greydius

Nature is under no obligation to comply with mathematical analysis.

I have my own "playlist" for programming and studying. I've found the key to not being distracted by the music is to avoid anything with singing and stick with stuff that's already familiar. My choices include a lot of ambient electronic and classical music. Oddly, metal also seems to work when the lyrics are completely indecipherable growls and screams.

Post the actual details of the product on a website aimed at entrepreneurs and tech-savvy people (aka "hackers"). Someone might see a good business was opportunity, and you'll have yourself a new supplier.

Very cool. Cheers.

Twice the resolution is 4 times the pixels, no?

It sounds like a good idea, but every time I've seen this implemented it's been as a simple whitelist lookup against user agent. This has two problems. First, user agent is... unreliable. Second, people that use less common systems are erroneously told the page won't work. (I've lost count of the number of times a website has told me that my operating system isn't supported yet the page works fine. What does my os have to do with a web page anyway?)

> break them as soon as the economy is stable again

How do we decide when that happens?

In a similar vein, we lower interest rates when the economy is in poor shape and raise them again when the economy is doing better. Unless the Fed can't decide that the economy is in good shape. For years.

This is a nice reminder that we don't have to make enemies out of those that disagree with us.

> The only reason I and a lot of other people use Linux on desktops is because everything we work on runs on Linux servers

That may be true, but there are also a lot of people (myself included) that just prefer a Linux OS. I like having a choice of desktop environments. I like that a huge amount of software is freely available and just a "suda apt-get install" away. I like that there's no shitty bloat-ware on my systems.

It's all the little differences that add up. Emacs behaves differently. /home isn't actually /home. Some of the Unix utilities are slightly different from the gnu versions. Etc. Basically, my Mac finds a way to annoy me every day.

I have a 2-3 year old Gazelle and a 2015 mbp. Here's my opinion: the Apple has beautiful hardware, retina screen, and an nvidia gpu. I hate everything else about it (e.g. mac os). The Gazelle shell is just a System76 branded generic laptop, but it has an i7 and ssd. The thing is a powerhouse, and I use it for almost everything.

My advice: if you want a solid development platform, System76 is the way to go (and will cost half as much). If you care more about a nice retina screen and dont mind mac os, stick with a mbp.

People do like free shit. This is why the wealthy like being wealthy. They get to live comfortable lives while their money earns them more money.

I don't buy the layman argument. Programmers might not be mathematicians or computer scientists, but they should be professionals and held to the same standards as professionals in other fields. For example, a mechanical engineer doesn't use a "laymen" definition of tensile strength when choosing materials for a design.

> Why are there so few useful Haskell programs?

How do you know how many useful Haskell programs there are? Did you count them all? How many have I written?

We must be using a different definition of simple. I've never seen a simple makefile.

This is not a free speech issue as far as the US constitution is concerned. Twitter is not part of the government.

That's my point. The real question is whether "having access to it" is of value to people. I tend to say yes because I love knowledge and take any opportunity I can to better understand the universe I am part of. But not everyone feels this way.

Math is one of those things that you'll see everywhere if you're looking for it. So its not that the mathematicians are lying, just that they have a biased perspective.

I agree for the most part. The problem is that the science that needs to be done to verify/falsify results requires a lot of knowledge. We cannot reasonably expect every citizen to have that knowledge. If they did, we wouldn't have this problem. (We'd have other problems, like who's doing all the other jobs now that everyone is a climate scientist?)

Your point about open access is very much on the mark, though. The society I want to live in is one that trusts science, and making all research freely available would, I think, greatly improve the general public's attitude even if they themselves cannot understand that research.

The problem with presenting data is that you have to be an expert (e.g. a climate scientist in this case) to thoroughly understand the techniques and assumptions used in the models. The average citizen, who is no doubt quite intelligent, isn't going to understand that stuff and certainly isn't going to put their life on hold to learn it. We need to look at the big picture here: society needs to trust science to get this stuff right. Or at the very least, we should all be asking ourselves "who benefits from the policy that this person is advocating?". The answer that we should accept for that question is "everyone", not "energy company shareholders".

Yeah, this is why I didn't become a surgeon. They have so many invented words for all the different parts of the body and diseases. Seriously, why call something a metatarsal when "foot bone" works just as well?

> Category theory in the context of haskell is a source of ideas, not a tool for formal proofs.

My thought as well.

It seems Haskell gets criticism from both ends of the spectrum: it's either too academic to be practical or too practical to be academic.

I also prefer data, but this data isn't useful. Sure, there are a lot of companies looking to hire C++ programmers, but why? Is it because of growth in the demand for C++ application development? Or is it because C++ developers are moving on and the companies are having trouble replacing them? There's probably a mixture of both, but I believe we're going to see a continuing slide towards the latter.

C and C++ will eventually die in the same way that COBOL has died. That is, they'll never go away, but there will be fewer and fewer people able and willing to use them.

I sold my collection years ago for about $1000 altogether. I started playing during 3rd Edition, had 4 of each dual land, a handful of older cards, and 4 of pretty much every card worth a damn from ice age until around when 7th edition came out. I doubt that $1000 came close to even breaking even on how much I spent on the game. However, if I still had those cards today, it would be a very different story. I never considered the cards an investment, though. I just liked playing the game at the time.

A cheap state school computer science education. It paid for itself the first year I worked as a software developer.

I'm not a millenial, but this quote sums up my attitude towards dating

> “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,”

The appeal of Haskell for me isn't necessarily that it makes everything easier. It does make a lot of things easier, but also many things become more difficult. No, the appeal of a purely functional language with an expressive type system is that it helps me write correct programs. I'm not claiming that Haskell will magically make code free of bugs, but in my personal experience when I write Haskell I make far fewer mistakes.

I can't really make the same claim of other functional languages that I've used, especially those with dynamic type checking.

There's really not much point in arguing about programming languages, though. People like what they like. I knew a guy that thought Fortran was still the greatest programming language because it's the fastest. Then you have the embedded device guys that will be using C until they die despite a mountain of valid criticism. Then there are the Lisp folks who are smart enough to not need help from a compiler to write programs. Etc. The thing is, these people are usually really productive with the tool that they've mastered, so of course they're all going to have anecdotal evidence of their language's superiority, just like me.

Not disagreeing, but Dubai is not a good example since Dubai is as hot as Dubai, and a lot of extremely wealthy people still live there.

Just listen to whoever says the thing you want to hear.

But keep this in mind: sometimes people say things to advance their own agenda.