wedesoft

Python uses reference counting. The garbage collector is only required for cyclic references and can be disabled.

Of all talks by rich Hickey, this is my favourite.

Dr Meister: Using Lisp, LLVM, and C++ for molecular programming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g

That's where the right to privacy comes in. The input should not be there to begin with.

Yes, if you control the language, you control the debate.

> ... but whenever I read the VPRI articles, I always feel there's too little code to play with.

That's the whole point of the STEPS project: Less code to play with ;)

The e-waste stream and the throwaway consumer culture is what's really sad.

Thanks. Very nice articles.

Maybe it was just bad luck but my transaction took 2 days to get confirmed even though I added the standard fee of 0.0001 BTC.

Edit: Yes, the multilayer approach with Bitcoin as a backbone makes sense.

I wonder whether there could be a hierarchy of transactions (like credit cards, banks, and cross-bank transactions). I.e. not requiring the entirety of transactions to be present in the top blockchain.

I think it's a really weird situation where everybody has painted themselves into a corner:

* the emission tests are extremely tight

* the car industry is very competitive

* loosening emission standards would be a politial issue

As far as I know things started badly with emission tests not being representative and car manufacturers doing cheap fixes to pass them. Now would be a good time to fix this mess.

With 2 billion lines of code I would consider the problem of developers stepping on each other's toes essentially solved.

At my school somebody did build a small time bomb and he made it go off in the dust bin at the playground. Even then the police didn't get involved.

Reducing the copyright term to something more reasonable would help a lot, too.

There is an old format called Mealmaster

Bezos can even make raw matter work extra hours for him.

To whoever contributed to it: the swscale library (colorspace conversions) was really helpful during my PhD work.

According to a "Megastructures" documentary, because Shanghai harbour is to small for the new generation of container ships.

I am currently trying out Kanboard [1]. Not as slick as Trello but self-hosted and easy to install. Wonder whether anybody else has tried it and what they think about it.

[1] http://kanboard.net/

Ok, I guess I better turn MMS auto-retrieve back on then ;)

It's not about being able to do harder and harder things. It is about making hard things easy. When you help others like that, you will realize the value of your work.

Macros is something I really miss in Ruby. But static classes strikes me as a bit of a limitation. E.g. a Crystal REPL can't create classes if I understand it correctly.

It helps to focus on the fundamentals. These change very slowly.

Here is a talk by David Nolen comparing Scheme and Clojure (and my summary of it):

http://www.wedesoft.de/clojure-for-schemers.html

I am not a "web developer" at the moment but rather into signal processing and I can only agree. Why is it so hard to just draw a pixel on the screen? Or why are there so many ways of doing it?

I can recommend having a look at GOOPS [1] (GNU Guile's implementation of CLOS) for inspiration. It provides multiple dispatch and facilitates overloading of existing functions (such as "+").

[1] http://www.wedesoft.de/oop-with-goops.html

Arthur C. Clarke: 2001

Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama

Pierce Anthony and Robert E. Margroff: The Ring

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes: The Legacy of Heorot

Stanislaw Lem: The Invincible

Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy

Yes, to delay gratification is a fundamental human skill.

Ok, will do. Cheers :)

I did something similar in Ruby but using GCC as a "JIT" compiler for image processing (software [1], thesis [2]). I can really recommend JIT compilation for doing array processing.

[1] http://www.wedesoft.de/hornetseye-api/ [2] http://www.wedesoft.de/downloads/thesis_wedekind.pdf

EDIT: In my approach I didn't go through the Ruby AST though. Rather I used the approach of injecting "GCCVariables" which emit C code instead of doing the actual computation.