Yeah, just pass over the requirements with regular expressions. Now you have two problems. Wait, there's a Lisp macro for that... dammit! Let me get back to you...
I don't think he's going to be dicking around in their web site code. It could be written in Brainfuck for all he cares. What matters is they have MONEY which he can use to fund efforts at using better technology to write it. Somewhere, somebody has some social site written in the cleanest, most beautiful, maintainable, optimized code that ever existed but... they don't have MONEY. Such is the way of the world. Keeping up with the Kardashians (which is all FaceBook really is) rakes it in. By comparison, things of quality might make *some* MONEY but not enough to fund blue sky projects like VR. At least he's not building rockets for the nazis. Things are much better these days for technical people who need a sugar daddy.
I haven't driven a hybrid; but I could sign on to four modes: 1. Normal acceleration with your foot on the accelerator. 2. Slightly more than ICE engine braking with your foot not touching anything, minimum regen occuring. 3. Minimum to maximum regen, linear scale, with your foot lightly riding the brake. 4. Brake pads engaged with the brake pedal depressed past a certain point. Bonus points for some kind of indicator to let you know which mode it's in.
Like I said, I haven't test driven one so I don't know what it's like or if any of them work that way. That's just what my first try would be. Then if I drove it and didn't like it I'd go back to the drawing board...
It'll take you a while to get it. You'll have to be asking yourself the question, "What's all the fuss about Lisp?". You'll set it aside for a while. You could easily dismiss it for glossing over some details such as the actual (read) function; but when you "get it", you'll get it.
Stumbling blocks: prefix notation. A lot of people say it's the ()s that make Lisp hard to read; but it's really the prefix notation. Another stumbling block is the lame explanations for what (quote) does. People say it says "don't evaluate me" and while technically true, it doesn't answer the question. A better answer is, "returns a syntax tree ". A more detailed answer is "returns a list which serves the same purpose as a syntax tree. This is handy because every function in Lisp takes that same kind of tree as an argument, so it's handy for writing macros".
Like many people, I've never written a line of Lisp that runs anything, let alone an actual piece of professional code in Lisp. Also like many other people, I've found value in studying it and applying the concepts elsewhere.
Another person said "Forth" and they've also got a point. In some ways, Lisp is the dual of Forth. The postfix notation of Forth can cause just as much confusion as the prefix in Lisp; but that doesn't mean they aren't elegant in their own ways.
Not a bad idea. If your classes have no virtual methods and they don't allow mixins or other crazy runtime dynamic shenanigans, then in theory the compiler can optimize them down to un-boxed numbers. I wonder how man OO languages are very good at that though. The hard part might be the base class. If you don't even have un-boxed numbers and the base class has virtual methods... you're kind of stuck with something less than optimal.
Oh and of course time*length isn't velocity. length/time is. Division is slow and requires exceptions though, so if you try to get around that by inverting the time once and multiplying after that, then you need an invert class where multiplication *does* create a velocity type, or maybe I'm just not thinking it through all the way.
In any sane programming language, you can access the bytes directly as an indexed array.
You can do that in C; but you shouldn't. There are too many things you don't know:
1. Debug or release? That could change the structure layout.
2. Structure padding.
3. Byte-order.
IIRC, they call such a cast "type punning". They got away with it in network stacks on BSD; but that was a long time ago, *and* they no doubt had knowledge of all the compiler switches and CPU architecture.
For a language like PHP to have functions that "pack" and "unpack" data is perfectly reasonable. In fact, you should be writing your C functions like that, not just type punning and letting it fly out to files in all its unknown byte-ordered glory.
I'm pretty sure the people on both sides are fixated at the grade-school level, and our political leaders aren't much further along. I half expect Obama and Putin to "double-dog dare" eachother at some point.
Is the biggest event really important, or is it more important to look at entire industries? Has coal in Appalachia been better or worse than gold mining in California? The gold mining contaminated many bodies of water with mercury, and fish are still unsafe because of it. How many streams and lakes in Tennessee have warnings like, "pregnant women should eat no more than one of these fish per month"?
Sounds cool as long as it's not a HOA that runs with deed. The community pool where I grew up was like that and it worked fine. If you were in the community you had the right but not the obligation to purchase a membership.
If longer lives were optimal for our species, we would already be living them.
Every species has an average lifespan. Parrots, tortoises, and whales are highly successful and live long lives. OTOH, flies and rats are also highly successful and live short lives.
The species as a whole is "tuned" to live a certain period of time. This is a significant evolutionary parameter. The era of highly developed societies with extended lives due to advanced medicine is just a blink in time. We don't even know if our current level is sustainable or compatible with survival of our species as a whole. Yes, this individual would love to live a healthy 150 year life. You do have to consider what it will do to the replacement rate. Whales are taking a long time to come back. Long life seems to correlate with lower replacement rate. A population full of old folks might be more prone to extinction.
However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one
That presupposes something about how many copies the monkeys are apt to produce. I could sign on to them handing us zero or infinity copies under an infinite time scenario, whereas any "large number" would be arbitrary. The "infinite copies" outcome is not a problem because the mean time between deliveries is sufficient for us to burn them.
I made what might be an erroneous assumption that you were familiar with the New Math which was taught in the USA.
The wiki article says it was a 60s phenomenon, but based on my experience at least some of these concepts lived on in mutated form well into the 70s. There were a lot of educational experiments tried in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps even worse than "new math" was "open classrooms" which is like "open offices" for kids.
So, the idea of "teaching calculus to 5 year olds" is not new to me. It's "new math" all over again. Hopefully they don't throw out the A-B-Cs this time in the rush to teach great literature.
I don't know about "brainwashing," but I sure think that rote memorization is inappropriate 99% of the time and that it ruins educations.
At least you're not saying "never". I think 99% is a bit harsh. The link was long; but I skimmed it. The music analogy is interesting. You obviously wouldn't want a musician to be all reading/writing scores. OTOH, a music teacher that ignored notation and sight-reading would be doing a grave disservice to students.
My childhood gives me a comparative case study: grades K-3 with public school and some "new math". Grades 4-6 in private school with traditional everything. Grades 7-12 in public school then a BSEE.
The "new math" tried to teach us long division with a really klutzy version of division by successive subtraction. Working a problem such as 9354935793578 / 7656 was not realistic. We were making little check-boxes and guesses. Their method for long division was absolutely horrible for large numbers, and working ONE long division problem took half an hour.
I the traditional private school I learned long division using the classic decimal place subtraction method where you gradually accumulate your result at the top of the paper and get a long train of carefully prescribed subtractions trailing down the page. Much, much better. Homework might involve 5 long division problems that could be worked in 15 minutes if you were good.
Then in high school when I got into computing I understood what "new math" was trying to do. They were trying to show us how to figure things out ourselves, how division relates to subtraction. In grade school though, it was just frustrating.
I don't think we should throw out "new math" entirely either; but we shouldn't use it to the exclusion of tried and true algorithms. Some of the bright students are going to ask questions like, "why does this work". New math is good for those students; but the "repetitive and boring" aspect of rote learning is too easily replaced by "frustrating, useless and slow" in new math curricula.
OK, I wasn't going after "data science" specifically, but ad algos and how my twitter feed has become a cesspool of mental masturbation for ad algorithm people, which is the "killer app" for "big data":
1. PhD invents fantastic ad algo. 2. Guy sees ad on iPhone, takes EBT card there. 1. PhD applies for EBT card. #OneTwoPunch
Wow, I can't believe I just typed that many buzzwords in a Slashdot post; but at least I had a reason and put most of them in quotes... dammit. "algos". Anyway, I wonder if everybody's twitter feed is as bad as mine lately. I think it might have to do with a former co-worker who now works in that field. Thus, I get a lot of improperly targeted ads for people who are in the data-mining/ad biz. Of course I'll never buy their product--I'm not a CxO who's looking to proactively synergize my paradigms.... but it's an interesting "fly on the wall" view of how that world works, so I'm not entirely sure if I should find a way to stop it.
It isn't too often I genuinely laugh at my own expense. Thanks for pointing that out. Free editorial essays on the intertubs. You get what you pay for.
Focusing on diet for human lifespan is like focusing on gasoline for car lifespan.
Studies have been done of places where people tend to live longer. Some common threads are: genetics, happiness, close community ties, everyday physical labor, low stress, diet and maybe a few other things.
Yeah sure, diet is in there; but if your Daddy died at 40, you're pissed off all the time, you don't know your neighbors and you spend 60 hours a day stressing in a cube-farm then the quinoa salad you ate probably won't help much. Go ahead though. It probably won't hurt; just don't expect miracles. Look at *all* the factors.
Even if they don't get it the first time, continued exposure is good. I can think of a lot of things in math that didn't "click" until I'd heard it the umpteenth time. For example, how to count to umpteen.
I think a little bit of "modern" math is good but the old stuff still needs to be taught. Rote memorization gets a bad rap; but IMHO the 10X10 multiplication table should be committed to memory just like the alphabet. All else equal, a student with the table in his head will be able to work more quickly and confidently than one without. Notice I said 10X10 table. An odd thing is that they taught us 12X12. I think it's a tradition held over from the English system, where you had 12 inches in a foot. 12*12 even has the name "gross". There's nothing wrong with teaching the traditional table; but it would be nice if they put a red line or something around the 10X10 portion of it so that students understood the significance of that--that 10X10 is the key to unlocking virtually unlimited multiplication abilities with pen, paper, and the simple algorithm that "old math" taught us.
Nothing particular that I remember. Nothing particularly ingenious--just your standard sexual or scatalogical humor. Sometimes they'd draw a penis on the card or something.
When you win the prize, be sure to go downtown and flash the cash in front of everybody. When you get beat up and robbed, use your leftover money to post a prize for "flashing your cash around town without getting beat up and robbed". If anybody says you shouldn't do that, casually dismiss them. They are not part of "the club".
Fond memories of bucket-sorting (I always called it bin sorting) on temp jobs in the early 90s. The early 90s had a lot of paper-to-digital temp jobs like that. It was an OK way to pick up cash when "real jobs" were hard to find. Entering insurance claims from paper forms was probably the most interesting. The last time I did anything like this was business reply cards in 2004. That one came off Craigslist. Gigs like that have to be getting few and far between since everybody has a device now. BTW, if you put a joke address on a business-reply card it actually brightens the otherwise boring day of the data entry clerk.
Slashdot Mirror
Advancing? Hardly, there are patents and so no advancement is possible.
Is too. The latest version has a sarcasm detector.
Nobody knows who's naked until the tide goes out. Nobody knows who shortcut the building codes until a moderate tremor hits.
A computer could do it for you.
Yeah, just pass over the requirements with regular expressions. Now you have two problems. Wait, there's a Lisp macro for that... dammit! Let me get back to you...
I don't think he's going to be dicking around in their web site code. It could be written in Brainfuck for all he cares. What matters is they have MONEY which he can use to fund efforts at using better technology to write it. Somewhere, somebody has some social site written in the cleanest, most beautiful, maintainable, optimized code that ever existed but... they don't have MONEY. Such is the way of the world. Keeping up with the Kardashians (which is all FaceBook really is) rakes it in. By comparison, things of quality might make *some* MONEY but not enough to fund blue sky projects like VR. At least he's not building rockets for the nazis. Things are much better these days for technical people who need a sugar daddy.
I haven't driven a hybrid; but I could sign on to four modes: 1. Normal acceleration with your foot on the accelerator. 2. Slightly more than ICE engine braking with your foot not touching anything, minimum regen occuring. 3. Minimum to maximum regen, linear scale, with your foot lightly riding the brake. 4. Brake pads engaged with the brake pedal depressed past a certain point. Bonus points for some kind of indicator to let you know which mode it's in.
Like I said, I haven't test driven one so I don't know what it's like or if any of them work that way. That's just what my first try would be. Then if I drove it and didn't like it I'd go back to the drawing board...
Yep, they even have Internet with unrestricted access... to 127.0.0.1.
Ukraine your neck to see if there is another joke to be made.
Lisp's eval
It'll take you a while to get it. You'll have to be asking yourself the question, "What's all the fuss about Lisp?". You'll set it aside for a while. You could easily dismiss it for glossing over some details such as the actual (read) function; but when you "get it", you'll get it.
Stumbling blocks: prefix notation. A lot of people say it's the ()s that make Lisp hard to read; but it's really the prefix notation. Another stumbling block is the lame explanations for what (quote) does. People say it says "don't evaluate me" and while technically true, it doesn't answer the question. A better answer is, "returns a syntax tree ". A more detailed answer is "returns a list which serves the same purpose as a syntax tree. This is handy because every function in Lisp takes that same kind of tree as an argument, so it's handy for writing macros".
Like many people, I've never written a line of Lisp that runs anything, let alone an actual piece of professional code in Lisp. Also like many other people, I've found value in studying it and applying the concepts elsewhere.
Another person said "Forth" and they've also got a point. In some ways, Lisp is the dual of Forth. The postfix notation of Forth can cause just as much confusion as the prefix in Lisp; but that doesn't mean they aren't elegant in their own ways.
Not a bad idea. If your classes have no virtual methods and they don't allow mixins or other crazy runtime dynamic shenanigans, then in theory the compiler can optimize them down to un-boxed numbers. I wonder how man OO languages are very good at that though. The hard part might be the base class. If you don't even have un-boxed numbers and the base class has virtual methods... you're kind of stuck with something less than optimal.
Oh and of course time*length isn't velocity. length/time is. Division is slow and requires exceptions though, so if you try to get around that by inverting the time once and multiplying after that, then you need an invert class where multiplication *does* create a velocity type, or maybe I'm just not thinking it through all the way.
In any sane programming language, you can access the bytes directly as an indexed array.
You can do that in C; but you shouldn't. There are too many things you don't know:
1. Debug or release? That could change the structure layout.
2. Structure padding.
3. Byte-order.
IIRC, they call such a cast "type punning". They got away with it in network stacks on BSD; but that was a long time ago, *and* they no doubt had knowledge of all the compiler switches and CPU architecture.
For a language like PHP to have functions that "pack" and "unpack" data is perfectly reasonable. In fact, you should be writing your C functions like that, not just type punning and letting it fly out to files in all its unknown byte-ordered glory.
I'm pretty sure the people on both sides are fixated at the grade-school level, and our political leaders aren't much further along. I half expect Obama and Putin to "double-dog dare" eachother at some point.
Google "Colcrys" and get back to me.
Is the biggest event really important, or is it more important to look at entire industries? Has coal in Appalachia been better or worse than gold mining in California? The gold mining contaminated many bodies of water with mercury, and fish are still unsafe because of it. How many streams and lakes in Tennessee have warnings like, "pregnant women should eat no more than one of these fish per month"?
Sounds cool as long as it's not a HOA that runs with deed. The community pool where I grew up was like that and it worked fine. If you were in the community you had the right but not the obligation to purchase a membership.
Here's another way of looking at it:
If longer lives were optimal for our species, we would already be living them.
Every species has an average lifespan. Parrots, tortoises, and whales are highly successful and live long lives. OTOH, flies and rats are also highly successful and live short lives.
The species as a whole is "tuned" to live a certain period of time. This is a significant evolutionary parameter. The era of highly developed societies with extended lives due to advanced medicine is just a blink in time. We don't even know if our current level is sustainable or compatible with survival of our species as a whole. Yes, this individual would love to live a healthy 150 year life. You do have to consider what it will do to the replacement rate. Whales are taking a long time to come back. Long life seems to correlate with lower replacement rate. A population full of old folks might be more prone to extinction.
However, there is a problem with this solution to the very complex existing in less than infinite time: the monkey should be handing us a large number of copies of the the works of Shakespeare, not just one
That presupposes something about how many copies the monkeys are apt to produce. I could sign on to them handing us zero or infinity copies under an infinite time scenario, whereas any "large number" would be arbitrary. The "infinite copies" outcome is not a problem because the mean time between deliveries is sufficient for us to burn them.
I made what might be an erroneous assumption that you were familiar with the New Math which was taught in the USA.
The wiki article says it was a 60s phenomenon, but based on my experience at least some of these concepts lived on in mutated form well into the 70s. There were a lot of educational experiments tried in the 60s and 70s. Perhaps even worse than "new math" was "open classrooms" which is like "open offices" for kids.
So, the idea of "teaching calculus to 5 year olds" is not new to me. It's "new math" all over again. Hopefully they don't throw out the A-B-Cs this time in the rush to teach great literature.
I don't know about "brainwashing," but I sure think that rote memorization is inappropriate 99% of the time and that it ruins educations.
At least you're not saying "never". I think 99% is a bit harsh. The link was long; but I skimmed it. The music analogy is interesting. You obviously wouldn't want a musician to be all reading/writing scores. OTOH, a music teacher that ignored notation and sight-reading would be doing a grave disservice to students.
My childhood gives me a comparative case study: grades K-3 with public school and some "new math". Grades 4-6 in private school with traditional everything. Grades 7-12 in public school then a BSEE.
The "new math" tried to teach us long division with a really klutzy version of division by successive subtraction. Working a problem such as 9354935793578 / 7656 was not realistic. We were making little check-boxes and guesses. Their method for long division was absolutely horrible for large numbers, and working ONE long division problem took half an hour.
I the traditional private school I learned long division using the classic decimal place subtraction method where you gradually accumulate your result at the top of the paper and get a long train of carefully prescribed subtractions trailing down the page. Much, much better. Homework might involve 5 long division problems that could be worked in 15 minutes if you were good.
Then in high school when I got into computing I understood what "new math" was trying to do. They were trying to show us how to figure things out ourselves, how division relates to subtraction. In grade school though, it was just frustrating.
I don't think we should throw out "new math" entirely either; but we shouldn't use it to the exclusion of tried and true algorithms. Some of the bright students are going to ask questions like, "why does this work". New math is good for those students; but the "repetitive and boring" aspect of rote learning is too easily replaced by "frustrating, useless and slow" in new math curricula.
OK, I wasn't going after "data science" specifically, but ad algos and how my twitter feed has become a cesspool of mental masturbation for ad algorithm people, which is the "killer app" for "big data":
1. PhD invents fantastic ad algo. 2. Guy sees ad on iPhone, takes EBT card there. 1. PhD applies for EBT card. #OneTwoPunch
Wow, I can't believe I just typed that many buzzwords in a Slashdot post; but at least I had a reason and put most of them in quotes... dammit. "algos". Anyway, I wonder if everybody's twitter feed is as bad as mine lately. I think it might have to do with a former co-worker who now works in that field. Thus, I get a lot of improperly targeted ads for people who are in the data-mining/ad biz. Of course I'll never buy their product--I'm not a CxO who's looking to proactively synergize my paradigms.... but it's an interesting "fly on the wall" view of how that world works, so I'm not entirely sure if I should find a way to stop it.
"you spend 60 hours a day"
It isn't too often I genuinely laugh at my own expense. Thanks for pointing that out. Free editorial essays on the intertubs. You get what you pay for.
Focusing on diet for human lifespan is like focusing on gasoline for car lifespan.
Studies have been done of places where people tend to live longer. Some common threads are: genetics, happiness, close community ties, everyday physical labor, low stress, diet and maybe a few other things.
Yeah sure, diet is in there; but if your Daddy died at 40, you're pissed off all the time, you don't know your neighbors and you spend 60 hours a day stressing in a cube-farm then the quinoa salad you ate probably won't help much. Go ahead though. It probably won't hurt; just don't expect miracles. Look at *all* the factors.
Even if they don't get it the first time, continued exposure is good. I can think of a lot of things in math that didn't "click" until I'd heard it the umpteenth time. For example, how to count to umpteen.
I think a little bit of "modern" math is good but the old stuff still needs to be taught. Rote memorization gets a bad rap; but IMHO the 10X10 multiplication table should be committed to memory just like the alphabet. All else equal, a student with the table in his head will be able to work more quickly and confidently than one without. Notice I said 10X10 table. An odd thing is that they taught us 12X12. I think it's a tradition held over from the English system, where you had 12 inches in a foot. 12*12 even has the name "gross". There's nothing wrong with teaching the traditional table; but it would be nice if they put a red line or something around the 10X10 portion of it so that students understood the significance of that--that 10X10 is the key to unlocking virtually unlimited multiplication abilities with pen, paper, and the simple algorithm that "old math" taught us.
Nothing particular that I remember. Nothing particularly ingenious--just your standard sexual or scatalogical humor. Sometimes they'd draw a penis on the card or something.
When you win the prize, be sure to go downtown and flash the cash in front of everybody. When you get beat up and robbed, use your leftover money to post a prize for "flashing your cash around town without getting beat up and robbed". If anybody says you shouldn't do that, casually dismiss them. They are not part of "the club".
Fond memories of bucket-sorting (I always called it bin sorting) on temp jobs in the early 90s. The early 90s had a lot of paper-to-digital temp jobs like that. It was an OK way to pick up cash when "real jobs" were hard to find. Entering insurance claims from paper forms was probably the most interesting. The last time I did anything like this was business reply cards in 2004. That one came off Craigslist. Gigs like that have to be getting few and far between since everybody has a device now. BTW, if you put a joke address on a business-reply card it actually brightens the otherwise boring day of the data entry clerk.