henrikeh

Haskell and Ada have very different goals. Ada is designed, in part, to work on embedded and real-time systems.

It isn’t really an “attempt” either. The language exists and is used and has developed as experience was gained. Why bother with it? Because you could maybe learn something new despite it being old.

Two more:

Ada is a name, not an abbreviation. It should be written "Ada" and not "ADA".

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Keywords in Ada should be written in lower case letters:

It is a common misconceptions that Ada enforces or encourages upper case, but here is the official Ada 83 Language Reference Manual on the subject: http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83lrm/html/lrm-02-09.html... > Reserved words differing only in the use of corresponding upper and lower case letters are considered as the same (see 2.3).

The manual itself doesn't even use upper case:

> For readability of this manual, the reserved words appear in lower case boldface.

So even the Ada standard recognizes the upper case is less readable and undesired.

There is a big difference between writing meant for public distribution and personal notes. The point of a Zettelkasten (or any notes) is not to build a comprehensive encyclopedia, but to support and augment your work.

I don’t necessarily agree either that “more notes is better” as an absolute statement.

I’m sorry, what is your point? I legitimately don’t understand what you mean.

Yes. That is called NCMEC in the US and it is a core aspect of how this whole process works.

If you don’t understand the details of this, I’ll recommend this podcast episode which sums it up and discusses the implications https://atp.fm/443

The book “VLSI test principles and architectures: deign for testability” edited by Laung-Terng Wang et al, is quite good.

My impression, knowing very few who has attended højskole, is that people do it for their own personal fulfillment and enjoyment.

Socially, I’d say that it is respected and regarded as a sign of dedication to ones interests.

I understand your sentiment – I’d expect NASA to have some overhead – but, as you asked, who else is building space telescopes? How do we determine if the cost of a telescope is “too high”? What kind of mission profiles should be targeted?

I am sure someone can build a cheaper space telescope, but for whom and to what end?

Who’s theory?

JWST costs upwards to 9 billion USD. An Ariane 5 launch maybe 200 million.

Just because the launch is cheaper doesn’t make the rest of the project less complicated and costly.

I am about at the end of my PhD* (a few months left) and my supervisor's advice still rings true: try to keep the feedback loops short. If you have to spend months figuring out if something is worth doing, then it becomes rather risky to try. However, if you can shorten the cycle from idea to rough confirmation down to a week or two, then you can afford to explore the options.

The trick is of course that there are several ways to approach this: you can develop more flexible tools, become more independent in the lab (if you have lab work), learn more theory, learn more tools, buy more compute power, pick easy problems etc.

Another angle I have thought about (and learned the hard way), is that there is a big difference between research and development. My topic is closely related to engineering and thus it is sometimes attractive to want to "solve a problem". Unfortunately, many measures of "good research" supposes a relevant application, but "solving a problem" is much more difficult than "understanding a problem". The understanding truly has to come first.

Also, these two pieces of advice (Short learning feedback; focus on understanding not solving), are not guarantees to produce "groundbreaking" research. In the end, the most important product of a PhD education is you and the skills you develop.

* A PhD in Denmark is a bit special, in that it is very short (essentially limited to 3 years) and thus has a slightly different scope.

If you read their responses and messages then they tell you exactly why they are interested in certain data and how they decided to respond to the outrage -- the _Audacity developer's responses_, not random people who are misinformed.

What if I told you that it is, in fact, opt-out and explicitly made easy to disable in the build config? Don't you think it is a bit of an overreaction to say that "Audacity is now joining the ranks [...] of Google, Microsoft, <Insert Evil Corp Here>" when you haven't actually looked at the source of the issue?

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

Given that they devote a section of the notes to discussing efforts in supporting multiple architectures and, explicitly, GCC, you'd figure that some do find those efforts are worthwhile and relevant.

In the post they mention two efforts to use GCC for compiling Rust.

It totally is a sensible point. In fact, _all_ file formats, SQLite or not, has to deal with untrusted data, which will involve some kind of integrity check.

I had some rather large SQLite databases so I just wanted to get a rough idea of the impact:

    Size (MB)   Quick (s)  Integrity (s) 
       8         0.061       0.47
      76         0.39        1.8
     582         2.8        13.
    2926        14.         79.

I tried my best to do the measurements with a cold filesystem cache, but this is by no means rigorous. For example, the databases for this test are roughly similar in schema and they all consist of many small rows. Few big rows might perform very differently.

It is a bit strange that the SQLite developers recommend SQLite as an application file format [0], but at the same time warn against opening database files from unknown sources [1]. In fact, their advice on using the `integrity_check` and `quick_check` pragma work against the performance advantage of using SQLite, as the entire database file now has to be read and parsed.

SQLite definitely still has advantages as a file format, but it would nice if there was bit more consistency in their messaging.

[0]: https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html [1]: https://www.sqlite.org/security.html#untrusted_sqlite_databa...

Do you have evidence of the contrary?

A 5 s search leads to this page from the US gov: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/truth-behind-weight-lo...

Note that this page warns against weight loss ads — not weight loss, which they argue is a more complicated topic than an ad will convey.

Further: https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459

And in communication theory / information theory there is spectral efficiency, which is 1/s/Hz (rate over bandwidth. Sometimes given in bits, sometimes in symbols)

There is a type of visual programming which is applied to virtually everything around you of some mechanical complexity: interactive geometric constraint solvers.

In CAD tools like SolveSpace, SolidWorks, Inventor and several others, the dimensions of objects are not described directly, but instead through a set of constraints such as “these are orthogonal”, “these have this distance”, “this is a tangent” etc. If you have never used it, try SolveSpace, which is free.

Albeit highly declarative, it is absolutely a programming language for a specific domain. It doesn’t try to be good at describing imperative programs or flows; instead it presents a paradigm which is very different, but fits perfectly in the problem domain of mechanical designs.

AFAIK, there is no difference in meaning between the `if` construct and the `when` syntax: https://github.com/AdaDoom3/ada-spark-rfcs-1/blob/master/con...

This, together with the `@` syntax, are interesting cases of adding a bit more sugar to Ada. Hopefully it heralds a good future.

This case has nothing to do with urbanism but has to do with how the environmental impact of the project is measured.

Put simply, despite planning and projecting the entire project, the environmental impact is done piece by piece. This vastly understated the environmental impact in the harbor and Øresund. This approach is what is being challenged, since it obviously disregards big picture thinking.

Do you have any sources to back that up? U.S. Congress funded development of the SST (Supersonic Transport) back in the 60'ies but stopped funding in 1971 due to concerns and displeasure of exactly the sonic booms (and ozone layer issues). So five years before the Concorde entered service a domestic plane was not seen as being worth.

Heppenheimer's The Space Shuttle Decision has a chapter where this is discussed in detail.

Won’t :active do that?

Is it just me or is this also a symptom of Python's documentation being really strange to navigate and generally having a massive impedance mismatch with Google?

When I search on Google for "python reverse list", not a single link is to the official Python documentation. Not even if I search for "python reverse" does the documentation page show up. Searching for "python reverse documentation" leads to the second link to the Build-in Functions page (https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html), which is what I "need".

Excuse the comparison, but "matlab reverse list" has the top three to the official documentation (all of them relevant, but slightly different semantics). Why can't Python be better than that?

Except the recommendation is made outside of the government and parliament. And some parties are even arguing for giving people a choice.

The official statement from the Danish Health Authority is quite thorough. Perhaps not a model, but there is a lot of nuance and they definitely consider the impact of their recommendation : https://www.sst.dk/-/media/Udgivelser/2021/Corona/Vaccinatio...

What do you have to back up that it is a decision made by “politicians”?

Sundhedsstyrelsen (the Danish Health Authority) makes that recommendation to not use it, not the government. Some parties are discussing giving a choice of AZ, but Sundhedsstyrelsen has then said that _that_ is a decision outside of their realm. But the recommendation is made outside of the government and parliament.

Can it exist and provide a usable service to some? Yes, probably.

Can it replace cabled internet, period? Can it replace terrestrial cellular? Unlikely:

Mobile internet is constrained by the capacity and coverage of the cell. "Capacity" being the practical sort of what the maximum achievable information rate is, given the available receivers and transmitters. Satellite links are a bit complicated, but essentially the Shannon-Hartley theorem holds and you either have to increase bandwidth or increase signal-to-noise ratio to provide better data rates within a cell. Bigger cell, more users, less capacity per user, worse data rate per user.

I don't know what the cell sizes Starlink will use are, but I've read numbers around 200 km^2. My hometown of 10000 homes is 21 km^2. If they were to provide 100 Mb/s just to my hometown, they would need a 1 Tb/s capacity in a much smaller cell. Of course, not everybody will use 100 Mb/s all the time, but it illustrates the problem.

This is why SpaceX is mainly focusing on low-density areas in places where the infrastructure is less-developed/monopolized. The capacity / coverage problems works much better to their advantage.

> the only limit is Shannon's limit, but that's only concerned with data rate.

But that limit, the capacity, is also the maximum possible limit of information transfer on the channel. Modulation schemes don't increase it or change it, they just push the achievable information rate of the system closer to the capacity.