1. More important issues do make other issues make other issues less important after the have been taken into consideration by definition of word "more" and less.
After more important issues are taken care of - well yes, the do not alter the priority of other problems.
2."Hackers" are people, and the topic of this talk is not about computers either; if you are about to start political campaign you can not tal about RoR, hadoop, clouds or whatever else technological; you gotta take into account, real old like humanity issues - healthcre, fraud, flee of capital; externalities of robbing countries of enterpreneurs.
I knew that not especially bright people would read my post and think that is about doctors. No, my post is about patents: USPTO is US Patent authority, that gives patents for all industries; it is carried/lobbyed by pharma, that itself have millions of questionable patents, and very interested to leave thing as they are; attempt to dismantle software patents would disturb the swamp, and as side effect should be prevented.
1. FP is almost never done in software, it hurts performance big time, The only reason gcc uses it - it wants to be cross-platform, otherwise it might have perfectly used native FP.
Also a lot more convenient to use different floating point point formats whene they are supported by language and hardware you running on, than messing with libraries.
2. Another example : OCaml. It has no "single float" type, and that is a reason I am not gonna use it for making a compiler; I'd choose haskell or F# - both of them have float32.
3. Depends what kind of HLL we are tslking about - Python and Ruby are defintely very poor choice for a compiler : lack of strong typing, only one type of FP is used, needs explicit watch for integer operations overflow, poor performance, lack of mature, bug free implementation (compared to C++ or ML for example).
ML derived languages, however are very good for making compilers.
if you read carefully what I said, i never said that hig-level languages are bad - I said only this:
1) Compiler written in python, ruby and other "slow" (do not beleive that pyruby is slow?) languages going to take eternity to compile linux kernel. 2) You need to have _precise_ mapping between types in compiler and the language you implement. It is so important that gcc use a software library for floating point computation, otherwise you are locked-in wit you cpu's FP implementation and can not write cross-compilers.
"Job lock-in is real and affects many, many more potential startup founders than immigration policy. VCs/investors from outside SF/NY (cough Brad Feld cough Josh Kopelman cough) would especially be credible, useful voices on a matter that's actually front and center right now."
I do not see anything bogus in my reasons. There a lo mor important problems to be solved for making the market for software/internet startups better place. Namely - fixing pharmaceutical industry which is main reason why such an evil corporation like USPTO exists, which inflicts problems on software/internet industry by means of issuing bogus patents for buttons on webpages so on. I kno many American people who suffered a loot from patent lawsuits. Heck, even Reaearch on Motion has been bitten by bogus patent.
Because:
1. If you work on tourist visa, your defintely need to exceed the allowed period of staying, let's say a month, and you are destined to become illegal _resident_; but when you come as startup founder, you will be _legal_ resident, inot matter if you __work __ illegaly.
2. Now you came as a startup, what you can do - instead of making a new unique product you just go and work with a software giant, doing let's say testing. Who is gonna watch what you are actually doing?
> low level details don't really come into play in compiler construction until the code generation
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Not true. modern compilers do a lot of optimization long before code generation, and you really want to have for example floating point to be behaving exactly like in target language - if you collapse operations on constants such as 1.0D + 4.0. And aside from optimization, lexer - it has to distinguish single-precision and double precision floats.
Impractical:
1) The compiler is gonna be very slow;
2) If you make compiler for low-level language, such as C
you need precise correspondence between data types used in cpu, datatypes used in compiler's implementation language and datatypes in the target language.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded. In fact they'd cause there to be more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.
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Of course they will not be hired by other companies...Legally...But USA is not the country where illegal employment is punished.
Every time when you open access to your (rich) country to poorer people think about how the system can be abused.
Be ready for influx of "startup founders", that would bring to the country taxi cab drivers, gardeners, all kind of "engineers" from India, China, Mexico, North Africa and so on..
Did you forget that very recent scandal with Satyam... They did what I just described...
You know what is the problem "efficient market" capitalism?
It is logical enough to make people with IQ 100-110 attracted and interested and even fascinated by it, but it is completely devoid of theoretic basis - the only basic premise is Adam Smith's invisible hand; and that is disturbing for smarter people. Like Stiglits often says - hand is invisible because it is not.
Several things:
1. Ok, 15w or 11w - not a big deal, the difference in energy savings less than 10%. Irrelevant worry.
2. But real issue is spectral content of light, it is not same, and frankly, I find flourescent light very unpleasant.
I watched through the video. And the man in the end of the clip correctly pointed out - Murdoch is a free market believer, which renders most of his words nonsensical.
"The only guarantee of freedom is profit"...
I'd say opposite - "the only guarantee of profit (for society in long run) is freedom",
Well, I think there is grain of truth in this research...
...but,
I measures only one variable, frankly irrelevant, without taking into account another one,which is amount of happiness these adopted kids have in their adult lifes for the amount of money they make. I mean, every person differs on scale how material he/she i, and that trait probably is inheritable.
For example, USA has rather low quality of live compared to GDP per capita, but Canada is opposite - gives better quality of live with lower GDP per capita. However Canada has less opportunity to become super-rich. So when people choose where to immigrate to, depending on personality the can make choice.
My point is - if these kids, who is as happy as their peers despite having lower income, that is very good, it means the spend less resources to "maintain lifestyle", less neurotic etc.
Expensive to do on per individual basis if it is for government curiosity, but can be used by corporation - let say some company that have unstable staff, such as retailers, fast food chains, installs a device in the bathroom, collect samples and once in let's say month send them to the lab. Can be used for discrimination to enforce occasional drug users to work for smaller salaries...
Scala is not only means [A Ladder; Stairs],
But also A Rock, in Slavic languages...
And Marin (the creator of Scala) has polish last name,
and most probably is polish..
I already gave my points about immigration in some earlier posts, but my opinion is: Immigration is irrelevant to prosperity of country. Several reasons for that:
1. The countries many immigrants are from, you know they have very affordable medicine and education (former Soviet Union, for example), so in fact any modern American big software company parasite on this cheap facilities, without any interest in developing similar things domestically.
2. There plenty of examples of countries with high rates of innovation, but with low immigration rates: Sweden (ericsson), Finland (Nokia), Japan.
3. I dare to claim, that immigration erodes values of American society.Imagine a person from China or India (the country where 60 million people literraly live in poop, they are born in cast of poop-cleaners-by-bare-hands), the person comes to USA and imeddiately becomes middle class (upper sometimes). Well, this new middle class built from immigrants from ugly places, thet have a lot higher tolerance for injustice and corruption.
My verdict:
Cargo cult critics ("Somebody else criticizes, so I can do as well, in a cargo cult way, by treating what they do a prori mocking, and without real understanding of matters") of management practices.