lamacase

You present a very crude opinion on a very nuanced issue, which is only tangentially related to the content of the article. It would be an effort just to elucidate what your precise position even is before anyone could seriously engage the topic.

Why don't you write up your ideas for constructing and enacting a well-prioritized research plan/budget, and submit it to hn so people can address your position in detail? That way you could have a focused discussion without distracting the people who are actually interested in articles like this one.

Your explanation is wonderful, but I thought the article said pretty much the same thing:

"So there is a subtle but important distinction reflected in the term deterministic chaos – the motions of an orbiting body are fully determined by the laws of physics, but they are unpredictable because we can never know the starting conditions well enough."

The cover actually appears to be one of the jpl "visions of the future" posters.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/images/superea...

I hope the author has permission to use it?

I don't see that it matters whether consciousness is "actual" or "illusory" (whatever that distinction entails) for the purposes of explaining subjective experience. The degree to which that experience reflects, or fails to reflects, physical reality is certainly interesting but I don't see it changing the nature of the problems.

"Instead of asking how neural impulses turn into conscious experiences, we must ask how the grand illusion gets constructed."

I really don't see what the difference is. How are we to interpret the notion that, say, the color Orange is really just a "trick"? Some sleight of mind perhaps?

What point was the author trying to make?

"This thing you think of as you: it spreads across two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum, a fat meaty pipe more than 200 million axons thick."

From the article.

It's interesting because, compared to the massive parallelism in each hemisphere, the connection between the two doesn't seem all that large.

Individual neurons also seem to have to have a fairly slow response time, on the order of milliseconds from what I've read. IANANeuroscientist, but that could be a manageable amount of data?

  7. It is a Secure

  byte code is turned into machine-readable code and is can’t be understood by a human being.

  The byte code verifier looks out for any additional symbols, as well as, code that doesn’t match up to the coding standards. This helps in making the byte code free from errors and highly secure.

I don't think Java hate is really necessary here. The article is really bad in its own right.

I interpreted him as saying (and it sounds like you may have as well?) that this distinction SHOULD NOT be ENCODED in XML or S-Expression or whatever data serialization/markup syntax you invent.

He does not appear to make an argument as to why he believes this, so I'd say his claim is at worst unsubstantiated.

I find it hard to believe that there's a objectively correct decision about the number of semantic concepts that "should" be encoded in a syntax, but I can understand why lisp enthusiasts would be on the 'closer-to-none end of that spectrum.

I'd be interested to hear why you think it's so essential. The only argument I'm really aware of is compatibility with existing markup languages.

I would guess that a markup syntax that is as simple and regular (ie. syntactically consistent) as possible would be the easiest to operate on algorithmically. I would also guess that this would make it easier to build, on top of this language, tools which present the content in various ways that are easier to read/write/manually-manipulate if you so desired.

Actually, his example syntax makes this argument implicitly. He is suggesting that his tools are significantly easier to implement by working with plain S-Expressions, and that they can easily be mapped to a 'write-friendly markup language that is isomorphic to XML anyway.

I make no claims about the quality of his presentation or the clarity of his arguments.

I think the confusion here (not yours specifically) is that his actual <|> syntax resolves this ambiguity and his informal CL translation does not.

You are correct that:

  <foo bar="zot">quux</foo>  =>  (foo (bar "zot"))
  <foo><bar>zot</bar></foo>  =>  (foo (bar "zot"))

Is an ambiguity. However in his <|> syntax:

  <foo bar="zot">quux</foo>  =>  <foo <bar | "zot">>
  <foo><bar>zot</bar></foo>  =>  <foo | <bar | "zot">>

What about, say:

  <foo bar="zot">quux</foo>

as

  (foo (bar "zot") (data "quux"))

Or any other keyword which you could reserve as being the special "non-meta" data?

  (foo (bar "zot")) is then unambiguously <foo bar="zot"/>
  (foo (data (bar "zot"))) is then <foo><bar>zot</bar></foo>

I'm not sure whose side I'm on by proposing this. I'd be interested to know.

I don't particularly like the blog format. The central organizational feature of a blog is a timeline. The idea that something you said is "older" than some other thing is not a particularly useful relationship. Though you would probably like to hear if a particular idea had been updated.

I think something closer to a personal wiki would be better. All links to entries would be versioned so external links always point to the content they intended, but the entry would contain a link to an updated version if it exists.

I think having a medium where people tend to curate their content, rather than forgetting about it and moving on, would lead to higher quality content over time.

The second-to-last slide ends with:

"ideally, a language should be designed so that an optimizing compiler can describe its optimizations in the source language. Of course!"

and

"The programmer using such a system will write his beautifully-structured, but possibly inefficient, program P; then he will interactively specify transformations that make it efficient. Such a system will be much more powerful and reliable than a completely automatic one."

Which I find to be a much more agreeable conclusion than

"everybody should write in-line assembly for inner-loops"

Bit of a tangent but, I don't know if a segfault should be considered a consequence of a "naive" implementation. Seems more like a consequence of a broken one.

A simple if (!A) goto err_free; would turn that segfault into a "Failed to parse file"

Also, it looks like qsort is implemented on his system as qsort_r:

  http://osxr.org/glibc/source/stdlib/msort.c

Qsort_r appears to allocate O(n) extra memory when the data fits into 1/4 of physical memory. The comments suggest that the regular qsort is slower.

I often do flip a coin for binary decisions. Not everything is so simple though.

For more open ended decisions I use deliberately and obviously irrelevant metrics like wordplay or ad-hoc numerology.

It's useful for getting people to stop asking you where you want to go for lunch for example.

I'd be interested to see if any of these techniques have a measurable impact on decisions with any consequence.

It seems like all these decisions are completely arbitrary, and I know that I'm always looking for any dumb excuse to pick one arbitrary option over another.

I always wondered this as well. If a company was sponsoring data on a product that they don't make any money from, that looks like it could be considered anti-competitive.

If a company sponsored data on search so they could fill the results with ads for their products maybe?

Or if a streaming service sponsored data so they could get people to buy from their music store or something?

If the data is sponsored using funds from the profits of the sponsoring service, I can't imagine how that could be construed as anti-competitive. Presumably the competition could do the same thing unless there's some sort of exclusivity deal.

There is a competitive advantage to being a bigger company with more money to throw around, but does that make it anti-competitive?

> What is rendering that HTML if not a browser?

I don't think the search-box and tabs are rendering it.

The firefox interface is already described in an XML format (XUL) and rendered from that. Instead of having two markups and two renderers, this allows you to simplify and consolidate to a single one.

I would hardly construe that as having "gone too far".

> (One reason for the recent infantile obsession about tiling window managers)

Wait, are you saying that tiling window managers are unusable, superfluous, arcane? Or do you simply object to cargo-culting?

I can't actually use stacking window managers anymore. It's a little like the difference between auto-arranging icons, and milling about manually organizing them into little piles. It may seem like you've lost some control with automatic, but it's control over frivolous minutiae. You've shed the responsibility of micro-managing the little file-fiefdoms and their petty squabbles.

Who would not prefer a desk where all the papers sorted themselves and squared the corners of their piles?

> ideas coming from ad design

One of the things that bugs me most about many "modern" product pages is that they are often designed to look like brochures. Flashy and eye-catching, but with very little content or meaningful organization.

Most of the time I was brought to the page by an actual advertisement, or some content performing a similar function, and I am on the page now, looking for information. It's a bit like going to a restaurant and getting a pamphlet promoting the atmosphere and decor instead of a menu.

I scrolled though many sites advertising devices, looking for that elusive little table that summarizes the data I'm looking for, variously called 'features' or 'specs' or whatever. But these days even those sections are full of non-information like "all day battery life* " (That star is pointing nowhere).

I'm open to the possibility that I'm using the internet wrong. Perhaps there's a very good reason that the last place I should expect to find information about a product is on the product's own page.

To be fair, this is an article by a UX designer, targeting other UX designers, for the express purpose of getting their (presumably) already usable interfaces noticed, and appreciated.

If you can accomplish this with 7 simple rules then you don't really have to worry about the subjective parts, and you can focus on the usability.

The guy who did the C4 compiler also has a more fully featured one that does support structures:

https://github.com/rswier/swieros/blob/master/root/bin/c.c

It's part of an OS he's building based on xv6

I printed out a copy of the source into a spiral-bound notebook to read/annotate. It can boot on real hardware which is pretty neat. It can even do multiprocessing on multiple cores (processes, no threads).

It uses "ATA PIO Mode" for the disk driver which is very simple and available on all ATA drives, but horribly slow. The console output is similarly naive but easy to understand. It even has a stripped down user-space, shell, C library etc.

It's a really good top-to-bottom look at a simple OS.

"The following external libraries and tools are retrieved during the build process: ... Mesa - Implementation of OpenGL (only the software rasterizer is available)."

From the readme