mroll

Wish more people understood this about tcl

> While all previous evidence goes towards pointing this to be another way for AMZN to squeeze more out of their employees...

Why would you go against a theory that all evidence pointed toward? I think what you meant is that despite what it looks like at first glance, there could be reasons why this is a good idea. You should present evidence for those arguments, maybe based on personal experience

Godels incompleteness theorem says that no formal system can prove or contain all truthy theorems. It says nothing about humans being immune to this effect, which it seems to me your comment is implying

I would be interested in hearing the opinions of people who've been in this situation, too. Seems like it could be beneficial to the community.

> The minimization of atoms is something that I think we’ll see continue to see over the next ten years...

What does this even mean? You can't make atoms smaller than they are. Unless he's talking about some abstract 'atom' which doesn't work since he just throws out the word without clarifying. I don't think this is a common metaphor.

Indeed I am thinking similar things right now

Title should be qualified like "Why webdevs should learn HTML and CSS." Article becomes less interesting and obvious.

> ...then the risk may outweigh the reward

I think you mean the reward may outweigh the risk

I like the browsing atmosphere of the small bookstore. Also I find it hard to get past all the titles that are currently being hyped if I go to amazon. I read more old books than I do new ones. But if I have a title in mind that I want to buy right away, amazon is my first stop

Why don't you read? Or is it just this year that you are taking off?

I spend a couple hours once or twice a month in a used book store. I browse the history, fiction, classics, science/math sections and look for titles that align with what I've been thinking about lately. I also have a mental list of authors that I will buy on sight.

Long After Midnight, Ray Bradbury

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Thieves' World, Robert Asprin

Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn, Robert Asprin

Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

Quantum Computing Since Democritus, Scott Aaronson

Reamde, Neal Stephenson

Fool's Assassin, Robin Hobb

Big Planet, Jack Vance

The design does not /have/ to involve writing a compiler. For instance, the X3J13 committee designed the ANSI Common Lisp standard, but left writing implementations up to third parties. On the other hand, the team of Julia language developers both design and write the compiler.

I guess it depends on your motivations for creating the language. Programmers will often design a language and write the compiler/interpreter themselves as a learning experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3J13

http://julialang.org/

It has 6GB of RAM... this has me wondering if I can plug it into a monitor and treat it as a linux box. Any comments?

Do these robots have electrical parts inside of them? It seemed like they were being made to move by a nearby magnetic force, not an engine within the robot.

Refutability is a quality of many a good crypto system

Edit: spelling

Found this thread looking through the new links page

Getting a job as a programmer certainly doesn't require either talent or passion. Even when you start to compare programmers, the better ones are generally the ones who've spent more time hacking, regardless of how much talent they have or if you would describe them as passionate. I guess you could say that if someone spends so much time doing something, they must be passionate, but I feel the term is overused in this context.

That whole block of self-promotion at the beginning kind of put me off continuing to read the ama.

But if they haven't studied graphs and are unable to give you rigorous answers, will you forgive them because they haven't taken the right classes?

It seems to me you should ask questions you expect the candidate to be able to give good answers for, period.

I like the fast fourier transform method for fast integer multiplication. Only applicable on really big inputs, but the idea is that it computes the fft of both integers, does point-wise multiplication of the resulting vectors, then does the inverse fft to recover the product. More about this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplication_algorithm#Fouri...).

Another interesting but asymptotically slower integer/polynomial multiplication algorithm is Karatsuba's.

The reason it has potential is because it is an unbelievable experience unlike anything that has ever come before it. I'm serious. You must never have had the experience of looking around the tombs of ancient egypt while standing in the middle of your kitchen, or of watching the Master's golf tournament, from the tee box, sitting on your living room couch. And those things are already possible when the device had been out a week and a half. From a place of experience, I'd say the potential is obvious

I'm not sure what method this system uses for definite integration, but it is likely one of Simpsons, Gaussian, and Clenshaw-Curtis. These are numerical methods that, for the best accuracy, require lots of steps of evaluation. Depending on the error bounds you want, it could take a while.

Edit: also the nonlinear square root term may cause difficulty.

People might find this interesting: Maple uses Clenshaw Curtis as the default, but will switch dynamically to Gaussian if singularities are detected.

This is a great piece of writing. Particularly for a hacker. If you haven't, also check out http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Great response. I admit I am interested in fexprs because of the syntactic sugar; not having to quote arguments means code can look more like words at the top level, and smaller functions can deal with how they are interpreted.

As far as the search for compilers is concerned, I think what is considered powerful notation should be kept around, even if it's tough to compile at the moment.

The point isn't that eval or fexprs are good to use all over the place. It's interesting as an exercise in language design to see what is possible when they are available.

And to the fact that fexprs operate on second class data. It's still a win that they are first class objects. It means you can dynamically pick which fexpr (or applicative operator) to call on a set of arguments, which like you said, can be selectively eval'd.

but not a macro in the sense Common Lisp knows them... FEXPRs are first class objects. FEXPRs can be passed around as values of variables, whereas macros cannot

Lisp as the idea has no syntax. Racket is a dialect of that idea, and the authors have decided to add syntax.

> I really dislike the idea that programming languages have "commands"

I guess you would really hate tcl, then. Everything is a command.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I know a lot of people, myself included, who have the patience to roast a golden brown marshmallow. I've only heard good things about Sandberg, but that seemed like a really weak anecdote to depict one of the world's most innovative people.