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occupy_paul_st

119 karma · joined January 3, 2016

http://paulkernfeld.com/
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occupy_paul_st··on The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
Since a common critique of city sims is that they are not organic enough, it's exciting to see this case where the mechanics are TOO organic!
occupy_paul_st··on How to calculate the alignment between BERT and spaCy tokens
Clicked on this thinking it was some kind of crazy decentralized crypto algorithm... yeesh, I gotta spend less time on the blockchain!!
occupy_paul_st··on An Update on the UMN Affair
> Of the remaining four, one of them was an attempt to insert a bug that was, itself, buggy, so the patch was actually valid

Absolutely legendary

occupy_paul_st··on Food Order Has Significant Impact on Glucose and Insulin Levels (2015)
> They worked with 11 patients, all of who had obesity and type 2 diabetes and take an oral drug that helps control glucose levels, called metformin.

This is such a tiny and specific sample compared to the unqualified claim they make in the title. Unfortunately, this level of rigor seems to be par for the course in the world of nutrition.

occupy_paul_st··on From First Principles: Why Scala?
I actually haven't seen a language that can do everything that Scala can do, so in a lot of senses I agree with you!

The alternative is to use multiple different languages to fill different niches. In theory this sounds suboptimal but I think it might actually be easier to learn multiple simpler languages than it is to learn Scala.

BTW according to PYPL: Swift, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Rust are now more popular than Scala.

https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html

occupy_paul_st··on From First Principles: Why Scala?
I definitely agree that many newer languages are strongly inspired by Scala, but I don't see a strong argument for why to choose Scala over one of a newer hybrid language. My own intuition is that these newer languages have had the benefit of being able to learn from Scala's mistakes. A lot of them have intentionally sacrificed some of the Scala's flexibility to be easier to learn and use.

I found Scala to be an extremely enlightening language: it taught me a lot about functional programming. But, the complex type system and the sacrifices needed to ensure Java compatibility entail many quirks that I find frustrating. I think it's actually a similar dynamic to what you mention: "retro-fitting these features onto an existing language never fits quite as nicely as a language that was designed with them from scratch."

BTW, I am a huge fan of your writing: the Principle of Least Power is a sacred programming text to me .

occupy_paul_st··on OpenStreetMap PBF Perfomance Tricks
Yeah, fair. I'm only working with Boston-area data so I can pretty easily load a Massachusetts OSM file from memory. However, memory would definitely be an issue for processing the entire world.
occupy_paul_st··on Show HN: The world's first decentralized cat name database
I might be misunderstanding your question, but the code that's part of the tutorial should run a webcoin node; does that make sense?