224 karma · joined December 17, 2013
Capsela was really cool, but I mostly remember that the tolerances or the connectors were loose enough that some didn't connect properly, and some other just stuck together forever.
And now I program.
Correlation not causation, but...
I can't read the wikipedia these days, there aren't enough opinions.
Give them to me.
Now.
I need them.
Currently bingeing http://slatestarcodex.com, and many, many of the blogs he links to.
In a completely different category, I enjoy war reporting blogs for a really down-to-earth, naturalistic (and arguably overly militaristic) point of view of geopolitic issues.
- The War Nerd (http://pando.com/author/garybrecher/)
- War is Boring (https://medium.com/war-is-boring)
And also why I cry when people create languages that are one simple regex away from brainfuck and call those esoteric.
Soo also: Malbolge, so evil that the only non-stupid programs in it were generated by LISP scripts
Also, there is something about using the same engine on every stage to gather more data per launch, but iirc different engine profiles are used for different velocities and air densities long the launch. I wonder what's the efficiency loss of using a single engine profile for the whole launch.
Crazy obvious, I know! But it is a thing I learned this year.
2) what the exact fuck is "programming aptitude" anyways? The article defines it as "having good grades in a CS program". Which is part of why I needed to rant against CS education.
What kind of "programming"?
What "ability"?
Ability to write space-O(my_god * n) sorting algorithms? Ability to duct-tape queries to an ill-documented SOAP webservice and upsert the return into a Your-Boss-Normal-Form database schema? Ability to brutally optimize the runtime of a really hairy numerical analysis algorithm? Ability to design a centralized data pipeline architecture and lead 12 hackers during the implementation and migration? Ability to find the off-the-shelf OSS project that solves the first 50% of the problem instead?
I was watching the news the other day on TV, which is something I almost never do, and there was a segment about the educative value of tablets, smartphones and laptops for teenagers and children. The value of the freely available information on the internet was discussed, along with the quality of free and... not free educative and scientific applications, and the ill effects of such devices on people's attention span, and... That's it.
Example devices included many, many Apple products, a few off-the-shelf Android devices. A Windows machine running MS Word.
Same ideology regarding technology in education: locked-down workstations with user-friendly applications, internet access which blocks every port except for 80 and 443.
A relentless and sustained effort to erase everything but the topmost layer of the IT stack. Locked-down devices. People come to me asking me to remove viruses, to speed up their old XP machines fraught with annoyware. No Windows license, don't want to pay for one, don't want Linux. Computers run on magic, right? How can you know that programming stuff and not be able to remove all that bad magic from my computer. Computer Science students who can't find the slash on their keyboards. People who see computers as a monolithic entity rather than a brittle but transparent stack of conceptually distinct layers. The new generation of systems administrators, can't scp a tar at the other end of the lab.
A teacher spending three hours explaining red-black trees to a class scrolling down 9gag; students, diploma in hand, who aren't entirely sure what's the difference between an array and a hash, who are not sure of what happens when one puts an array in another array, in PHP, after 120 hours spent theoretically writing PHP.
Computer Science students convinced that Linux is 100% not worth learning, in any way, because nobody uses it.
This is how the knowledge economy dies.
It's one of the most polarizing and memetic thing to happen in popular philosophy and epistemology, and cultists typically end up moving into less sectarian areas of the internet pretty quickly.
LW has a culture that encourages and celebrates self-consciousness, and knowledge and correction of one's cognitive biases.
LW is a place where people have flame wars about epistemology. LW is a place where the participants of a given flame war adopt the logically correct conclusion reached through civilized and organised discussion.
LW is beautiful.
Let it go.
Nearly all open-source software projects either the source or at least a specification/standard for the upcoming software very early.
OSS doesn't begin with closed alphas of closed software and a content-free press release.
Thankful because this made me valuable to an industry currently growing and almost guaranteed to keep doing so even while the greater occidental free lunch is slowly coming to an end.
Thankful because among all of the social and professional situations that I can't stand due to concentration problems, I found a tiny niche in which I can thrive.
Thankful because in this microcosm, my flaws are a benefit, and my hobby is a cash cow.
wow
For some reason I'm fascinated by how slow this thing is, but it seems obvious, with the size and all.
Even if that wasn't the case, their design just avoids the issue by not trying to do any typecast, ever.
I think it all boils down to considerations of idealism vs. realism, in the end, and yes, I have to admit, I managed to get a sort of big picture understanding of Yesod and its ORM, and it's definitely a cool design. Can't say I know as much about Happstack, but the hello worlds were smaller. And the authors didn't have to invent two dependency management tools to get it to compile... /off-topic
I actually used something akin to monads to write a quick and dirty parser combinator library... In PHP! It was really fun, but I have to admit that it got really hard to keep track of what was function, what was return, what was supposed to be passed along to the next function and so on without any real typing. For the first time I... I wanted monads.
But still, I have 99 problems and I'd say 97 of them are undefined, nulls, erroneous typecasts, unexpected layers of wrapping, and so on. I wrote bad code, my teammates did, and here we are. I want to get rid of those so that I can, at last, have real problems.
Then I'll port my REST server in Haskell ; )
I can't see why anyone would go and mess with CPython's internals like that in production code. Other than for nefarious purposes, I guess.
(ref this absolutely fascinating paper
http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation....
and this piece of V8 dox quoting the aforementioned paper
https://developers.google.com/v8/design)
It seems that adding a type system to a dynamic language has little real drawbacks compared to designing language and type system at the same time, for both performance and type safety considerations.
So, with element of answer 1) ruled out as Lua is also dynamic, and 2) ruled out by your evidence, remains
3. Python's object model can lead to inefficient memory access