johnaspden

This article is literally the first I've heard of this bill and I'm now strongly in favour of it. Lucky California!

So, does it turn out that all those nut jobs who ignored science and claimed that putting a neurotoxin in the water supply was a bad thing might have had a point?

So, er, it's a coat, with some crap sewn into it, and that crap has something to do with telephones?

Wow! I tried to prove Cantor-Schroder-Bernstein last year and couldn't get my head round it. This makes it obvious!

No, you have it right. We suck.

coordinates of rotaty-thing

I'd love to, but they're all bloody open-plan

It doesn't look like much of a debate! Everyone hates them and is trying to work out whether they're caused by stupidity or evil.

I think this is a good suggestion. I've given up on 'contracting' these days, solely because I hate open plan, and just consult freelance. I rent my own office to work in and it's lovely.

I get lonely though! I miss the technical and social conversations we used to have in the kitchen or round the coffee machine.

What would be ideal is if I were to rent an office inside the company I'm working for. I would actually be quite happy to pay my client to rent a bit of their space if it's ever a possibility. After all rental costs are chickenfeed compared to developer compensation.

At last, an explanation for the proverbially low price of legal services!

I learned about diet coke and mentos from that cartoon. It was wonderful.

But you do want them to die?

Death is a bad thing. Anger is appropriate. We can probably fix it. If not in time to save ourselves, we might be able to save our children. We need to start now and spend a fortune. People need to stop pretending that it's ok.

Ah, in firefox, right click -> inspect element, find 'position fixed', and untick it. Page behaves....

So is there any way to do this automatically whenever websites do this sort of thing?

Fun article, but does anyone else find the damned banner at the top of the page infuriatingly distracting? And is there a way to make it go away?

Looks as if it might be interesting, if it were not verbose. Summary anyone?

It's hard to express how much I want to cheer Arnold for this!

I made an intelligence test. Will you guys help me calibrate it? It was built with the idea of being immune to practice effects, background, and stereotype threat, because you can practice it as much as you like without spoiling it.

As far as I can tell after trying it out on various friends it seems to be a mathematician / programmer detector.

If people would like to leave comments about their backgrounds that would really help! (What was your last year of formal schooling, do you have an IQ test result, formal exam results, etc)

Looks cool, I tried to install it under ubuntu and got the error (SB-KERNEL:ASSERT-ERROR (STRING-EQUAL ASDF-INSTALL::URL "http:// :END1 7)

Full procedure if anyone's interested is:

sudo apt-get install sbcl sbcl-asdf

$ rlwrap sbcl This is SBCL 1.0.29.11.debian, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp. More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty. It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the distribution for more information. * (require 'asdf)

NIL * (require 'asdf-install)

; loading system definition from ; /usr/lib/sbcl/sb-bsd-sockets/sb-bsd-sockets.asd into #<PACKAGE "ASDF0"> ; registering #<SYSTEM SB-BSD-SOCKETS {AD248A1}> as SB-BSD-SOCKETS ; registering #<SYSTEM SB-BSD-SOCKETS-TESTS {AE975D9}> as SB-BSD-SOCKETS-TESTS ("SB-BSD-SOCKETS" "ASDF-INSTALL") * (asdf-install:install :cells) Install where? 1) System-wide install: System in /usr/lib/sbcl/site-systems/ Files in /usr/lib/sbcl/site/ 2) Personal installation: System in /home/john/.sbcl/systems/ Files in /home/john/.sbcl/site/ --> 2

debugger invoked on a SIMPLE-ERROR in thread #<THREAD "initial thread" RUNNING {AA5E589}>: The assertion (STRING-EQUAL ASDF-INSTALL::URL "http:// :END1 7) failed.

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:QUIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):

Beautiful. Thank you.

Is there really no piece of Spanish that you cannot translate into English without changing the meaning? And no English poem that will not translate into Spanish without losing some of its power?

That is a fascinating article, but isn't its point rather that languages probably do have an influence on how you think?

And no-one is claiming that you can't do closures in C, but I am claiming that C-only programmers don't usually think in those terms, because the language makes them more complicated than they need to be.

Strong disagreement. My first language was also Spectrum BASIC (I'm not dissing it, by the way, a mighty engineering achievement and my life would have been much poorer without it), but it's not a language I'd expose a child to today, because you need to deal with all sorts of accidental complexity to see some of the deep ideas. On the other hand, the Spectrum environment was almost perfect considering the hardware available.

In the same way, if you want to learn OO, learn Java rather than C++, where the same concepts seem very much more complex. And that's probably true even if you want to program in C++ eventually!

Probably better to use python than either, because that's got the least accidental complexity of anything and can express a wide range of ideas, as far as I can tell.

My favourite language at the moment is clojure, but actually some of its nice features like pervasive immutability would make things hard for a beginner. Better to learn how to do everything and then decide which powers you want to not use.

So I guess my ideal beginner's computer today would be a modern ZX Spectrum running a version of python with a lisp syntax (for macros). pg's original vision for arc sounds like a good spec.

And of course an essential requirement would be a printed user manual as friendly and straightforward as the ZX BASIC manual or the TRS80 one.

But law, maths, computer science, and weirdly, classics all appeal to the same minds. Are there examples of people with English Literature or History degrees who say the same?

I would have thought they would be more useful for the sorts of things that programmers are bad at, like dealing with, or in, lies and half-truths. And not be so good for the 'long chains of precise reasoning' type problems.

Of course, you might equally say that being able to handle the political side of life 'makes you a better programmer', but I don't think you'd mean it in the same way.

Ideally you'd want both.

he died

Yes, let's. You first!

Being a sometime embedded man myself, I was nodding sagely at your comment until this bit: "Java itself is far from the fastest thing possible, and the speed of Java is itself a strict upper bound on Clojure's speed"

Clojure doesn't compile to Java, it compiles to JVM bytecode, and I think (although I don't know) that that's supposed to be very fast.

In this post:

http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/09/clojure-faster-than-m...

I compiled a (lookup into a map (potentially constructed at run time)) into a series of nested if statements, which then ran very fast indeed.

I shouldn't think I've achieved anything like the holy grail here, it all goes wrong at the end anyway, and I think that clojure 1.3 might actually have broken the optimization techniques I used.

But I think there's a case for saying that an immutable lisp on the JVM might one day be the fastest language in the world, because you can do those sorts of tricks in lisp in a way that you can't feasibly do in assembler, and the JVM does optimization dependent on run-time behaviour, as well as on static analysis.

I don't have the data. I'm not asserting this.

But I am asserting that Java speed is not a strict upper bound on JVM language speed, (unless every JVM bytecode program is also a Java program, which I can't imagine is the case!).

Last time I tried Scala, it blew Clojure out of the water for speed on the program I translated. I assume that Java did too. I think that's probably not true any more.

Anyway, pretty fractal tree program in lisp!

Behind the scenes, they work very much in the same way. It's the interface that's different.

This is just getting better and better. It almost makes me wonder whether I should bother reading Harry Potter to get some context for it. Although I understand the Author hasn't actually read all the books?