scoith

Oh, you're making me cry. I'm leaving HN anyway, since it's already in a downward spiral. Sayonara.

You are a faggot. I hope you'll lose a finger or two to yakuza.

You. Yes. YOU. The guy who down-votes this post. You are what is wrong with HN.

Really? Is this what you understand from guidelines? What's your next post? "I found a very delicious and interesting recipe on web. It was delicious and I think it's worth sharing with hackers ♥." Get out of here.

Maybe the blame is this stupid, non-central ranking mechanism which makes idiots like you and OP motivated to dump such stuff here for points and down-vote any criticism that does make sense.

Why the hell was this posted on Hacker News anyway?

Apple builds fancy gadgets and gathers a fan-boy population, and eventually starts selling more. This really doesn't say anything about Linux desktop.

This whole thing about backward compatibility and the discussion that surrounds it is just vague. Here's a practical "true story" for you: I'm using GNU/Linux for more than 10 years now, and it is still alive.

Never had any vague binary compatibility problems either, because I'm not strangely expecting to use an ancient binary version of Gimp on my current system. That's because FOSS is source oriented, not binary. I'm not suddenly trying to use a 15 years old graphics card whose driver is longer in the kernel either, because I don't use a 15 years old graphics card.

Yeah, tell me about those genius ideas invented by Apple that only 10 Einsteins could have come up with. Rounded corners? It's too fortunate for that that nobody patented their "innovative" stuff 50 years ago because it is totally ridiculous. Want some respect as a company? Do something like research.google.com instead of trying to screw people over with overpriced candies and screwing other companies when they put their hands in your honey jar.

...which unfortunately doesn't cover a photon. I think you meant quantum electrodynamics or quantum field theory.

Are we talking about the same thing? I'm talking about particle waves, or wave functions of particles, not a function which satisfies the wave equation (a photon happens to satisfy the wave function, but I'm trying to be general here) and with frequency, I mean energy. Try changing the sign of t in Schrodinger equation and see if it simply amounts to changing the sign of your momentum vector or not.

Save me the trouble an learn some basic physics. Read Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics, Chapter 7. If it's too complicated for you, read about waves. See how they propagate in time and space, and pay special attention to what happens to the equation when you change the sign of t. If it's too difficult to imagine, try plotting using a program. And anti-matter is not matter travelling backwards in time. See my post below.

The problem with such interpretations is that they violate causality. Check out Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory for history. Concepts such as collapse of a wave function aren't necessary when you stop treating the observer in a special way and start considering observer-particle as a big quantum system.

This is not true. A wave propagates both in time and space. You're mixing these two. A negative frequency is like a wave travelling backwards in time, not left/right spatial direction.

Don't push the idea of a wave in space too much, that's not how stuff works in quantum mechanics. See Feynman Lectures of Physics, Vol 3, Section 3-3 for a text at the introductory level.

Please tell me you were trolling. Or that you're 10. Otherwise go read some basic mechanics from Goldstein's Classical Mechanics. And learn some basic mathematics.

Classical state of a particle lives in the 2n-dimensional manifold known as phase space. The coordinates of the phase space are the configuration space and the corresponding conjugate momenta. The state is a single point on the phase space, corresponding to the initial conditions of the problem. The Hamiltonian determines the time evolution in the phase space, which is a trajectory.

To make is simpler for you to understand: 1. Position and momentum couples form the physical state. And of course, for any physical system, it exists. 2. You need 2 initial conditions to solve a 2nd order differential equation. You can't solve a differential equation without initial conditions (of course to use this fact, you would need to understand that F=ma is a differential equation, not a function) (Maybe it's better if you read some good introductory text, such as Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol 1, Chapter 9).

If still not clear for you: the initial state in a two body problem is determined by the initial position and velocity. They are the initial conditions of your "function" F=ma, which is actually a second order differential equation. F determines how this initial state will change over time.

And sometimes they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they forget all about you.

I think there is a confusion here: our "mental" grasp of a physical process and intuition is tightly related to how the world works. We develop our intuition from real-world experience. They're not two separate things. This's also why quantum physics is so non-intuitive for us, and why we struggle dealing with it (counter-intuitive it is, we do it anyways, because that's just the way the Nature works --it's not something man-made like Lisp). That being said, the physical processes don't depend on people's understanding. Physics doesn't depend on how you think about the world. The quantum state (or a classical state) is there, and it won't go away just because you want mathematical elegance or try to see things in a different way in your inner world as hard as you can.

That being said, of course it matters the way you write your software. There is a huge gap between actual CPU instructions and Lisp. Between Lisp and the machine is an automated, soft layer of emulation, which may or may not be optimal and is extra work anyway.

Was there something wrong with the old definition?

Tbe reason that functional programming languages, including LISP, will never dominate the world is because most people are doing engineering, not maths or getting out CS papers.

CS people like to abstract away the computation from physical hardware, but the apparent fact is computation _is_ physical, and it's limits lie in physics and not in mathematics or philosophy (see Shor's algorithm for instance).

It's only natural to write programs in a language that follows the same flow as the underlying physical computer. A classical computer is represented by it's assembly language, thus it makes sense to have languages like C. Concepts like "stateless programs" don't even exists in a classical computer. It's as crazy as trying to build a quantum algorithm that does away with measurements!

In addition the physical world does not work anything like a stateless machine. As most useful programs imitate a physical process rather than a pure mathematical object, the notion of writing programs in such languages is not-intuitive and requires transformation of the actual problem at a both low (hardware) and high (software output) level.

Finally I would like to speculate that the whole concept will never be intuitive in the future (post-quantum computer era). In the era of quantum computers, because they will always be physical objects with a particular state, and it's this very fact that they have a well-defined state allows us to perform a computation.

Using computers. And with computers, he means Mathematica.

His talk is fundamentally wrong. Turning real life problems into a mathematical form (in other words, modelling) is not a subject of mathematics.

He's basically trying to sell Mathematica.

Lol! "I could teach myself more in an afternoon than I would learn in a 10-week class." Really genius? "Calculus B: F" Any it says repeated! Why didn't you take five afternoons and graduate then?

It is a well-known fact that becoming a "high-level" web programmer doesn't require brains or a degree. Now this post makes it clear that, even such people who miserably fail to get a degree can write PHP programs and Javascript.

As a scientist, I wouldn't worry about someone's lowered opinion who judges a scientific text by the font.

How about switching to Go and using goroutines?

Any programming language X people crying over "Real life X" ---it's always a sad story.

@ruediger There's nothing wrong with Unicode. UTF-8 sucks because it ends up taking more space.

@byuu No it doesn't. Try compressing a SJIS text using gzip. Then convert it to UTF-8 and do the same thing. With a "perfect" compressor, there shouldn't be any difference since the information contents are the same, but unfortunately we don't have a perfect compression algorithm that hits the theoretical lower bound for compression.

That page is misleading when it comes to Japanese text: UTF-8 sucks for Japanese text. UTF-8 and UTF-16 aren't the only two choices within the whole world, which is demonstrated in their choice of encoding Shift-JIS.