficiency in the market and development process drove client developers to be a dirt cheap bottomless resource. Before iPhone apps (and later Android), you could create a new application and sell it in a box for a good living. The only "box apps" which most people will still pay for are grandfathered in things like Photoshop, Matlab, and Office. Even new video games are mostly in-app purchases or ad-based. I don't like electron based apps, but that's not what devalued developers.

Besides, I wasn't talking specifically about electron-based apps, I was talking about apps in general which don't use the native widget toolkits.

Also, I can't speak for everyone, but my preference for a platform boils down to whether it provides a Unix shell and how pushy it is about forcing me to download updates or upload personal information. Consistent widget look and feel just doesn't matter when I spend most of my time in a browser or shell anyways.

> Imagine a pile of ash (high entropy) assembling into a copy of Shakespeare (low entropy), compared with the reverse.

Imagine the soil 50 years before Shakespeare forming the food he ate and the trees which became the paper he wrote on. It seems a lot like ash (soil) did organize itself to a lower entropy collection (with a lot of help from an external energy pool).

As more and more apps are web based, this seems like an antiquated notion. Consistency lost, and I doubt it's important any more. Why should "desktop apps" follow those rules at all? Even Apple and Microsoft violate their own rules with their flagship applications.

Sorry, I should have compared C-major and C-minor keys. If I play a C-major scale, and then a C-minor scale, C-minor sounds sadder in comparison. But if I just play ascending thirds (R 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 5 7 6 R) in C-minor, it doesn't sound sad to me. Moreover, it's easy to make C-major sound sad by playing descending thirds (reverse of above).

I have the same question about major and minor keys. It's pretty easy to play something somber in C-major, and something happy in A-minor... This is opposite to the conventional wisdom about keys, and I think it's a cultural thing.

When you play them right on top of each other, the three notes which are a half step lower do seem to sound sadder in comparison, but I think that says more about descending vs ascending tones rather than the key itself.

I think you're exactly right: People who live and breathe JSON and strings don't (and probably shouldn't) care about use cases where the choice between float or double matters...

I also see this with graphics people who live and breathe small (2x2, 3x3, and 4x4) matrices don't care about "type level integers" (as Rust calls them) to make 6x9 matrices efficiently live on the stack or in an array.

> Is it possible that a boxed "Number" type would solve most of the problems?

If you mean it the way I think you do, not for me. I can easily afford to fit a billion 4 byte floats in memory, but I can't afford a billion 8 byte box pointers to a 4 byte box with an n-byte tag, and the cache locality could be horrible.

However, if Go had an elegant macro system (Rust's doesn't seem too bad), I could get by though.

No, Go is not currently the right tool for me, but it's close, and it would be much closer with (usable) generics.

What's "so sad" is you think this Reddit style "Don't use it" imperative is an acceptable way to talk to people. You're rightfully afraid of complexity creeping into an otherwise clean language, but it would suck less if you said it better.

Yes, it works well enough in C++. It would be nice if another language, without C++'s other pitfalls, got some of this right.

Btw, it's "ironic" that you think pointing at two broken implementations says anything about where it works. "Are folks just not aware" it's ridiculous to be snarky when arguing from a position of ignorance?

Writing the exact same code for float and double (and possibly complex float and/or complex double) sucks. You've created some straw man about dopamine junky programmers because you don't need generics for whatever it is you do. If you wrote numerical algorithms you'd be annoyed at any language which lacks generics.

I'll (cautiously) take your word that this works transparently when I supply arrays as arguments to a library function. However, what does the library function return to me as arrays it allocates? What if I do an outer product of two arrays with different base indices?

Whatever your answer, I suspect it is more cognitive overhead to remember than "always 1 based" or "always 0 based".

I do a lot of FFTs for a living - I really want my zeroth frequency in my zeroth bin. Negative indices (as done by Python and other places) are nice though.

This points to another example where 0-based should be preferred. When doing modulo arithmetic, 0..N-1 mod N gives 0..N-1, but 1..N mod N puts the zero at the end. I also cringe at languages where -1 mod N does not equal N-1.

I understand the argument, but when the default disagrees with your override, there's almost always an impedance mismatch and some pain. It's like being left handed when 99% of the interfaces in the world assume you're right handed.

People argue that zero-based is incidental, and that 1-based is the right way because of it's long history in mathematics notation. I would argue that 1-based is incidental, and that zero-based is better most of the time for modern math and computer architectures.

Zero based arrays are frequently better in a numerical context. Many times when you’re using the index in the computation itself (FFTs for instance), zero based is what you want. For instance, the zeroth frequency (DC) is in the zeroth bin.

She tried to save his life by removing the knife, then she went in to shock? Probably not the explanation you had in mind. This is not a good metaphor.

A lot of people go around predicting calamity... They’re usually wrong. Generally not liars, just evolved monkeys who are trying to avoid problems.

As a rule, Rust and Cargo developers aren't satisfied with something until it's difficult to explain and complicated to implement.

My guess is they're including requests for /

A billion "hacks" per day seems a bit far fetched. At that point, it's either a visible act of war (if external to the US) or the FBI would be much more involved (if internal). Both of those would be much larger news.