nene

Why do you think self-driving-cars are so far fetched? We already have some pretty good prototypes.

Additionally, what would be those massively positive effects? I can see less car accidents and reduced amount of mundane driving, but I wouldn't consider those effects as dwarfing everything else.

From the interview:

- How can you patent something like online flight planning? [--] Were you just first ones to think of patenting it?

- According to the Patent Office, that is correct.

The interviewer tries to squeeze information out from the man, but he just talks his way around the actual question, saying things like IANAL, It's in the Patent, the Patent is very specific, that's what the Patent Office says.

I wish the interviewer wasn't so soft with him.

What struck me most was this passage:

In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions.

Isn't it like taping on the cover of the book: "Only for white"?

You can't introduce s-exprs into an ordinary language - it would cease to be an ordinary language and become a Lisp dialect instead.

Yeah, the UNIX ln command is full of trouble.

* The arguments order is just the opposite of common sense. It has taken me years to really remember it, and I still have to think a little every time I use it.

* The default is to create hard link, which you almost never want. And if you do want them, you are probably doing it wrong. Making hard links is just asking for trouble.

I've read that Plan9 has somewhat corrected this whole problem. At least there is no ln command at all. Instead one uses bind, mount, and unmount. Of which bind is most similar to ln -s, but with arguments in reversed order.

Does anyone know how this "most popular languages" list is calculated? I can imagine several methods:

* Number of projects containing a language. * Number of projects having most of the code in a language. * Lines of code in a language. * Number of users having a language in some repository.

Plus there is this whole forking thing going on...

From the article:

> In addition to improving peak performance as measured by the V8 benchmark suite, Crankshaft also improves the start-up time of web applications such as GMail.

As I understand it, there is more to Crankshaft than just startup time improvement.

Hmmm... I don't know much about COBOL, but Wikipedia tells me that she wrote the initial specification of the language, and given that it doesn't look to me as such a big stretch to name her at least as one of the main inventors of the language. Although it might be the case that after the committee there wasn't much left of the initial spec. But as I sayd, I hardly know anything about COBOL.

> Unit Testing - Do you unit test your JavaScript?

IMHO the simple boolean answer doesn't really tell you that much. There is a big difference between someone having only a few unit-tests for a huge codebase, v/s someone having most of the code covered by unit tests.

Additionally JavaScript is used a lot for user interface related stuff, where unit tests can often be more trouble than they're worth; instead full-scale functionality testing (like with Selenium) could be more useful thing to do.

I think it could be made more legible by having a lowercase font instead. Most of us are accustomed to recognizing entire words by just the shape of them, but uppercase text doesn't provide much cues for such pattern-matching.

I think it is just taken out of the context from the article, where it's just below a code sample with a fair amount of lambdas in it.

I find this hard to believe. Maybe if one is still living in the mainframe era and doesn't have a truly personal computer at all. Do you have any real examples of this?

> By any chance, is your most recently elected president called "moot"?

Sorry. I don't understand this comment.

Is it trying to say, that electronic voting is by definition a failure? It doesn't seem to criticize any specific aspect of the Estonian e-voting system.

Or is it just calling names?

Found an answer.

The problem is that String.fromCharCode takes multiple arguments and Array.map also passes multiple arguments to the callback, therefore the equivalent of numbers.map(String.fromCharCode) is actually:

    numbers.map(function(x, y, z){return String.fromCharCode(x, y, z);})

Which of course is slower as the end result will actually be array with longer strings in it.

That's exactly what I was thinking:

* In the first version each time the anonymous function is executed interpreter has to lookup String and from it the fromCharCode method => 2n lookups.

* In the second version the String and fromCharCode have to be lookud up only once => 2 lookups.

Therefore according to slow-lookups-theory the first version should be slower. Except when I measure it, the opposite turns out to be true.

I decided to try writing the same thing in JavaScript and discovered something really strange.

My first idea was:

    numbers.map(function(x){return String.fromCharCode(x);}).join("");

This was pretty fast already, but why not eliminate the anonymous function completely and pass String.fromCharCode directly to map():

    numbers.map(String.fromCharCode).join("");

I timed it and... ...this was ~100 times slower than the previous version. WTF!

Somehow passing this native function directly to Array.map() is way slower than wrapping it inside another function and passing that to Array.map().

I have tested it so far in Chrome, Firefox and Opera - the results are the same. I also tried forEach(), which behaves similarly.

Does anybody have an idea why this is so?

Update: I tried the same with Math.round and Math.sin, and with these the results were as one would expect: passing the function to Array.map() directly was a little bit faster than using intermediate anonymous function. So it seems the problem is with String.fromCharCode specifically.

It's hard to find a worse example than php, because when many "bad" languages fail in one or the other category, php seems to fail in most categories.

* Java has a really repetitive syntax, but it's libraries might make up for that.

* C++ with all it's features has bazillion ways to shoot yourself, but it's arguably fast and the syntax is bearable.

But php has both an ugly syntax, horrendous stdlib, and fame of security issues.

Maybe COBOL or MUMPS could be worse than php... haven't used these though.

Hammer and screwdriver are equally ugly/pretty. But that's beside the point - it's not the ugliness of php that puts people off, it's the clumsiness and awkwardness of the tool.

It's sad that this app doesn't work with a normal desktop browser - IMHO one shouldn't rely completely on touch events.

It almost works with Android, except for the special-characters-menu, the tooltip of which gets hidden under textarea.

Emacs doesn't really come with out-of-the-box great support for most languages. Even for one language there are usually several alternative modes available, from which you have to choose. Even for Lisp you probably want to consider SLIME instead of the default.

Unfortunately not every popular language has a truly great mode available. And the whole mode-ecosystem feel like a pita (especially for newcomers), but at least you have a choice, which you don't have with most other editors/IDE-s.

But your talk about syntax highlighting is just unfair. I for example use a JavaScript mode written by Steve Yegge, which actually contains a full-blown JavaScript parser which pretty much ensures that under normal circumstances I don't make syntax errors. Oh... and it also has syntax highlighting :)

Actually, I found the Slashdot commentary a lot more informative then the crypic IRC chat, which I couldn't force myself to read through.

WTF's / minute ?

http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg

Thanks, this was a really interesting read.

Oh... so this guy basically patented the evil method of associating registration code with specific hardware configuration. But he should have used it for good and sayd: "No Microsoft, I will not allow you to use this technology at all."

IMHO it would be a good idea to patent all evil business practices and then disallow companies to use them :)

Even if it's not meant to be true, I find it even more disturbing that the symbolic and English formulations doesn't seem to quite match up. (IMHO the symbolic formulation doesn't state that n must be integer.)

It's like the source code and comments being out of sync - you don't know which one is wrong.

That's IMHO a good thing - you can easily filter out somebody who says "C/C++/C#" - I wouldn't want to work in that kind of place.

As far as I know, that language has always been called Go! (your referenced wikipedia page doesn't state otherwise, although the wikipedia page for Go! didn't even exist before Google annouced its Go language).

But don't you also have to trust a bus-driver, airplane-pilot, etc. And all kind of things can go wrong with these human drivers: they might be drunk or under some medication, they can die in a sudden hart attack, they can just make bad decisions, or even worse - they can be commanded to land the plane into some tower.

Yeah... Apparently this turns out to be a link bait.

The author seems to confuse self-learning with learning only the theory.

The real title should be: "Theory without practice is overrated".

And when you word it this way, it's hardly anything surprising.

Damn. And the Wikileaks page itself is down for maintenance :(