jakub_h

Wasn't there a problem that while there was an anomaly of some sorts, different teams still reported significantly different results? That would still mean that n-1 teams were wrong, which could mean that the nth team could have been wrong as well. Or was that some other similar device?

There are hundreds of boys like this as well. Geniuses get born everywhere, in different bodies, places, social strata etc. The fact that many of them get lesser chances to contribute to the world is an outrageous abuse of the most precious resource that the humanity has, regardless of why it happens.

As a person from a country with <20% of religious people, about half of them (lukewarm) Catholics, reading some of these comments, the only thing that comes to my mind is...W.T.F.?

Supernovae and GRBs are chuckling right now. ;)

"their pension and economy are STILL getting built on O&G"

I don't quite get the peculiar use of the word "still" in your sentence, seeing as the topic seems to be ditching coal and not ditching oil or gas.

The difference is that there's currently no large-scale acceptable replacement for oil, so ditching oil would be committing a global suicide (or genocide, if you will), while ditching coal in the presence of nuclear, wind, solar and hydro plants that can replace it much more seamlessly is merely a reasonable thing to do at this point.

In addition, this is apparently an investment fund and the coal stocks are tanking, what would you do with the money of the people who turned it over to you for safekeeping? Keep it there?

I'm getting kind of sleepy here at 2 AM and my brain misarranged the headline words into something like "Development of an application in Clojure onboard the Boeing 737 Max". So it seems like an easy mistake to make!

Setting aside the fact that condescending comments aren't mutually exclusive with true ones, I wonder if those packagings weren't "relatively useless" simply for the fact that small packagings ususally tend to be more expensive in the long run. It's more or less the same problem as with poor people in developed countries not being able to save money on batch buys, especially in case of supermarket discounts.

The police can't do any such thing here. Only a court could. And even then, it generally happens to the property that is the result of a crime (like bribes, for example, or drug money). What message about the level of respect towards private property and human rights would it send if unrelated property was seized for no good reason? If you can't sell your raw milk (I don't actually believe it's illegal here anyway), I don't think anyone is going to take it from you. After all, it's better if you have to get rid of it. You're perfectly free to drink it. At least the state doesn't have to pay for its sanitary disposal.

"I don't know why NASA is tracking these levels in India"

Because's it's basically in their job description? https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLIC...

"...Objectives of Aeronautical and Space Activities. The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space. ..."

I don't know where you live but around here, property of people in prison still remains their property.

Clearly you haven't been in a car with my German grandfather.

Yes, yes, you and the guy above are Americans, I get that. Me, I'm from Europe. I guess we see things differently.

Of course, none of us here has a country that would demand such ridiculous things as income taxes from expats, so I see where that may come from.

Probably even better to arrange it so that any removal of any storage media destroys the very contents. And have some safe backups far away. After all, that's just basic theft prevention. Who knows what burglars could fate deal you?

Is paying for services theft?

The notion r/K selection always comes to my mind, regardless of whether or not this is correct and/or a fair analogy (since humans are generally considered clear K-strategists in general). Still, when a human society develops, it's almost like switching from a "slightly-more-r-ish" strategy to a "slightly-more-K-ish" one, given the higher survival chances of children and also the corresponding higher expenditure of time and resources necessary to prepare then to succeed in their environment.

> Not to mention languages like German which capitalize way more than English.

And as everyone knows, Germans drive like crazy on their Autobahns, so they're clearly not the type of people who would willingly put speed bumps into their sentences. Therefore, capital letters don't work like speed bumps at all. My logic is bulletproof, case closed!

I'm still not comprehending how telling someone not to do something would amount to confiscation of property. State mandated confiscation of property would be comparable to robbery the way that legal death penalty would be comparable to murder, but no confiscation of property seems to be involved in simply telling people that some things are not allowed (I'm avoiding here, of course, the very issue of whether it's wise to do that in the first place, which it probably isn't, at least for the foreseeable future.)

> Thus, the algorithm must require substantially more time than the data transfer. Render farms are the classic example.

Unless you work at Pixar, where render farms have been bandwidth-limited from day one.

It's called Oberon.

> although it might not be as fast as a hand-written CUDA program

If you're dealing with larger pieces of code at once (that is, if you have a bigger view of what the programmer wants to run, which you should have), one interesting thing you could do is "exploratory compiling". Try different compilation step sequences and transformations, if you have enough invariants in the code. Machine time is cheap and this could yield some interesting results. Of course, the more constrained the language model is, the more opportunities for this.

(There's been some interesting results in this area, like superoptimizers for local optimization, but larger scale compilation would probably use something like genetic algorithms, as you're unlikely to have the opportunity for exhaustive searches.)

Sounds like an ambiguous question. Most algorithms are "arbitrarily expensive". It generally depends on some measure of the data you're putting in. But in case you mean "an arbitrary algorithm", then no, nobody knows how to do that. But it appears that the most useful things people actually want to do lie somewhere in the middle: not trivial to parallelize but also not exactly impossible.

"liquid natural gas[1] (mainly propane and butane)

That doesn't make sense to me. Either it's natural gas, or propane-butane. Where I live at least, there are requirements for what natural gas is supposed to be. There can be some amout of impurities in it but it's still supposed to be mostly methane.

Maybe they meant that the propane and butane impurities stayed low while methane escaped?

Yes, that's another reason why a municipal grid would be useful: city-wide storage could work better than each house having a small battery (but the roofs are still useful for panels, of course). But it may not need to be a utility in the traditional sense (unless the US meaning of that word is different from what I understand it to be). Just some local company with a contract. Or a few of them.

There was also Component Pascal. And Franz Lisp, if you accept dialect names. Also, OCaml used to be called Objective Caml, if I'm not mistaken.

Maybe people write infrastructure stuff in it?

> So your process will never shrink in memory usage

But it should at least stop growing (unless my understanding about non-moving GCs is off, which it could be).

If by ML, you mean machine learning (and not, e.g., Ocaml et al.), I thought those people were actually into GPUs.

> Single core performance still matters for algorithms that can't be efficiently parallelised.

Any real world examples? Especially considering that at this point, sacrificing cores to boost the remaining ones seems to be a really bad deal with current silicon. Core power requirements appear to decrease faster than their actual computational speed does if you go low-power. Even if you lose 40% of performance due to overhead, if the same-TDP CPU package is twice as fast with more cores, you still win. (And who's to say that your implementation can't be improved in the future?)

Don't forget the rest of the machine. At these comparatively low CPU price points, buying three machines instead of two might not be a good decision.

(Of course, licensees of per-core-licensed software are screwed again.)