bbeonx

If the restaurant industry collapsed next year I'd say the same thing for them too. But there is a qualitative difference between ad hoc business failures and a systematic change.

But I agree that bailouts != empathy. Still, bailouts aren't the only option, and as a society it is in our interest to help a sector when it goes under. It may happen to you or me next.

EDIT: I should specify that I'm speaking about owner-operated cabs.

But Daiyi's main point isn't that abc coders aren't xyz, but rather that other people are also xyz, and that if an efg coder becomes an abc coder and are found to be xyz then they were probably xyz back when they were efg before becoming abc coders.

And this point should be well taken. There is a common trend that analytic subjects contribute more value than artistic subjects. This, in part, is due to the phenomenon that analytic subjects have values that are easier to calculate (...analytically, whence this is somewhat circular) while artistic subjects have effects that must be evaluated more subjectively. A coder works for a week and adds a new feature which increases marketability. A painter works for a week and produces a painting that may eventually sell for $500 in a couple years. But this undervalues the painter---the effect of arts on a society is more than their retail value.

I think this in part describes why web devs/front end engineers are socially valued less than coders in the development community. Their contributions are harder to quantify and the problems that they solve are more diffuse and subjective. This leads to "it's hard to quantify an efg coder's contribution" being conflated with "efg coders contribute less".

But this is BS---I have yet to come across anything that isn't both an art and a science if done correctly. In fact, this thought lead me to my own answer to one of the great philosophical questions of the ages: "what is art?": I contend that art is anything done well.

And as a computer scientist with a prior life as a musician I can assure you that there is plenty of 'calculation' that goes into the arts. Sometimes this is explicit. For instance, say that I have a closed voicing CFA (closed voicing means everything is close together) and they are moving to B?G that will then move to CEG. What do I want to replace `?` with? Well we don't want F to move down (we try to avoid parallel motion, this can be thought of as a sort of axiom) so F must either remain fixed (oblique motion) or go up (contrary motion). We also don't want voices to cross (while voice crossing is less taboo than parallel motion it is still often avoided, and our adherence to this restriction makes our problem much easier). Since we are working with a closed voice we have two (diatonic) choices: we can double the G or stay fixed on F. Doubling the G is boring but staying on F creates dissonance (B to F is a b5 and F to G is a M2). Luckily this dissonance is nicely resolved by the subsequent voicing and we win music! Yay!

Notice something? This is just a constraint system! But rather than solving a SAT formula we are adding in some subjective data to consider as well. I like to phrase this as "In math, `1 + 2 + 3 = 6` while in music, `C + E + G = happy`".

These calculations can also be done implicitly: say I'm taking a break over some jazz tune and I'm hitting a turn around, a ii-V7-i. I have a vague notion that I want to hit the "Billie Holiday special" (https://youtu.be/KUCyjDOlnPU?t=2m59s) at the end of my break (a melodic 5-2-1 with a slight scoop up to the 2 which falls back to the 1). I'm in the key of Bb and I want to play this around the tonic at the 8th fret of my D string. Right now I'm in the upper area of the neck and about to change to the ii chord which holds for two beats. I want to leave a pause over the V chord to make the tag more interesting, so I have exactly two beats to get from where I am to where I want to go, and I have to quickly 'calculate' this transition in real time. This is, of course, very natural since I've been playing for most of my life, and the 'calculation' is more of a feeling than an explicit mental exercise. But underneath the hood there is a shitload of precomputation that I did, practicing similar harmonic and melodic situations, honing my instincts, expanding my ear, studying theory, etc. I have just, in real time, solved a complicated constraint problem in front of a room full of people. And they are all cheering for me! See? People love math!

I'm sure I don't have to argue the reverse direction on this site (namely that coding/engineering/mathematics/etc are all forms of art) so I'll omit this.

All this is to say that the distinction between the artists and scientists is very blurry. I won't go so far as to argue that it doesn't exist since it clearly does. But when I try to figure out what that distinction is I find a number of qualitative differences but nothing quantitative.

Granted, he hadn't touched the ball since our last set of matches but I'm not letting that take the wind put of my sails.

Obsession is the name of the game. Balance is for chumps. Nobody ever got great at anything by spending a reasonable and well adjusted amount of time working on it.

In general, when you see an example that explains a complex issue you should assume that it is significantly simplified and therefore will not be realistic.

Math is terse and there is an initial hurdle to get over. However, once that initial hurdle is cleared there are a lot of things that become obvious as a direct consequence of the notational bootstrapping that we did.

With that said, every time I start looking at Haskell I end up playing with category theory instead which may be indicative of something.

I can't tell you the number of 'trivial' math facts that I have (re)discovered because they were in the context of something I cared deeply about.

The point isn't to remember D_x is a linear operator--math isn't about memorization. It's about understanding the context where this is a useful fact and knowing how to figure it out.

Learn it in Calc I and you can half-heartedly reference it (...isn't differentiation linear? I feel like I remember that from senior year of high school...).

Figure it out on your own and you own it for life.

Post it to the internet and you get ridiculed and mocked for it so that you wish you could forget it.

And maybe that's okay, too, but high school isn't the only place that many students will get to experience Shakespeare and if it can't be done right there might be more damage than good done.

There is a difference between not exposing a student to something that they cannot understand at first glance and not having a teacher who doesn't understand the matter themselves try to muddle their way through a presentation the material. Making it part of standard curriculum means that we will have a heavy dosage of the latter, whereas making it optional means that only those teachers who truly have a passion for the thing will present it (theoretically, of course).

Then again, I'm in America so our teachers don't have time to teach anything that isn't showing up on a standardized test, and for me this debate is purely academic :)

Rather than trying to get programming languages to look like human language, we need to get human language closer to computer language.

By this I mean that every argument I've ever been in has turned out to either be an intrinsic disagreement about definitions (fixable, and usually we agree) or an intrinsic argument about god (probably not fixable, we will probably not agree).

If the average person understood the beauty of a solid (and unambiguous) definition, I dunno, world peace and rainbows and butterflies? Probably not, but I'd definitely not have to rage-quit socializing so often.

Still, with that said, from a purely intellectual curiosity standpoint this is neat. I hope that the general saltiness of the internet doesn't discourage the devs from working on this some more.

Also, they don't do natural language processing but allow you to write method names like "the square-root of _x^2 + _x + _" where the underscores are arguments.

Thus their "efficient" compiler that they parallelize the parser to find an unambiguous parse.

I don't know. This seems like it would be super fun to write and to play with, and that there are probably some really cool new things being discovered that, when matured and properly integrated, may be workable into a usable programming language.

    CTRL-ALT-T
    $ killall vim