lower

There were actually localized version of Visual Basic for Applications.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications?...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21352796

The shop has the 12 available replacement parts: https://shop.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?categ...

I've spent so much time for pointless reformatting. With Springer LNCS it's often that you have to work really hard to cram everything into the page limit. Then Springer does some editing in the bibliography, and the article then often overflows by one or two bibliography entries and is published like that, making the effort of meeting the page limit a complete waste time

We've had various examples like these:

- Puzzles: Sudoku, St8ts

- Bridge crossing: Missionaries and cannibals, 17 minute bridge crossing (I need a computer to solve this anyway)

- Concurrency: finding bug in mutual exclusion algorithm (Peterson algorithm with a bug)

- Graphs: coloring a map, finding a Hamilton path

- Sorting: Finding bugs in a sorting network

For many students it was difficult to encode problems in SAT. They seemed to understand given example encodings, but then found it difficult to vary them. There is a lot of freedom in how one may encode things and it's hard at first to debug at first when things don't work in the way you're expecting. If there is no solution, then one needs to investigate where there are unwanted constraints or errors in the encoding. If there are unwanted solutions, one needs to identify the missing constraints. It was hard to get across how to do this and it's probably frustrating for beginners.

I used to teach formal methods at university, including a course with a lot of SAT examples. We tried to make it as practical as possible, with many examples and exercises in Java (where you just generate your formulas and call a solve method). Thing is, most students seemed to hate it passionately, just like with reductions to SAT in complexity theory.

Yeah, but then you have: It seems like every week or two this year, another crisis presented itself, each manageable in isolation.

I've had this happen and it really grinds you down when you work full-out for months and, just when you think you've contained all the crises, the next one drops.

> But the professor said he'd never do it again because 30 minutes * 30ish students was too much work.

The old German Diplom system (replaced by BSc/MSc about 15 years ago) was based on oral exams. The way this worked there was that there were much fewer exams. For example, in Computer Science I had my first oral exams two years into the degree, and there were only five of them: one in Mathematics, one in each of Theoretical, Practical and Applied, Computer Science, and one for the second subject. Each of these oral exam was 30 minutes but covered the content of four semesters. There was a second round of such exams at the end of the degree and that was it.

To be admitted to an oral exam, one needed to pass the courses that the exam was going to be about. Lecturer were free to set the passing requirements. It was often just something like a coursework threshold of 60%.

There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence. -- Chen Ning Yang

It's interesting that OCaml's syntactic quirks go back to Edinburgh ML. I had never known about this bit of history.

~/Repos of course

It's the Holy Roman Empire of modern times.

The crisis is having an impact on science funding in general:

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202207262...

EU legislation applied in the UK until the end of 2020. The UK's withdrawal agreement was finalized in January 2020, and there was a transition period until the end of the year where all EU legislation still applied.

Not within the EU. There is EU legislation requiring the costs within the EU to be that same as at home.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/internet-tel...

Hitler learns topology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyD4p8_y8Kw

Also check out Ipe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software)

Imagine what they could save by disabling autoplay.

"And the launch date for the first manned Mars expedition? Maybe 1986 wouldn't be a bad year, from all angles."

I remember looking at Clean at the time when Haskell98 was new. It had uniqueness types at the time and this seemed really cool for efficient destructive updates. But all the excitement was with Haskell.

Found an accompanying article: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190522-(Dont-Fear...

This reminds me of an old story about the original development of OS X Aqua in the 90s.

At the time they were doing functioning mockups for the Aqua design in Macromedia Director. It was not easy to actually implement the UI with the available hardware, but the mockups showed that it was possible. "Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that 'Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?'"

Only source I can find is: https://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/03/15.9.shtml

> As it so happened, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team had already been working on a ground-up redesign of the operating system after they discovered that their original goal of porting the look-and-feel of Mac OS 8 completely to Mac OS X would be impossible. "We were only going to be able to get about 95% of the way there [putting the Mac OS 8 interface on Mac OS X], which is possibly the worst thing you could do," Mr. Ratzlaff said. The redesign had been scrubbed by higher-ups at Apple but was put back on track by Mr. Jobs.

> With that, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team's list of requirements for the operating system, which had been called overly ambitious and led to laughter from engineers who heard of them only weeks prior, became mandatory. These included 32-bit color with alpha channels and QuickTime integration, all being able to run on a system with just a G3 processor and as a little as 8MB of video memory. Mocking up the operating system's design and functionality with Macromedia's Director, Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that "Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?"

Ah, you're right. If one goes to x_{i+1}, then there will be 2^i Maybes in the type. The number of Maybe-occurrences in the type doubles in each step and sharing won't help there.

Yes, types are usually represented by a DAG with sharing. OCaml does so, for example, and I assume ghc does something similar.

So, while id id has type ('a -> 'a) -> ('a -> 'a), this is stored in memory by a pointer structure that amounts to let 'b = ('a -> 'a) in ('b -> 'b). The type of id id id would become let 'b = ('a -> 'a) in let 'c = ('b -> 'b) in ('c -> 'c). This grows linearly. If one were to write out the types without sharing then their size would grow exponentially.

With x1 = Just, the program is accepted instantly by ghc. I think you need a type variable to appear twice.

Maybe it's a good idea to add a concrete example (can't edit the reply anymore):

OCaml:

  let x1 = fun y -> (y, y) in
  let x2 = fun y -> x1 (x1 y) in
  let x3 = fun y -> x2 (x2 y) in
  let x4 = fun y -> x3 (x3 y) in
  let x5 = fun y -> x4 (x4 y) in
  let x6 = fun y -> x5 (x5 y) in
    x6 (fun z -> z)

Haskell:

  test = let 
    x1 = \y -> (y, y) 
    x2 = \y -> x1 (x1 y) 
    x3 = \y -> x2 (x2 y)
    x4 = \y -> x3 (x3 y) 
    x5 = \y -> x4 (x4 y) 
    x6 = \y -> x5 (x5 y)
    in x6 (\z -> z)

If you can compile these, add x7. The effort increases exponentially as one adds x7, x8 and so on.

For languages with Hindley-Milner typing, like SML and OCaml, it has long been known that type-checking is even worse in the worst case (DEXPTIME hard) [1]. But the programs where this matters aren't what one would write by hand, typically.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/96709.96748

> If you want to see a POV test drive in a Trabant, here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzEPWttWVlk

One thing to note is that this is a Trabant 1.1 not a 601. The 1.1 was produced only from 1990 to 1991 and had a four-stroke VW engine (produced under license from VW). So the sound in the video is not the one typical two-stroke engine of the standard 601. The appearance of the car is very similar to the 601, though.

I don't really understand the rationale either, but it's easy to add a hot bottom edge with this extension:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4222/hot-edge/

> She added, “There’s really no evidence that anyone has ever gotten Covid-19 by touching a contaminated surface.”

This reminds me of "Rubbish bin the likely source of Covid infection": https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/427446/rubbish-bin-the-l...

You mean they've been short-selling gorillas?