cconroy

This reminded me of an interesting dream I had. I dreamt I created a nice language with a meta protocol. In working with the language and using this protocol I changed the language into a different language which gave me insights on changing that language -- all through meta protocols. I woke up having a distinct feeling of what is means to not be plodding around in a Turing tarpit.

Me too. But if he doesn't answer it he may mean how languages don't have a well designed meta protocol. See the one they built for CLOS in that good book.

Forgive my ignorance on this issue but Earth has various feedback mechanisms that forestalls CO2: getting absorbed back into rocks and consumption by flora. Is comparing CO2 levels to 4 mya disingenuous because that is just one variable we are isolating? Are we sure that rising CO2 is producing these effects attributed to climate change and not some complicated combination of factors that is evidenced by Earth history of rising temperature followed by cooling temperatures followed by...

Tv is a cool medium of which requires participation. If the audience (public) are not "put on" to terrorism, that is not participating, the the power of idea will cease (and the secondary effects like the issue raised here).

But it is not illegal to not pay back private or federal debt, right? The federal gov has ways to get payment via tax refunds and social security benefits.

Did not know that and that is important context. I hope he is receiving proper medical treatment and wish him the best.

What is the worst thing he said that was dim-witted that you remember off hand? Generally curious, he defends his positions rather well I believe.

Are you sure it is not just because he is not having fun anymore. Otherwise is skin is too thin.

I dont know Fry but he isn't handling things as well as Dawkins does it seems. Dawkins has a hilarious video of him reading the most hateful tweets.

You have to be careful. Some of the people who complain about others being offended all the time are the biggest babies.

[Edit] If he is leaving bc it is no fun anymore that is an excellent reason.

Is Fry leaving bc of the PC culture or bc of all the mean things trolls say about him? This may be obvious but I don't know Fry or his circumstances.

I think you could make a strong case that would still be problamatic. Let me explain this by attempting to uncover what I think is the underlying problem.

Firstly economic inequality may or may not be a problem, so it is probably not worth talking about. It is only when the inequality manifests itself in terms of power between people. Were some people have to work for a wage in bad working conditions (even here in the US) because they have no other options. They may have kids. All the way up to: having to work for Google or Facebook et al. and hating it because you know on your free time you would rather explore your own creative ideas. But people who work at menial labor jobs are just as creative and should be given paths to allow them to pursue their creative interests too.

Language makes us creative beings, and if power constrains that in any way and it can not make itself legitimate (which the burden is on it to do so) than it is wrong for it to be there.

Thus because economic inequality illegimitately constrains the human capacity to express itself creatively it is therefore problamatic and should be dismantled.

PS I realize in theory this sounds all good, but I am more convinced that humans can organize themselves into these freer societies. And those future denizens will think of us as savage as we think of american colonialism and slavery and genocide (native americans) a few hundred years back.

`I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there.`

Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.

You are obviously biased. Im sure those tech gods affect politics as much as the Kochs -- but it is the kind of political choices that you are ok with. Therefore, they are the good guys and the Kochs are the bad guys. Not so sure things are that simple. E.g. Bill Gates and patents.

Haha, I cannot believe I defended the Kochs.

Can you explain why you think Bob Kahn is against net neutrality (whereas Vint Cerf is for it)? I am not that familiar with this issue and the other sides arguments (against), but there are prominent people there.

About once a month for the past 3-4 years I have typed "Alan Kay" into youtube. This has been more valuable than my 85K CS Degree manyfold.

It is a shame this work is relegated to mainly niche. Am i wrong for saying this?

s/computer/dynamic medium/g

One thing is clear: our brains required tremendous amounts of energy. Cooking starches allows us to extract more energy from them. Meat eating is calorically dense too and so that could of played a role (see Expesive Tissue Hypothesis). I have read meat-eating was hugley beneficial during resource scarcity.

The critical question is what diet do we thrive on? A carb rich plant-based diet is my guess based mostly on Dr. Michael Greger's work on summarizing nutrition science literature [0]. But I shall be convinced otherwise if the science is there.

[0] http://nutritionfacts.org/

It's funny I come to hn for stuff like this. Thanks for the video. Here is a nice one for Debussy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kziF6whWW8)

In a function call the arguments are applied to the function after being evaluated (LISP's apply).

In Message Passing a message (which is just another object) is sent to the receiver object.

The crucial difference is in a function call the the function is already bound when the args are sent. With message passing the args are sent to the receiver object which can handle them there or up its superclass hierarchy -- with the ability to handle messages it does not recognize too after exhausting the superclass hierarchy.

The smalltalk blue book has the VM implementation of message sending which is very straight forward.

Has anyone read the Art of Prolog -- i have it collecting dust but when I bought it I was intrigued?

I couldn't find the ingredients list -- but because it is not fully understood what food contains there may be missing nutrients in soylent that a well-balanced diet would have.

Has anybody had experience with both Racket and Squeak that can compare and contrast them for doing things like this article describes?

Whichever one is most parsimonious is what you should be.

Definitely not trolling. But I realize I am quite off topic. I am happy that Apple is starting to embrace it.

I am thinking of something like the LivelyKernel[0] or better.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lively_Kernel

I really hope WebGl+javascript kills CSS and html and all the other web stuff and we get back to desktop rich applications.

And a URL can map to some state/object too. Google can then think about searching for things richer than just textual.

Worthless to you at this moment. Number 3 is differential calculus. That's a big one.

...feared or marginalized by the mainstream media should be reserved for the badge of honor. Noam Chomsky comes to mind.

This article made me feel better about choosing to be a computer scientist instead of some sort of scientist or mathematician.

Anyone else love Smalltalk's message syntax. Objective-C uses it too. It has got to be the best syntax invented for a programming language. To see what I mean compare the normal procedural code vs. the OO version:

(a) drawRect(50, 50, 10, 21)

(b) aRect drawAtX: 50 andY: 50 width: 10 height: 21