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pierrebai
Joined 1,310 karma

  1. Strawman detection activated.

    The goal of giving money is not to make those who receive it more educated, better parents or making them politically active. I mean, why did I have to say that?

    (The amount of money is also unlikely to enbale to make savings for the future.)

    The goal is that their immediate poverty decreases. Why is the author insistent on the measurement of unrelated stats? Because he has an ax to grind.

  2. OTOH, 99% of use cases don't care about performance and just want a portable implementation.

    While it could be useful to have a "fast" variation that offers no guarantee at all, what you would end up with (because people are vain) is that too may people would use those instead "because perf", even though the actual usage is not performance critical, and have code that breaks whenever the compiler or platform changes.

  3. Knowing that a typical maze will have branching paths at the beginning, but necessarily one good path at the end, I find it easier to start from the goal and work my way backward.
  4. But your example is not reflective of the study. Are you saying that the 17% reduction is for some reason significant but the other ones, all of which would inconveniently disagree with the result you want, are not, even though they are in the same study?

    IOW, you're saying that among the study results, all that agree with your POV are valid, all that don't are invalid. That's quite some bias there.

  5. Well, we read the article, which cites many studies. Maybe she is doing a super selective review of the field, but she does not merely quote one study, but several, all of which indicate that there is no correlation between saturated fat and cardiovascular problems.

    IOW, we did not merely "read and trusted one random article" but assessed the presented evidence. You OTOH, merely provided ad-hominem attack on both the author and anyone who dared believe the presented evidence, which smacks of trying to shame people in not voicing their opinion.

  6. Ah, the old "if you do not spent your time, effort an interest where I have chosen to spend them, then you are an inferior human being to me."

    Everyone judges people who do less about subject X, Y, Z to be criminal, lazy slob, and everyone doing more to be inflexible annoying zealots.

    Woe those who are not me and do things differently, for they are worthless.

  7. Isn't this whole description a lie, both ways?

    You can embed/tunnel any network transport into another. There is nothing magical about the internet and IP. It is actually being tunneled when you're using a cable modem. WiFi is a horrible hack that encapsulate IP in a very ugly way to make it onto it's wireless tech.

    You could have tunnel ATM over IP, I'm pretty sure of it. The depiction seems to me like a flattering extolment of IP.

  8. No, since they use an integer (Z) as the denominator. So their representation support having -1 (i.e 0) as the denominator.
  9. I wonder why they chose to represent rationals with subtracting one from the denominator. It makes human parsing of the value harder and in many case makes the implementation code slighter harder; for example the equality op need to increment both denominators before using them. I suspect such increment must be constantly be needed left and right?
  10. Some of the ideas in the blog must be speculative, given that it fell through a wormhole, being published September 17, 2024.
  11. ... or simply that the LOGO language syntax and choice of commands is confusing? Without formal explanation, how surprising is it really that a child would assume that STOP mean stop?

    I'd bet that if LOGO had used RETURN, like many other languages, then the children's reasoning would be likely be more accurate. Or go the other way and make them tell you what this or that brainfuck[1] program does. So, to me, this research says more about LOGO choices than anything.

    [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Brainfuck

  12. Looking at the code, "maintainability" is quite relative: it might be maintainable by the original author, but the code has no comment and is chuck-full of magic constants without any explanations. Or'ing this hex value, and'ing that other hex value, etc.
  13. The article is just plain wrong about classes: if you have declared any constructor, then the language will not provide a default constructor and default-initialization will fail with a compiler diagnostic.

    So their claim that "T t;" will "do nothing" is incorrect.

        class T
        {
        public:
            T(int);
        };
        T t;
    
    Will fail.
  14. I'm utterly confused by the description of the solution of Hilbert's 10th problem.

    On one hand, the article claims that Diophantine equations are polynomials. On the other hand, it claims that when JR is true, a Diophantine equations grows faster than a polynomial.

    How can a polynomial grow faster than polynomial? That seems like a contradiction to me.

  15. Interestingly, there is a common pattern for fixed-points and cycles for different number lengths: numbers made of 4, 5 and 9. For example

    length 3: fixed-point 495 length 5: 2-cycle containing 59994 length 6: fixed-point 59994

    Similarly for digits 6, 1, 4, 7:

    length 4: 6174 length 5: 4-cycle containing 61974 length 6: fixed-point 631764

  16. Reading the example, I really wish the syntax for push and pop had been "<foo" (push foo on stack) and ">bar" (pop from stack into bar). I find the choice of $ and ^ not obvious. Especially since, for me, ^ implies popping, not pushing.
  17. Was it firing was it not? It's all semantics, people on both sides of the fence have legitimate reasons to choose one over the other. Get over it.

    The real interesting bit, is that Paul Graham somehow thought it was worthwhile to stick his neck out and improve Sam Altman public image by clarifying he was ever fired from YC.

  18. IDK, if my explanation is correct, but I do believe it is. I t goes as follow.

    Imagine that you have a container of potential limitless capacity. The container starts with smalls capacity, equal to the real limited capacity that the real algorithm uses. As you add elements, when the container is full, its capacity is doubled, but all elements are then placed in a random position.

    When you're done, you're told the occupancy of the subset of the large container corresponding to the initial size and how many times the container size was doubled. Multiplying that occupancy by the power of two of the number of doubling gives you an approximation of the real size.

    The small catch is that in the actual algorithm, due to the discarding, the final number of elements, the occupancy, is somewhat erroneous.

    EDIT

    Another way to say this: you got a container of limited capacity S. When full, you "virtually" double its size and then randomly move elements over the full "imaginary" size of the virtual container. So after the first filling, you end up with about 1/2 the elements. After the second filling 1/4, etc. Also, since now your "virtual" container is larger, when you add a new element, there is only 1/2^n the it will be place inside your limited-capacity view of the entire virtual container.

    At the end, the approximate real count is the number of elements you got multiplied by 2 to the power of the number of size doubling.

    Again, it is as if you have a small window into a limitless container.

  19. I have a hard time swallowing the hubris of the teller. No one was to be able to approach or chat with Orson Wells... except him, of course, who "connected" with Orson, so it was all OK and he'd launch with Orson too! But the others, these inferiors, mere crew, set extras. God, even a clapper boy could not /possibly/ do their job as they would need to get near Orson Wells!!!

    But him, the director, yeah, he could approach talk, whatever. He's in another classssssssss, you see...

  20. Read the example code, have a sinking feeling that is not taken from a real tested example. Either there are multiple unexplained symbols or teh code does not actually run.

    For example, in "Implementing a Workflow" the execute_activity refers to Purchaser.purchase, which is not declared anywhere.

    If the execute_activity times-out after 1 minutes, the status does not seem to be updated anywhere.

    In "Running a Worker", do_purchaser is passed as an activity, without explanation. (I guess I'd need to read the fundamental Temporal docs?)

  21. The problem with this thinking is that you are creating dissatisfaction for 25 cents.

    Let's say, you sell your software as a single-version perpetual license. You sell it for 150$. A typical user uses it 8 hours a month. After a year, that's 96 hours. So they spend less than 2$ per hour (I'm rounding in the seller's favor.) So using it for 5 minutes, 1/12h, is less than 25 cents. (Again rounding up in the seller's favor.)

    Is this about not giving away 25 cents?

    This is where SaaS wins over, but even there, the overhead, both for sellers and users, of managing payment for people who want to do one-shot work is never going to be worth it.

  22. The fact that science and religion can have similar flaws or components is shallow. Churches in the US and universities in the US both use English. That does not make them the same.

    What makes science is a self-consistent framework and tree of knowledge that successfully model the universe and for which proof and experiments can repeatedly redone giving the (approximate) same results.

    All religions fail on one or more of these criteria.

  23. The explanation could be a combination of experience, details, survivor bias and true scottman.

    That is with experience you can select something on the ocean far away that you can track (kelp, etc), with experience and focus to accurately track it and take into account its own movement. Then the method is obviously only promoted by those who successfully survived using it, as the potential nay-sayers who used it and failed are no longer there to give a counter-point. Finally, those who did not use it successfully are probably characterized as "not good navigators", in circular logic.

  24. I find the use case where you have a system in production but could not possibly use the official Python for that system... unusual?

    Double so since Python code (.py) is itself portable, and I would assume that the amount of work to make all the necessary extension be built into your APE vs just using the standard pip/pipenv/poetry/etc to be in favor of the latter.

    Not even talking about the maintainability of the resulting system by other people who'd have to learn how to handle building an APE.

  25. I suppose it may also apply to voodoo dolls. Make an effigy, put pins in it, burn it for emotional release.
  26. I find it hard to reconcile the growth and positive message in these blogs with the ultimate tragic end of his life.
  27. Repeatedly clicking the same bar keeps shrinking it... weird
  28. Come on now, if it was /that other company/ you'd be saying it without a pause.

    FUD

    See? Not hard to say, even when it is Apple and not Microsoft. The concept that browser allow one web site to read the storage of other sites is ludicrous. SuuuuuUUUuuure Apple can't /guarantee/ that the browser has no bug... which assumes Apple can somehow prove their own browser is bug-free. Plus, what prevents Apple from launching separate instances with separate data permissions for WPA? That's is 99% certainly what they did with their own WebKit-based solution.

    FUD FUD FUD

  29. Of course, Python would have been way more awesome if they did not reject the much more reader-friendly and idiomatic:

      squared_div_by_3 = [
          for i in range(10):
              if i % 3 == 0:
                  i**2
      ]
    
    That is, just transforming the normal for loop and if into a list comprehension by surrounding it with brackets. It would even preserve the friendly forced blocking and indentation. Can you imagine?

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