icarus127

You may be interested in this paper www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/publications/ICFP01.pdf. It solves Dijkstra's algorithm as an example for the implementation of a priority search queue data structure, which is very similar to a priority search tree. These structures act as a heap on one index and a search tree on a second index. So you get both efficient update and find-min.

I don't know about the author but not all of us oppose Gay marriage.

Sure but unless this new service is along the lines of "I generate my own key pair _and then only ever give Google my public key_" there's no way they're getting me to trust them. And I seriously doubt that's something they are going to try to do, it's to much of a niche market for Google IMO.

    Not only are those wise words for users, enabling that
    way of working, and making security an easy verifiable  
    default, and, is going to be the only way to heal this  
    problem for US tech companies. And they have been slow 
    to  get started.

The trouble is the service providers have a significant vested interest in having access to your data. Google will never implement a system where only you have access to your data because they make a lot of money by accessing your data.

Depending on where you want to draw the line it would not be a stretch to say that an advertising company like Google would be eliminating their entire revenue stream by implementing such a system.

At my previous job I thought the same thing. They didn't stop people being bullied by superiors and basically did nothing but exit interviews and layoffs. The entire company was really dysfunctional. At my current job HR is _supremely_ competent. The entire organization is more functional and a joy to work for. I think there are subtle but significant effects when people know that it is not okay to behave in a bullying or discriminatory manner because HR takes those things seriously.

> variables don't have types, only individual values do.

It really depends on what language you're using. This is more or less true in Python, Ruby, and Javascript. In Lisp generic methods you can specify the type for the input variables and be guaranteed that if you are inside the method the parameters are of that specific type. For optimization reasons you can also declare to the compiler that variables are a specific type. This is really important when doing numeric computations in a tight loop. I've had 50% - 80% performance improvement by declaring types (amounting to hours of run time). I think Groovy and Clojure also allow this but I don't know much about those two.

There's also the maintenance issue though. After a few years of maintaining a fairly large Lisp project I've become pretty convinced that the only way to stay sane, at least for me, is to treat it as a statically typed language. I have asserts and check-type macros all over the place. If variables may have multiple types they can be checked against '(or type1 type2) but things do become more complicated then.

That latter's debatable but probably not the former unfortunately.

Indeed, the first thing that came into my mind when reading this was "You wouldn't have this problem if the only valid type in a conditional was boolean."

I think the point was that homosexuality has been taboo for a lot longer than the CIA has been around. So while they obviously have found it useful there's no reason to think they needed to work to keep it taboo for so long.

>they've gone way beyond being about what any actual women think and care about...

And those articles were written by whom then? Apparently at least one woman actually cares about those issues. Or are you trying to say that by going "that far" she or they are not "actual" women? Whatever that means.

Could you elaborate or provide links to examples of what you mean by solving this with codata?

My point was not that no guys do, of course I know some do. The OP used 'guys' to seemingly include all men. My point was that, no, not all men do, so you don't get to play the "everyone does it so it's okay" rationalization card.

None of the guys I'm around, nor myself, think that's okay just because women aren't present.

I notice substantial overlap between the things these men are wanted for and what the NSA and FBI have been doing....

I was thinking the same thing. At my last job we had one dev board (TI ARM/DSP SOC + lots of custom hardware) that we could reset with a static discharge into the carpet 6 - 8 feet away. That took us a while to figure out :p

One might say that being polite and not insulting people are traits of merit.

A lot of people are criticizing Schneier for lack of empathy or too much nonchalance. Can we really have too much nonchalance in our post Afghanistan/Iraq/Drone strikes/Surveillance state world?

I think about what our world and the U.S. might be like if we had "too much" nonchalance in the face of the 9/11 attacks and had simply done nothing in response. It's hard for me to come up with a scenario that is worse than what resulted from our response.

I'm interested, what is the open source core in OSX and iOS? I was not aware of any. I know they share code with BSD but I didn't think it was to the extent that one could compare Apple's OS relationship with BSD to Android's relationship with Linux.

I too share your general optimism about the current state of open source. I really hope that you are correct in your conclusion that the GPL mandate is unnecessary because, as we see here, many projects are trying to get away from it. However, I feel we have a number of historical examples of what happens when constraints are lifted in a space that has a number of very powerful players. None of them look like anything I want the Open Source movement to look like.

I was thinking this as well. I see the GPL, and Copy Left licensing in general, as a sort of regulatory force in free software. If you want to participate the GPL will put constraints on you to play nice with others in the FOSS space.

Given what happened in the financial markets as they were deregulated I am extremely suspicious of the notion that removing the constraints of Copy Left will actually be positive in the long run. I have no doubt that it will help companies like Apple but I don't see the benefit for the wider community of developers.

Having state does not mean a function/algorithm is not pure.

The argument seems to be "you shouldn't do this because it accomplishes the goal it was intended to". Saying don't use this pattern to hide internals because it achieves the goal of hiding internals seems dubious at best.

Does anyone know anything about Project Meshnet? http://projectmeshnet.org/

I discovered it a few days ago and it sounds promising but some of the cjdns whitepaper was over my head. Apparently there are a few hundred people participating in their alternative internet on a daily basis already.

I haven't written any Elm but having written some Haskell I can say it's surprising how often you _don't_ need a debugger in a functional language. I doubt Elm not having a debugger is as difficult as, for instance, Javascript or Coffeescript not having a debugger would be.

I'm genuinely curious, why do you think inversion of control is an unqualified Good Thing™?

Ah, that was exactly how I read it. Basically what Yesod uses template Haskell for in a variety of cases.

> Lazy computation has its disadvantages. Still, impressive gain.

After reading the article I don't see anything about lazy evaluation. What am I missing?

The reality is someone like bmelton probably can write what he wants and get away with it. As a normal white guy who believes in technology and etc. etc. It's very unlikely that he has, or will ever, face oppression for his views. And that's probably why he can't relate to these particular views. If he were Arab, Black, or Latino he would probably be able to relate just fine.

Why would it matter? If they decide to not release a maps app at all that would be their prerogative.

But it's not perfectly legal if the patent is valid. The infringement would just be against the original company if said company hadn't been bought. Or are you suggesting that when a company is acquired all it's patents should become null and void?