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_mhr_on A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (2011)

Great answer, thanks.

_mhr_on A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (2011)

Can you elaborate on why graph databases are important in this context?

_mhr_on Red Programming Language 0.6.3

Could I use Red in a manner similar to Awk for record processing?

_mhr_on The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee’s early programming career

Well, given that Apache Kafka is written in Scala and Java, I would suppose...

_mhr_on Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

Imagine when entire videos can be synthesized.

_mhr_on The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Programming (2014) [pdf]

The difference between code and literature is that, while both can be abstract, code must ultimately be executed unambiguously. Underneath all the abstraction is concrete meaning. This is unlike literature, which concerns ineffable concepts like hopelessness and anguish - qualia. We don't program fuzzy, human ideas. Otherwise, a computer wouldn't be able to do anything.

_mhr_on The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Programming (2014) [pdf]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? What would it mean to be able to manipulate the call graph? In which situations would that be useful?

_mhr_on The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Programming (2014) [pdf]

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate: isn't the purpose of an IDE to keep you from having to remember parameters and stuff like that? Autocomplete?

_mhr_on The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Programming (2014) [pdf]

How would you prefer to see computers programmed, besides code?

_mhr_on Don’t Take My Folders Away: Organizing Personal Info to Get Things Done (2005)

I'm also working on a personal DB. My email's in my profile if you're interested in chatting about our ideas.

_mhr_on Why Don't We Have a General-Purpose Tree Editor? (2014)

Can I email you? I'm working on similar ideas. I can't find an email address. My email address is in my profile.

_mhr_on Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out

Perhaps Trump is unpredictable... but the people he's choosing for his administration are not.

_mhr_on Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Never female dominated (at least, in terms of degrees), but there was much less of a gap.

I couldn't find occupational statistics, only academic. I did find a lot of anecdotes about software being a stereotypically female activity, but I couldn't find actual data.

_mhr_on Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

They're not pleased with a majority female program. They're pleased with a half-male / half-female program. They don't want it to be lopsided in either direction because they believe programming as a skill is orthogonal to sex.

I think making computer science assignments and quizzes fun and less intimidating is a very different idea from the extreme of macho nursing.

Your article shows that teachers were making girls feel unwelcome because they didn't understand the cultural in-jokes. There's a big difference between cultural predisposition and predisposition towards a skill. I find it really hard to believe that programming and problem-solving is something men are just generally better at compared to women. If we measure problem-solving ability by IQ, then women are just as capable as men, though it looks like there are more males than females on each side of the spectrum of extraordinarily good at problem-solving and extraordinarily bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intellige...

_mhr_on Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

It'd be a fun project to write a an APL-like that compiles down to NumPy. Would it be pointless? Another interesting project might be to make an APL-like for probabilistic programming.

_mhr_on An open source deep learning curriculum

Really good idea. One of the things that I found lacking (in retrospect, now that you mention it) in Coursera when I used it was that study groups weren't an official feature. I'm sure people made them unofficially in the forum, but it wasn't an official part of Coursera. I think it would really elevate MOOCs to another level if you could have face-to-face Skype-like study groups with other students during assignments.

_mhr_on Why I wrote a book about interpreters

I suggest http://web.archive.org/web/20160413005246/http://www.norvig..... It's extremely easy to understand. Once you start adding features to your Lisp interpreter and extending it, you'll eventually realize that the naive recursive descent approach is getting in the way of your more complicated ideas, but you'll be ready to try more sophisticated approaches to writing an interpreter. Nothing beats Norvig to me for learning how to write an interpreter as a beginner. Lisp isn't as complex as the Monkey programming language from https://interpreterbook.com, but I argue that that's a good thing. Once you get the basic principles, writing an interpreter for a language like Monkey seems like a much more easily surmountable task.

_mhr_on Homeopathy 'treatments' must be labelled to say they do not work, US gov orders

It works according to what proof? Do you know of a scientific article that compared homeopathy against a control placebo that showed homeopathy outperforming the placebo?

_mhr_on Swift and the Legacy of Functional Programming

I would call a language like Haskell "purely functional" and a language like OCaml "impurely functional". A functional programming language to me is a programming language where functions are in charge of data. In a language like Java, data is in charge of functions (broadly speaking). In a language like Prolog, relations are in charge of data. It's all about what perspective the programmer has between the abstraction and the data.

_mhr_on Real or not? USC study finds many political tweets come from fake accounts

That's wild. You have personal anecdata seeing this in action? How do you detect it? How do you know you aren't just being... paranoid? Can you give irrefutable evidence of an simulated persona? How would one even prove that?

_mhr_on Regular meditation may be more beneficial than vacation

You say "foods" - plural. Did you cut other things out besides sugar?

_mhr_on Pre-Socratics: A Painless Introduction

Can you provide a source for that? How is Ted Nelson's work Heraclitean?

_mhr_on Ask HN: Any other blind devs interested in working on dev tools for the blind?

How would seeing through sound be better than seeing through touch? Like with http://www.radiolab.org/story/seeing-tongues/

_mhr_on The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play

For me at least, I know that if I didn't have my nose in my phone, I would have my nose in a book instead. Either way, I manage boredom through reading.

_mhr_on Modern Functional Programming: The Onion Architecture

If it helps at all, here's a transcript of that talk: https://github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2015/blob/master/t...

_mhr_on Haiku Project

is your elisp clone of agenda available online somewhere?

_mhr_on Ursula K. Le Guin, “the emissary from Orsinia,” challenges expectations

PKD has some bad stories, but I think he has a lot of good ones. Electric Sheep isn't one of his good ones, I agree with that. I quite liked most of the stories in Beyond Lies the Wub. An example of a bad story of his from that collection, off the top of my head, is The Indefatigable Frog. That was pretty silly. I encourage you to give Beyond Lies the Wub a shot before writing him off entirely.

_mhr_on Playing with Syntax

You should submit that project as a Show HN, that is seriously cool.

_mhr_on Ao is a tool for programmatic computer-aided design using Scheme

I think it'd be killer if you could combine the user interface of Antimony with the same inspectability Ao. What would it take to achieve an Antimony-like UI on top of Ao?

_mhr_on A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline

I found a chart showing the prevalence of multiple forms of cancer over time: http://i52.tinypic.com/r9euci.jpg.