aufreak3

I like how your page reflows for different widths and full screen reading. Nice work!

edit: Sorry I think I'd accidentally clicked through to another page which did what I said above -http://roundedbygravity.com/colophon/

Is it possible to install regular Ubuntu or something on a Chromebook? I'd absolutely hate to see kids use computers whose operation they do not control.

"A course in mathematics for students of physics" (volumes 1 and 2) by Paul Bamberg and Schlomo Sternberg. [1] [2]

I loved both the books! I replaced my course textbooks with these and am eternally thankful I did that. Volume 2, in particular, is really cool where you get introduced to the exterior calculus formulation of circuit theory, leading to Maxwell's equations.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Course-Mathematics-Students-Physics/dp... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Course-Mathematics-Students-Physics-Vo...

> One of them is called Padhuka Sahasram, was written in less than a day in response to a challenge and contains 1008 verses in 32 chapters.

If he spent 24 hours non-stop writing those verses, he's have to write 7 verses every 10 minutes on the average. If it is really a "less than a day" 8 hours, he'd have to write nearly 3 verses every minute. In summary, this sounds like something that will need some serious substantiation to believe.

If someone wrote a haiku that's visible in base64 encoding and which stood for a pretty interesting number (like pi, or e or whatever) it would be worthy of a HN post for intellectual curiosity.

... but please do cut out the "Indians did this ages ago" crap, for it is the least intellectually interesting of all things ... unless the poster backs up any such claim with proper first-hand references.

> "It has a self-contained master-key for extending the evaluation to any number of decimal places."

Well, at least if someone would actually say what the freaking "master key" is, it might be intellectually delightful even if historically BS. ... but I can't find any description of what this "master key" is.

There is another sense in which the idea isn't new - the notion of an image in smalltalk environments provides a similar level of encapsulation as docker containers, except perhaps that running smalltalk images don't get assigned their own ip address. A metacello script is analogous to dockerfile.

One way to think of docker is as an installation automation and management thingie. However, it is better to think of it as an encapsulation mechanism for your setup. Almost like a vm in itself. A running docker container is also assigned its own private network ip address, which helps reinforce the abstraction.

Digitalocean has a standard docker+ubuntu setup you can fire up for about that price. However, I haven't had much luck with its stability and switched back to running on bare ubuntu. Docker kept bringing the system down even when I wasnt running any containers!

Any pointers on how to make the site visible to search engines when the delivery is as a single page app that does everything in JS? I know google's crawler can run the JS, but any notes on how far that can go?

And then there is this whole other category of self-modifying programs - programs that know about their own structure and can change themselves at runtime. This is (almost) in the "unthinkable" category for non-homoiconic languages.

I wonder how many more decades it will take until a "technology" magazine ceases to put "weird" in front of quantum mechanics.

Ok I'm in! Your reply is sufficiently reassuring :)

Just saw this reply. Maybe bring me to a screen with two buttons that say "create an account to sync" or "sync using icloud"?

Same question for me. I'd happily pay for this without an "account". I suppose that doesnt give you recurring revenue, but i can imagine things like tying up with photo album printers and dvd memoir makers may work?

Kahnemann and Tversky call it the "planning fallacy".[1] the interesting bit is that the predictions are pessimistic when you get "non-involved" parties to estimate time to completion of the same task. Perhaps using a figure between self estimates and third party estimates may work?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

The post makes a good point about the distinction between two types of text - symbols and human text. Sadly, this is made very complex in our world through the introduction of the markup (and markdown) languages which mix text targeting both machines and humans. As long as you're having to work with embedded structuring or formatting codes, woe betide you. You'll have to deal with script injection, sql injection and what not.

.. and our programmers created Occam and made him come up with his razor so that most serious people (sorry .. simulations) who might actually be able to answer this question within the system will more likely discard it because of how much their training emphasizes Occam's razor.

edit: quoting the part of the article that read like the flying spaghetti monster [1]

> In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d simply vanish.

> In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features, however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them again, they’d sketch them back in.

[1]: http://www.venganza.org/

I would like to add this - kind of the major point he's getting into --

> The anonymity of reading is the central, fundamental guarantor of freedom of the mind. Without anonymity in reading there is no freedom of the mind. Indeed, there is literally slavery.

"Asshole" is easily defined by someone who puts their interests in front of everything else. Both introverts and extroverts can be assholes .... or not.

The Alan Kay reference is from his OOPSLA'97 talk [2], where he says that he's "apologized profusely over the last 20 years for introducing the term 'object oriented'" and suggests that the Japanese notion of "Ma" or "the unseen stuff that goes between objects" as what is important.

(edit) [3] is a quote from a communication with Kay in 2003 -

"OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them."

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY (around 38minutes)

[3] http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...

Was about to post this as well. By far the neatest application of curry-howard i've stumbled on.

Doing this all in a webworker might be one way to get security - by sandboxing the with/eval?

If the ring indeed indicates dream/reality, why does Cobb bother to spin the top .. since he already knows whether he's wearing the ring or not? .. or did he take off his ring even in his dream by that point?

I was reminded of Anton van Straaten's "koan" on closures vs. objects with venerable master Qc Na [1] ... but I digress. This post is actually a troll post designed to re-ignite fiery discussions about which is the superior PoV - functional or oop - and I'm going to bite.

The only point I'm willing to give is the somewhat sane zen-like advise of "don't fall in love with your models".

Regarding OOP, I recall Alan Kay saying something to the effect of "OOP is not about objects. It's all about messages." which nicely points to the dualism between the two points of view.

    > There exists things that are not objects. Functions are not objects.

Well, objects are any "thing" that you can talk about, toss about in your head. Functions are certainly such "things" and count as "objects" in that sense. If we accept that "monotonic" is an adjective, i.e. an attribute of a noun, then the function described as "monotonic function" is an "object".

    > There exists things that are not pure. Side-effects are very real.

Um, how so? One notion that characterizes side-effects is irreversibility. You cannot unlaunch a rocket, for instance and so it counts as a "side effect" of the code "launch rocket". Despite that, when we look at the basic equations of quantum mechanics, they are all pure unitary! I mean, not only are they perfectly reversible, quantum "information" cannot be destroyed or even copied. So with fundamental physics we have the opposite question - how the hell do we get "side effects" out of this much purity at the core?

    > Also purely functional languages cause a huge cognitive cost. 

I call pure BS on this section. "Huge cognitive cost"? For whom? Wouldn't "structured programming" have placed huge cognitive costs to former "goto programmers"? It is more honest to just say "I don't understand monads, so I won't use them."

    > If you look deep into them, monads make programs complicated and hard to write

Again, "complicated" for whom and "hard" for whom? Is there some objective sense in which such declarations can be made? I, for one, have benefited greatly from learning about monads, reading monadic code and recognizing the pattern in existing code.

    > You can write pure functions in any language, but the important thing is, you should be allowed to use side-effects too.

Why? Who's to say you "should" this or "should not" that?

   > Everything starts to do harm when they are pursued to the extreme.

I'd say the exact opposite actually. Both OOP as well as the functional perspective here illuminate the programming world only when taken to the extreme. Until then, folks just keep arguing about what is functional and what is oop and what isn't. Haskell and Smalltalk/Self have done this favour for us by adopting these extreme dual perspectives.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...

Um... Why is it inappropriate to suggest that one might bump into passionate and talented programmers at the startup centre?

You may bump into some of them here? - http://www.thestartupcentre.com/

I'm having a hard time believing the app affordability argument 'cos iOS apps require iOS devices to run them, which aren't by any means cheap in these countries. I'm guessing these were downloaded using a scripted iTunes on a desktop/laptop. But why?

While that criticism is valid, it is also possible for them to think that the details of it be better kept a trade secret than be revealed to the public through either a patent document or a detailed enough paper. (Just giving them the benefit of doubt.)

If you look at Gary Drescher's work published in "Made up minds" [1], it seems possible that an AI that can influence the world can more efficiently arrive at intelligence than one that simply observes it - i.e. one that can learn by performing experiments rather than only looking at data coming out of everywhere. So there does seem to be scope for approaches to AI that aren't in the "data trumps everything" gang.

[1] http://books.google.co.in/books/about/Made_up_Minds.html?id=...

Something funny happened to me when I went to that link. On the side panel, right near the top was a video titled "The Power of Smalltalk". I clicked that to see what it was about - it was about real "small talk", as in "chit chat" :)

AI ftw!