xrange

I wonder how much atmospheric carbon dioxide has been avoided by the use of nuclear power over the last 70 years?

If Fukushima is a major event, with no fatalities, what does one consider the Banqiao Dam event, with 170,000 fatalities?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Not the OP, but 15,000 people died because of the tsunami. No one died from the radiation release at Fukushima and:

"A comprehensive assessment by international experts on the health risks associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster in Japan has concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated."

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_...

Is there a particularly egregious example that we can link to (since the book is on line)? Or maybe someone has an annotated version which has better references to prior work?

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/

>I've never heard this work described that way before.

One way to summarize the thesis of book would be to say: Historically, we've analyzed natural phenomena and tried to fit equations to the data. But Nature may be doing something analagous to running simple programs instead of solving equations. What are the implications of this? Complexity and "randomness" comes about from the "programs", not from their initial inputs/conditions. And predicting behavior of programs is harder than predicting behavior of systems of equations, which sucks.

>but not any kind of science

I think many people who aren't familiar with the book are thinking that "a new kind of science" means "a new branch of science" like we have physics, chemistry, biology, and now this new "computery" science. But the book is actually about looking at nature with the new perspective of "programs", that previous generations of people didn't have a reference frame for. And some of things that we think are "complex" might actually be following simple rules (or can better be modeled as such).

>I honestly tend to wonder if the people who are complaining about the book actually bothered to read it in its entirety, and understand the information and ideas being conveyed?

I've always wondered if there was a psychological component to it -- as in certain personality types get personally offended by Wolfram's prose. I'm certainly curious if there would be any correlation between liking/disliking the book and some sort of Meyers-Briggs type personality assessment. Maybe it is an INTJ vs. INTP type of thing?

Re: Fruitfulness. For the general thesis of "computation" vs. "equations" as the "new kind of science", it is not like Stephen is the lone practitioner...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/finite-time-blowup...

...(skip down to the last paragraph).

If one were to try to make a judgement on whether to buy a copy of this book based one one or two images in the book, I'd recommend looking at the photos on page 423 and then 424:

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p423--biological-pigmenta...

...then you could start to read the on-line version to see if Stephen Wolfram's writing style rubbed you the wrong way.

>As a "New Kind Of Science" it's atrocious.

Investigating nature starting with the premise that the "laws" may be imperative procedures instead of pure functions doesn't seem orthodox (for 2002), so isn't that "new"?

I found it to be a very interesting book. The criticisms basically boil down into three categories:

- I don't like Stephen Wolfram and his personal style offends me.

- This isn't new material because there were academic papers that covered some of this material scattered throughout the literature.

- Stephen should have been more generous in giving credit to previous work.

...If nothing else, get a copy to look at all the great pictures, and ignore the text if it bothers you.

>most concerning being the lack of mathematical rigor in the work

This book is about how very very simple programs can end up producing complex results. You can easily write the program for simulating the cellular automata in any programming language and check that you get the same picture as shown in the book. You don't have to accept anyone's philosophy of math and their opinions on the Axiom of Choice when it comes to uncountable infinities. It is completely formal. In fact, the best reason for getting the book is to encourage you to write tiny little programs to see the results for yourself.

http://math.wikia.com/wiki/Mathematical_rigor

"A comprehensive assessment by international experts on the health risks associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP) disaster in Japan has concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated"

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/fukushima_...

15,000 people died because of the tsunami. No one died from the radiation release at Fukushima.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

>K&R C no longer compiles.

    foo@virt-ubuntu:~/c$ gcc --version
    gcc (Ubuntu 6.3.0-12ubuntu2) 6.3.0 20170406
    Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
    
    foo@virt-ubuntu:~/c$ cat 'k&r.c' 
    #include<stdio.h>
    
    int main(argc, argv)
        int argc;
        char *argv[];
    {
        puts("hello, world!");
        return 0;
    }
    
    foo@virt-ubuntu:~/c$ gcc 'k&r.c' 
    foo@virt-ubuntu:~/c$ ./a.out
    hello, world!

>I find myself (especially in REPL environments) often doing `list(map(sth, sth))`.

This. I wonder if you could have a switch to make ipython print out the list instead of the iterator object at the REPL.

Wikipedia says that the first release of FreeCAD was in 2002:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCAD

...Python 3.0 was released in 2008:

https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/

...It looks like the port of FreeCAD to Python 3 stared in 2015:

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12534

>Python 2 is going to be abandoned in 2020.

But Python 2 is Free Software, so as long as people like it, they can keep improving it:

https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

Thank you for signing up to help in the porting effort for FreeCAD and Pyspread to Python 3. Free software projects depend on volunteer contributors like you.

> After more than half a century of living under a trade embargo, many Cubans have grown accustomed to shortages of basic household goods

Are there countries other than the U.S. with an embargo against Cuba? What's stopping them from trading with China or Mexico or Canada or the E.U. countries for basic household goods?

> No justification is given for why the results for the Bay Area should be generalizable for America writ large.

Hockey. Stick.

> (defgeneric xplusone (x) (1+ x))

> The sbcl compiler (called python) even creates the typed methods by itself, so mostly the defgeneric line is enough.

Is this some new SBCL extension you are talking about? That `defgeneric` line is an error in CLOS.

Makes the front page of HN, and not a single comment. I guess smalltalk is even less of a spring chicken than forth:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13594526

I was more thinking that the compatibility layer would maybe suck in a whole python 2 parser, and potentially even the interpreter, operating on potentially common objects in memory. But just how different are the bytecodes for 2 vs. 3? Even if they were very different, I guess my question is, how hard would it be to transpile 2 bytecode into 3 bytecode. I'd think it would be loads simpler than what Jython does on the JVM for what I can only imagine must be a radically different virtual machine and memory model.

I guess the real answer is probably more political rather than technical.

Interesting. I wonder what most people's thoughts are on the market/target area for Rust. My complete outsider perspective was that Rust was a "replacement" for C, C++, Ada, etc., and that "most" programs would be better suited to be written in higher level languages.

Can anyone point me in the direction of information of why is would be so hard to have a

    from __ancient_history__ import print_statement, etc.

...especially now that most of the big projects that are ever going to get converter have been converted? Even if it was slower / used more memory / etc. for those programs that did use that pragma.

>Some corps may continue to do so

https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13144713

It looks like all Python 2.8 is missing is a new name:

https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/

You might want to check out Python 2.8

https://www.naftaliharris.com/blog/why-making-python-2.8/

>This is the good kind of nationalism, the kind where people band together to defeat the global elite and the upper class/0.1%

We'll believe it or not, that's what Trump supporters think they were doing:

https://www.google.com/#q=draintheswamp

https://www.google.com/#q=globalism+vs+nationalism

If we are serious about climate change, shouldn't we be thinking long and hard about flying anywhere for a vacation? Maybe take a ferry/cruise to the Bahamas or some other Caribbean island?

https://www.frs-caribbean.com/ferry-routes

Or drive to Mexico or another Central American country?

Come on man, we all know that subtle issues are really just racist dog-whistles.