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IvarTJ

217 karma · joined January 6, 2011

http://stud.ux.uis.no/~ivartj/
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IvarTJ··on Is Scheme Lisp?
True, but as I understand it, the Scheme standard isn’t as complicated as that of Common Lisp. Implementations are partially standardized through SRFIs as well, which I think is a more active process.
IvarTJ··on Is Scheme Lisp?
I have chosen to look further into Scheme rather than Common Lisp, in part because it appears simpler, but also that Common Lisp is said to be directed by a standard that has stood still for many years and which doesn’t address many new issues faced by programmers. Scheme appears more nimble with many different implementations for different purposes.

For historical reasons, I would call Scheme a Lisp, and I would not use the word Lisp as synonymous to Common Lisp. Common Lisp surfaced after Scheme, and Lisp was used of programming languages even before Scheme.

IvarTJ··on 254 Neurons per Cell in Genetic CA for Linux
I get a bunch of warnings when compiling it, but it runs.
IvarTJ··on ARPANET dialogues - fictional chat logs
There are Wikipedia articles dedicated to them. Marcel was Belgian while Edward was Palestinian-American.
IvarTJ··on I'm a linux noob, that thought he knew something, got destroyed in an interview.
I believe Ctrl+D should send end-of-file to console applications, ending the input stream to the program from the shell, while Ctrl+C kills the application.
IvarTJ··on GNU Hurd in Google Summer of Code 2011
The hypertext project Xanadu, founded in 1960.
IvarTJ··on CAPTCHAs decrease conversion rates
A point made in the comments of the post is that blind users using screenreaders may notice and interact with the honeypot fields.
IvarTJ··on Don't distract new programmers with OOP
I sometimes want to avoid using floats because of the inaccuracy that sometimes arise with their use. If I recall correctly, in Haskell division requires the numerator and denominator to be of the class fractional. So how I did integer division was something like this

round (fromIntegral x / fromIntegral y)

round is one of several functions that transform numbers to integers.

IvarTJ··on Don't distract new programmers with OOP
As someone who gave Haskell a shot, I was very quickly put off by having to learn functions to convert from integers to floats, while such things were automatically taken care of by more low-level programming languages such as C.

Also, I was confused by the package management with Cabal, and now I appear to have broken it with an error message whenever I start ghci. When choosing a first language for students, you have to think of idiots such as me.

IvarTJ··on Live demo of Asana, a new product from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz
He mentions Google Wave as “Jack of all trades, master of none,” and say that their application will focus on project management.
IvarTJ··on Study: Diet May Help ADHD Kids More Than Drugs
ADHD has a long history of claims of diets supposedly helping kids with the diagnosis. It began with the Feingold diet, went on to the Gluten-free/Casein-free diet, and now apparently exclusion diets. I am rather sceptical.
IvarTJ··on You won't find FSF on Facebook
Facebook appears to have had a tremendous effect on countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The alternatives that FSF lists may not have been as effective because of the technical difficulty for a large number of people to set up such a service.
IvarTJ··on My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs
Once I stopped punishing Symbolics, I had to figure out what to do next. I had to make a free operating system, that was clear — the only way that people could work together and share was with a free operating system.

At first, I thought of making a Lisp-based system, but I realized that wouldn't be a good idea technically. To have something like the Lisp machine system, you needed special purpose microcode. That's what made it possible to run programs as fast as other computers would run their programs and still get the benefit of typechecking. Without that, you would be reduced to something like the Lisp compilers for other machines. The programs would be faster, but unstable. Now that's okay if you're running one program on a timesharing system — if one program crashes, that's not a disaster, that's something your program occasionally does. But that didn't make it good for writing the operating system in, so I rejected the idea of making a system like the Lisp machine.

Is this something that is still relevant to modern attempts at making a Lisp operating system?

IvarTJ··on Poll: Which version of Google Chrome are you using?
Just Chromium.
IvarTJ··on [dead]
On my laptop, there’s a light that goes on whenever the camera is activated. Perhaps she was looking at that.
IvarTJ··on Show HN: Mathalon
I sensed that “What you need, when you need it” was written somewhere on the front page. The Live Updates were first mistaken for ads. I like the idea though, as I have been looking for something like this.
IvarTJ··on Retracted autism/vaccine study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds
This has been known for several years by people who have followed Brian Deer’s investigations and the Autism Omnibus Proceedings.

At the same time there have been massive targeting of parents of autistic children by quack therapists.

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