mahmud

Love it how opium growing regions are exactly the same ones on the ancient silk road.

Isn't CoffeeScript the "Macro-assembler" of JavaScript? i.e. a simple 1:1 syntax mapping, without no differentiating semantics of its own. Or am I wrong?

Paul Graham wrote a seminal Common Lisp book specially for this. On Lisp www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

It's a Lisp dialect it seems :-)

So friken beautiful! Ahhh.

To be frank, it's more like 1084. There is no sophisticated surveillance apparatus, because they Hay'a (as it's known) is forbidden from spying on Muslims.

"In addition, the power of the mutawwa'in is limited by the Koran, which frowns upon those who intrude on the privacy of others in order to catch them in sinful acts. The mandate of the Committee on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is specifically to regulate behavior in the public realm. What occurs behind closed doors is between a believer and God."

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/05/the-king...

Saudi Arabia has just been chosen to head the United Nation panel on Human Rights. Disgrace abounds.

Employers require you to hand them your passport, and you get it back at the end of your work contract.

Not unusual for employers to owe labor several months worth of salary, and then deny knowing them, so workers get deported. A process known as tarheel in Arabic. When a worker decides to quit his or her job, out of desperation, the employer reports them and their visa status is flagged as huroob, it literally means "escapee", or runaway.

It's a reflection of American individuality, which sort of turns into selfishness and isolationist at some point. Everyone must have their own front/back yard. Everyone must own a car, which in turn is housed in its own garage, which itself is its own sanctuary cum creative space, so much so that most music bands start rehearsing in garages, businesses start in garages, etc. Garages also double as storage rooms for home maintenance tools, machining equipment, car repair, and everything a "man" must have. The average American home can supply all the tools necessary to start a small, home-repair business. Why does everyone need a 12' ladder just to clean the gutters once a year? Why no borrow/rent?

Ok.

Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is trying to turn Vegas into just that. Wish him luck!

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/350-mill...

It is the usual American word for housemate/flatmate. It's just that, usually, those with the most interesting "roommate" stories are typically university students (current, or former.)

Outside of university, hardly anyone shares a room with any stranger on a rental basis. That is, outside trafficked migrant ghettos, homeless shelters, San Francisco and prisons.

I have read in a few places that use of profanity signals affinity, and even used by some sales people to quickly build rapport with their leads. Same thing might be at play, subordinates trying to be chummy with their superiors.

> AWS to AWS APIs without a helmet (daringfireball.net)

I just ..

Heck, even use HaMLet to bootstrap it.

Hamlet is a portable SML implementation written in SML.

http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/hamlet/

(Not unlike SICL, which is a portable Common Lisp for R&D https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL)

OT:

"Why do we always refer to female public figures by their first name, and male ones by their last?"

I heard/read that question somewhere, and it stuck with me, can't stop seeing it. And this is a fine example of that.

Google results:

"Clinton email scandal" 41M results.

"Hillary email scandal" 48M results.

Yes, I do realize hers is a special case, and it's necessary to use her first name to disambiguate wrt to Bill. But the phenomenon exists. Just some thing to keep in mind.

[Edit:

"In the tennis commentary, women athletes were called by only their first names 52.7% of the time, while men were referred to by only their first names 7.8% of the time."

http://www.la84.org/gender-stereotyping-in-televised-sports/

]

Ouch, this sounds terrible. What if two functions/classes/top-level-constructs have the same name (and signature)? Now you have a conflict and your project won't build anymore.

Use version control, develop new features in branches, merge to master + tag. There.

You could do that in Common Lisp for about 3 decades now. I remember doing this 10 years ago, from the REPL no less.

https://common-lisp.net/project/cffi/manual/html_node/defcst...

Off-topic:

I really thought this was about DR-DOS, Novell's version of DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

Maybe they had a private communication with AM, and only released it after the negotiations broke down?

You login with your Facebook credentials.

Today's CS graduates are much better educated than people in those days. Early programmers wasted much of their energy fighting the platform, reverse engineering undocumented features, and haggling vendors for better access.

Today, you just focus on the problem and take the underlying platform for granted. Free Software has liberated computing from vendor-reliance.

I did that for 4 years. Beware! Being the only tech at an "agency" will quickly atrophy your core engineering skills, if you're not careful. You will get _good_ at delivering working solutions quickly, but these will tend to be one-off fixes, often data deliverables, but not finished products. You will also gradually slip on testing, and QA in general.

Working in an engineering team environment has all sorts of benefits. After I moved to my next gig, I think I learned more about dev in my first 3 months at product team, than I had in my last 4 years at previous gig, all thanks to simple code reviews and pairing. It's amazing to hear the thought process of other developers and how they would approach a particular problem.

Enjoy it. Learn everything you can, but keep in mind that you're not getting the full picture. Full software product lifecycle might be very different beast than what you're doing right now.

Anyone know how incremental-computation related to partial-evaluation or staged-computation?

I haven’t dug into the IC papers yet, but from my understanding.

Partial-Evaluation is specialization of function over arguments. Say f(x,y,z) => v, a partially computed function f’(x,y) can be computed by binding ‘z’. Thus, applying f’ to (x,y) will yield the same value ‘v’ as f(x,y,z).

Staged-Computation is a generalization (restriction?) of partial-evaluation, but for meta-programs that generate other programs. That’s to say, the result value v of a staged meta-program M is itself a computable function. M(f(x,y,z)) the meta-program that generates previous function f can itself be decomposed to multiple steps M’’(M’(f(x,y,z))) => M(f,x,z), but having those intervening steps of computation openly accessible allows for interesting program manipulation possibilities. Which is why staged-computation subsumes everything from compiler generation, to macros, to runtime optimization.

So, Incremental-Computation (is?) looks to me like partial-evaluation + reactive programming? That is, a PE’ed function will get recomputed if any of its arguments change value? This doesn’t make in a formal model like the lambda calculus, which captures values and renames variables. So perhaps there is something other than call-by-value at work here?

  (define add-two
    (let ((two 2))
      (lambda (x)
        (+ x two))))

If I were then to say

  (incremental-computation:change-value 'two 3)

And I'm assuming ADD-TWO will get recomputed, how would this work? Which "two" will be changed? Will it replace the captured value in the body of the lambda, or does it reify captured variables of each function into a global symbol-table, a la the Mozart/Oz constraint store?

Can someone explain how this works actually?

Lisp is more like the Velvet Underground than the Pixies ;-)

And still no EBCDIC! :-/

/s

Glad you clarified and said Minix 3; I remember the 90s version had its own userland, and its own C compiler (also written AST), I know this because I hacked on them extensively. Probably the first time I have seen extensive source code, more than a snippet or a *.c file.

Focus, dedication, specialization, experience, and superior choice of technology.

Please don't! IntelliJ is both perfect, and very affordable. Google will only ruin it by neglecting for a few years, before shuttering it down.

JetBrains, stick to what you do best.

Another one off to the eternal jam session. RIP.