kaosjester

6+ hours of battery life is _absolutely terrible_ by today's standards.

I read the blog post and I still have no idea what Gomix is. Is it just a web-based nodejs ide?

It's a damn shame they only did it for the DNC.

This isn't about marketing. Uber is literally pushing toward this. They hired most of CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center! They're making this push, and it's either that or bust for them.

You want the Nintendo Switch of computing?

I completely agree. The battery life difference -- even those few hours -- are enough to drive me away. Combine that with an absurd price point jump, and I'm out. The macbook air 13" was the perfect developer laptop, and now I guess I'll buy a Lenovo Carbon X1 when this laptop dies. For my work, I don't need a big processor or high-speed RAM or high-resolution display. I need a light, usable laptop that will run all day surfing the internet in an airport. And the new MBP doesn't fit that use case.

And while the new 13" MBP is technically less volume, it's thick the whole length of it. There was something oddly nice about the MBA's shape when holding it in one hand.

No, I got that. The article also has the person who demonstrated it advocating for democratic control of leadership, and I was commenting on how that might run into its own troubles.

I find the idea of a democratic structure oddly appealing. Don't like your boss? Vote them out! Love someone and wish they'd be in charge, because they're basically in charge anyway? Vote them in! If anonymous voting happened at every level, it's possible that the incompetent people hiding away in the company will quickly get revealed and demoted (which might make them leave altogether).

That said, the democratic approach has a lot of other issues in the form of cohorts and cliques. A manager might secure just enough votes to stay in power by having quiet conversations with some employees, using power to give them breaks, etc. I'd love to see a frank discussion or proposal about how to dissuade that.

We spent so long asking if we could do it, that we never stopped to ask if we should.

So it looks like, in short, welfare dollars have mostly stopped being spent as checks handed to the needy and, instead, are being used to help people with drug problems, childcare, and educational needs. Moreover, most of the states that have stopped giving out money are rural, and many of them are right-leaning. Which isn't a particularly surprising outcome, when you consider the GOP-spun narrative that welfare recipients are mostly lazy, poor people who are unwilling, but not unable, to work.

Here's the link to the actual website where you can use try it: https://www.eyeem.com/

Another instance of a cop who has watched the 'war on drugs' rage on and on, and came to speak out about the fundamental flaw in the approach: you can't fight a war against drugs; you have to treat the people at the bottom, hopelessly addicted users, like the victims they are. The poignant quote in the article isn't the one used for the headline, but this one: "drug policy should be about reducing not drug use, but drug harm."

It's certainly a mixture of the two.

To be more explicit, it isn't a guarantee as much as an implicit government economic policy which, it seems, boils down to:

It is the individual's responsibility for their own financial security, and the larger economic scheme of the United States should continue to support and encourage profiting off of moral hazards.

That said, there does seem to be some US consumer backlash, where individuals are basically attempting to stay out of this system altogether. Millennial house buying rates say it all: these rules are unfair, and the next generation don't want to play.

Or, the amount of drunk drivers is so small that whatever number Uber takes off the streets doesn't make a statistical bump. The p-value hit the threshold for DUIs and deaths, but not for alcohol-involved accidents.

I'm pretty familiar with various approaches to implementing Lisp / Scheme, and seeing projects like this is almost heartbreaking. What's been done here (which I might call the "mechanical" approach to implementing Scheme) seems to attempt to emulate an underlying LISP machine instead of emulating the language itself, and that's fundamentally problematic because, for the most part, that's the wrong abstract machine. If the author took the time to work through the first four or five chapters of SICP, they'd have the knowledge to construct a much cleaner machine (based on CEK) that would, ultimately, end up far more performant and faithful to the end-goal semantics. All of this mucking about with allocation and free-cells for expressions and the like is orthogonal to building a LISP interpreter in C. (And, if the author is really interested in that sort of thing, the LISP machine is well-documented.)

If anyone else is interested in starting a project like this, getting down and dirty, I'd urge you to start with the first part of SICP and then move into Dybvig's dissertation (at http://agl.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf), which directly and plainly describes multiple approaches to producing efficient, reliable Scheme implementations.

(Also, why doesn't this link to the Github page instead of the blog?)

In the near future, criminals will learn to leaves their cellphones at home while committing crimes, using burner phones for any contact they need during that time.

Which, incidentally, is advice that the Shadowrun tabletop RPG gives freely as advice to would-be players...

There are two kinds of companies in today's world: those who have been hacked, and those who don't know it yet.

You're blowing my mind. Apple Music's interface is so bad that I literally did not know it could do any of these.

Compare this to Spotify Premium:

- Syncing an album for offline play is a checkbox.

- I can play music on any device logged into the account from any other device logged into the account

- Robust song discovery

- Massive back-catalog

- HD Playback

It's absurd that iTunes, my phone's native media player, is worse than a third-party app.

Good thing this article names a bunch of people who wanted all of this history about them anonymous.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two MIT economists, recently wrote a book about this, called The Second Machine Age (here: http://www.amzn.to/0393239357). We're teetering on the edge of economic shifts, and we have a lot of questions we're going to need to ask about how people will live in a world where jobs simply aren't available.

When 60% of the workforce is unemployable, either there will be massive unemployment, and the crime, poverty, and starvation associated, or there will be a massive paradigm shift in how we think about employment, money, and scarcity.

I'm hoping we get to the latter before the former.

It's recur, not recurse. Would you incurse during an incursion?

And there isn't a password reset option or password confirmation. Hope you typed it right!

I went to Trinity and Howland attempted to teach us J there. The entire thing went terribly. I agree with Iverson's assessment: learning J is a lot like learning math in that mathematicians often use weird and cryptic syntactic forms that are only tangentially related to other, similar forms. Unlike APL, this problem occurs in absurd detail in J. APL, at least, has strictly different symbols. J, on the other hand, uses strangely and opaquely-overloaded syntax. By way of example, consider the following:

A programmer may expect < to perform less-than. In J it does, when used as a dyad. Used monadically, it acts as a boxing operator (similar to Scheme's box). That's strange, but livable. The problem, though, is in J, <. means 'lesser of' (min), and <: means 'less than or equal'. Again, this is a potentially livable arrangement. Except that . means determinant (or dot product, depending on monadic or dyadic appearance) and : means either 'explicit' or 'monadic/dyadic', a sort of combinator that accepts a monadic and dyadic operator and yields a new one. That is, in Scheme, dyadic usage of : is akin to a case-lambda that checks if it uses one or two arguments.

If I present to you the program <., what does it do? Well, it certainly does something different from < ., which does something different from < :, which does something different from <:, which does something different from < . :, which again differs from <. :, and so on. This is exacerbated by operations such as 'table', written /, which bleed into other places. For example, </ inserts box, while <:/ inserts a decrement! And < :/ boxes up the result of an 'explicit' being 'inserted', whatever that means. And this syntactic problem plagues the entire vocabulary of the language:

http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm

A clear optimization would be to just give these things their real names, use text, and write S-expressions. At least then the programs would be readable!

The largest problem, however, is that for being a functional language, J does little if anything to convey the important idea that have been developed in functional programming: recursion. It simply isn't how things 'are done' in J. So we have a language with bad syntax, good semantics, and a horrible problem from an educational perspective. It has some nice additions above and beyond other APLs, but after that it falls flat. I'd urge anyone who has read this far to learn APL instead of J; it will at least be readable by other APL programmers.

(I didn't mean to go on a rant, but I suffered through Howland's class on J at Trinity, and it wasn't until I had a professor show me Scheme in ~3 hours that I saw why functional programming was truly worthwhile.)

The point everyone seems to be making is that there is no reason to do this in javascript if it's for command line use. Implementing it in js like this is just silly.

My wife worked on this a bit with Adam (https://twitter.com/#!/acfoltzer) and Ryan. There is a pending submission to ICFP.

The reason they went with CUDA was to plug into Accelerate's existing framework without redeveloping the entire wheel. As meric mentioned, Accelerate is a pain to do anything with and you can bet dollars to do syntax that this package will generate the hard parts for you.

IIRC, ParFunk also has some nice framework in place for distributed computation (though I'm not certain it's completely in working order yet).